Inside Ramp’s big stunt
I talked to the team about livestreaming Kevin from "The Office" working from a glass box for six hours.
Hi everyone! I hope you all enjoyed your AWS-mandated screen sabbatical yesterday. How did you spend it? I decided to make Chuck and Hailee’s green chicken chili. Like everything they do, it was perfect.
Here’s what’s in today’s newsletter:
My conversation with Ramp about their CFO stunt
Four post ideas to try this week
The cereal company with delightful LinkedIn carousels
A very bad brand post
How to join the Link in Bio Discord
“B2B SaaS marketing doesn’t have to suck”
It’s not every day that my feed fills with people talking about a smart marketing stunt from a B2B SaaS company. Usually those conversations are saved for the SKIMS and Liquid Deaths of the world. But, last week, Ramp broke through.
The financial operations platform brought on Brian Baumgartner—who played Kevin from The Office—as their “CFO” and livestreamed his “first day”. Brian worked for over six hours from a glass box outfitted like an office in the middle of NYC. It was an over-the-top way to demonstrate how slow manual expense reporting is and how efficient a tool like Ramp makes it. A live tracker showed how many receipts Brian had processed compared to Ramp. People like The Rizzler, Packy McCormick, Zarna Garg, and more all stopped by. Clips quickly showed up on TikTok.
According to Ramp, the campaign has generated over 112M views across platforms.
For today’s newsletter, I talked to Kendall Hope Tucker, Head of Creative Experimentation at Ramp, and Nathan Allebach, Social Media Lead at Ramp, about how they pulled it all off. They share their 50+ hour brainstorm process, the tactics they borrowed from streamers, and why B2B SaaS marketing doesn’t have to suck.
Rachel Karten: How did this idea come about? I believe you worked with Rohan on it? It’s one of those campaigns where I can see how the pitch must have just immediately clicked.
Kendall Hope Tucker: After the buzz from our Super Bowl ad with Saquon Barkley, we were tasked with thinking about how we could create viral moments or stunts that didn’t just happen once a year around sports. We wanted to get Ramp’s name in front of a broader audience especially outside of tech because our software is amazing for any finance teams that want to save time and money.
Around the same time, I had cold DM’d Rohan Kumar who led social at Mr. Beast for 4 years because I thought he was cool and wanted to learn how he saw the world. We had spoken a few times and I invited him plus his friends Lewis Atallah and Mattias Russo-Larsson to our office for a week-long brainstorm. The deal was that each day we’d pitch stunt ideas, and by Friday we’d choose our favorite.
That week was great. After working 50+ hours, we landed on one idea that stuck: a glass box with someone trapped inside, living the visceral pain of manual expense reporting. We wanted to show something real in an AI world. Something people could walk by, film, and say, “I was really there. I saw this.” When our execs said yes, I spoke to 30 celebrities about potentially being involved and landed on Brian as my favorite because of his great disposition and his unique role as the most famous “accountant” in the world.
Convincing him to sit in a glass box in public for eight hours wasn’t easy, though. He was nervous but we promised him we’d make it the coolest thing to happen in New York. Against all odds, he believed us and signed on. Having Brian involved is what made it a fully fleshed out idea.
Rachel: Talk to me about the role social played in the lead up. You previously mentioned that for the video with Andy Buckley (who plays the CFO on The Office), you wrote, filmed, and turned it around in one day? Wild.
Kendall: This was one of those serendipitous moments you can’t plan. We’d plastered flyers and wheatpaste all over New York announcing that Brian was Ramp’s new CFO and would be “starting” his first day live in Flatiron Plaza. Andy Buckley, who played David Wallace the CFO on The Office, happened to be in town, saw one of the flyers, and sent Brian a video joking, “Wait, you’re the CFO now? You’re taking my job?”
Brian forwarded it to me, and I immediately reached out to Andy to ask if we could share it. He was amazing—totally game, so I invited him to get involved in the stunt. He was incredible. It added this perfect, organic crossover moment between their show and real life.
Nathan Allebach: It was unreal. The original plan was for Andy to join Brian in the box during the day for a bit, then film a mockumentary interview with him. After the rain date, we confirmed on Monday that he was still down to shoot content Tuesday before the stunt, so our team wrote an ad and organic script that day, jumped into filming the next morning, and had a teaser posted that night. We actually edited the full video that day, then captured footage of Brian in the box Wednesday to splice in so we could release it right after the stunt on Thursday. It’s now our most engaged organic video on TikTok.
Rachel: The livestream reminded me a lot of my interview with IShowSpeed, a popular streamer on Twitch and YouTube. There were so many good bits and stunts and moments baked into the activation. Were you inspired by streamers?
Kendall: Yes and no! Honestly, we never expected the livestream to blow up the way it did. Our original plan was just to stream the activation so people could see that Brian was actually doing expense reports live in public. It was meant to be proof, not a main event.
Then, during planning, Brian mentioned he might get bored sitting in a glass box for eight hours, which made us rethink the format. We’d already scheduled a few guests to join him, but after that conversation we built out a full show: breaking the day into 15-minute programming blocks with planned bits, surprises, and cameos to keep it dynamic.
Rohan had just come off helping with Kai Cenat’s “Streamer University,” so we borrowed a lot from that world—pacing, interactivity, and the idea that a livestream should feel unpredictable and alive. That approach turned what was supposed to be background content into a real-time event people couldn’t stop watching.
Rachel: Twitter seemed like a huge hub for the buzz around the campaign. Can you talk to me about the role that platform plays for Ramp?
Nathan: Yeah, X is one of our main comms channels! It’s where we reach the highest density of investors, founders, and talent, especially in product, engineering, design, and data. Ramp has built a cult following there, not led by content, but by just building a killer product that so many people love. Our engineers are known for fixing bugs and crafting features in direct response to customers. Brand partners and friends like the TBPN crew and David Senra are super active on the platform, too. We have fun.
So it only made sense to make that our flagship live streaming platform for Brian’s Office. The buzz was surreal. Like a nonstop flow of positive quote tweets and replies all day long.
RK: Any numbers or stats you can share that point to the success of it?
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