Game Tape is my weekly series pulling lessons from a new media property. Notice an interesting moment you want me to talk about? Hit reply and let me know.
Branded entertainment is content that puts your product at the heart of its narrative.
It’s not a product placement where you get vibe points for a cameo inside an unrelated story, or a brand deal where you take a loan on an influencer’s reputation via a thirty second shoutout. It’s IP that acts as a vehicle to specifically tell your brand story, all without feeling like a hard sell.
It is no secret that people hate being sold to, but love to be entertained.
Ramp, in the irresistibly sexy B2B SaaS industry of *checks notes* expense management, took over tech Twitter today with an interesting swing at branded entertainment: “Brian’s Office”, a six hour livestream where Brian Baumgartner reprises his role as Kevin from The Office as Ramp’s CFO for the day. You can watch the whole thing here.
It’s currently getting absolutely glazed on my timeline:
(These four screenshots are from, quite literally, a 30 second scroll just now)
I left feeling impressed by its creativity and disappointed with its entertainment value. It was an extremely good concept, extremely well executed, extremely novel marketing, and the team should be proud of themselves and the halo effect this creates for the Ramp brand. But as a viewer who doesn’t really watch livestreams I thought it was a low effort-to-entertainment experience. But, admittedly, maybe that’s besides the point. The gist of the stunt was:
Brian became “CFO for the day” at Ramp, and was tasked with manually filing receipt expense claims.
He was stuck filing expense claims in a glass box in the heart of Flatiron, surrounded by onlookers, while he raced against Ramp’s software (which does 600,000 claims a day). The tension built visually as the office slowly fills up with printed out receipts, but he believed that “...with human grit and determination, I can do the same thing Ramp can do”
Characters appeared throughout the day to add absurd side storylines (Indian mom, a Steve Ballmer reference, a wedding ft. the Rizzler???)
The stunt ended with Brian, of course, only manually filing 122 receipts against Ramp’s 600,000
A few takeaways:
Narrative first, brand second
Ramp aside, there was an extremely simple thread that tied this stunt together: old world slow, new world fast. Concepts work when you can understand them in a millisecond. They nailed this point over and over with: Brian doing long division on his whiteboard instead of using a calculator/computer, using a chunky CRT monitor for his computer, calling his mom from an old deskphone. All of these details were on the margins, but they were narrative tools to highlight the core story: it is extremely dumb for your financial back-office to operate on technology from the 90’s.
I thought there were a few moments where the Ramp pitch felt a bit too scripted, such as Brian’s initial monologue in front of what seemed to be a teleprompter (@28:30). But otherwise the branding took a backstory to the narrative, which made for a livestream experience that felt less like an ad even while you knew it was as ad an ad could be.
If you’re exploring a swing at branded entertainment, distill your promise down to a thesis statement and build your media around that. Benefits, not features.
Maximize your surface area for virality
It’s worth repeating the fact that I’m not a regular watcher of livestreams, but I do see them everywhere because Twitch streamers effectively invented the modern art of clipping. They know that very few people are tuning in for their entire streams, but that doesn’t mean they can’t take over your timeline with clippable moments on every other platform. The Ramp stream on Twitter had 135,000 cumulative viewers, but the team is squeezing the juice out of the moment on other platforms via:
They seem to have hired clippers to slice segments onto TikTok: Example, Example
They’re clipping segments onto their own socials
Everyone wants to be a part of a moment, and all the live viewers outside the stunt were given sufficiently shareable material for their IG stories (arcade games, Brian walking off-set)
They had a mid-stunt scheduled interview on TBPN
They had a 14 day build up to the stunt, with a moment around the site launch, a postering campaign that focused on Brian reprising his role of Kevin (but no mention of Ramp!), the launch video which apparently got 20 million views across socials according to the morning-of interview with Ramp’s CEO, several teasers with the actual CFO from The Office, and more
An attempt at cross pollinating audiences via cameos from: Anthpo1, The Rizzler, Packy McCormick, and more
They committed to the bit across the entire org to actually give this thing a chance at going viral.
The people yearn for whimsy
Of the several million people who came across this stunt in some shape or form today, maybe, what, a few thousand people watched more than an hour of the six hour stream? And yet everyone on tech Twitter is unanimously weighing in on how good this marketing moment was2. The people are yearning for collective moments, people comment on good marketinggggg to show how smart they themselves are, and even if this stunt didn’t scratch my entertainment itch, I think it’s fair to say that in a moment of AI slop any bold marketing swing is an extremely appreciated breath of fresh air.
Remember: a stunt like this isn’t being measured on its ability to move decision makers towards a purchasing decision. We design shareable moments for the sake of awareness, which should theoretically lower your future customer acquisition cost. Brand marketing should give people something to talk about.
I’m excited to explore how brand marketing evolves in the face of generative AI. This sort of brand stunt is a brilliant contrast of high effort/low stakes, which is an antithesis to the shortcut that gen AI often represents. My archenemy randa and I took a half-swing at a stunt like this while I was at Substack with The Brainrot Pharmacy, but today I’m kicking myself because we didn’t go all-out to execute on the IRL pharmacy pop-up we had originally planned. But this is just another sign of a new wave of branded entertainment that is already in motion—creators are whetting their appetite for bigger creative risks, and brands are seeking out deeper relationships: Speed Goes Pro with Dick’s Sporting Goods, Passenger Princess with F1, or Kid With Crocs to name a few. Brand deals are boring, and branded entertainment is the future. More on this front from me soon…
This stunt was of course a joint effort by a few people, including Rohan Kumar and Kendall Hope Tucker, but I’m curious about the extent of Anthpo’s involvement. He might be the GOAT of absurd stunts: Timothy Chalamet lookalike contest, Kid With Crocs, Cheeseball Man, and if your brand is looking to take a big creative risk he might be your guy.
I believe the love is real, but I do wonder with the amount of $ that Ramp deploys on brand deals how much of this is seeded by people loosely associated with the business.
Very interesting! As a tech twitter apostate and convert to Substack I missed this. Thanks for writing this overview!