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The staff at Dunder Mifflin Paper, the fictional company at the center of The Office, aren’t exactly known for being star employees. For the B2B expense management platform Ramp, that was the point.
This past Wednesday, Ramp put Brian Baumgartner, best known for playing the lovable, bumbling accountant Kevin Malone in the hit sitcom, in a transparent box in Manhattan’s Flatiron Plaza for seven hours. Inside, Baumgartner processed expense receipts in real time—an entertaining commentary both on the drudgery of the work and how the platform can help companies streamline those efforts.
The activation, which was in the works for five months, drew a rough estimate of 10,000 in-person attendees, Kendall Tucker, head of creative experimentation at Ramp, told Marketing Brew; a livestream on X garnered 380,000 viewers over the course of about a week. Across platforms, Ramp estimates the activation has had “at least 85 million views,” Tucker said.
The effort came about shortly after the company’s first foray into Super Bowl advertising earlier this year, where Ramp executives were itching for their next big push to pitch businesses on Ramp, especially when there can be hesitancy to switch software.
“Once a company switches to our software and our corporate card, they love it, but helping them to understand that they have a problem, that their current expense management solution is not great, is actually really hard,” Tucker said. “Accountants have been using the same software for 30 years, they’re not looking for alternatives. So we’re like, ‘How do we make that pain feel visceral?’”
And putting Baumgartner, arguably the most famous accountant in pop culture, in a glass box for hours processing receipts was one way to highlight those pain points front and center.
How it worked
Before landing on the idea for the activation, Tucker spoke with Rohan Kumar, a “professional internet surfer” and the former head of vertical platforms for MrBeast who brought on the co-founders of production shop Coming of Age. Kumar and Coming of Age co-founders Lewis Atallah and Mattias Russo-Larsson joined the Ramp offices for a week of brainstorming, at which point they came up with the idea.
But it wasn’t as simple as just making a deal with Baumgartner and calling it a day. Throughout the course of the seven-hour stunt, Ramp added different bits to break up the monotony and keep things interesting. Internet personality Christian Joseph, aka The Rizzler, comedian Zarna Garg, and The Office costar Andy Buckley all popped up at different times throughout the day. Even more unexpectedly, Baumgartner officiated a real wedding of a Ramp employee in the box. (Tucker said she sent out a message to the company a week before the stunt and got three couples to volunteer to be married by Baumgartner.)
The day wasn’t scripted, but it wasn’t entirely off-the-cuff, either. The team worked with Baumgartner to identify the right moments to play up throughout the day. The stunt itself was “broken up into 15-minute segments,” Tucker said, which helped structure improvisation.
“[Baumgartner] had an in-ear [piece], so we would say, ‘Hey, the private equity guy is coming in right now. Just seem kind of annoyed by him,’” she said. “And he knew from his 30 pages of beat sheets that this guy was just going to come in and railroad him.”
To document the day, Ramp had five cameras inside the glass box and one outside the box to show the reactions of the crowd. The company set up a livestream, which Tucker said was designed to “impress upon the audience that this is for real”; camera operators could switch between the different angles for the livestream throughout the day.
For the stunt, Ramp signed two contracts with SAG-AFTRA, Tucker said, including a new media agreement covering the livestream of the event, as well as a commercial agreement covering the ads and social video content created out of the event.
Copycats?
It’s possible that the livestream helped the brand get more eyeballs on the stunt, encouraging people to tune in and post clips, but the unexpected nature of the activation is really what made it stand out, Eunice Shin, CEO and founder of brand strategy consultancy The Elume Group, said.
“With so many brands getting canceled for their marketing moves, people are playing it safe, marketers are playing it safe,” Shin told Marketing Brew. “And to me, that equates to boring in a sea of sameness, of a lot of marketing that just doesn’t get people’s attention. So whenever anything feels a little bit interesting or fun, I think, everyone’s like, ‘Hey, look at that.’”
Tucker is optimistic that the response to the stunt so far encourages other brands to say yes to strange ideas, even if it’s not duplicating the activation exactly.
“I hope the takeaway is that companies and individuals should just try wild things,” Tucker said. “I know we’re gonna continue just doing really interesting things that are physical and real, and I hope other companies take that away, more so than like, ‘Yeah, you lock a guy in a box, or do a livestream.’”
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