The marketing campaigns that stuck with us this month have something in common. Not one of them opens with the product. They start with something people already dread, or laugh at, or read in the news. Culture-led marketing is something we expect from B2C brands, but companies like Ramp and Perk provide excellent examples of how B2B can join in on the fun!
– Jeanne Kirby, CMO
Today in marketing school: Your AI is only as good as the content and infrastructure behind it
Keeping content up to date has never been the most glamorous part of marketing. But as more of that content starts feeding AI experiences, the stakes are getting higher.
Juliana Lavorini, Marketing Director at Inviso, has been thinking about this a lot. Recently, we helped a Microsoft team manage hundreds of content assets in SharePoint while also preparing that content for downstream AI use.
The solution brought together automated review cycles, markdown conversion, metadata and tagging, and AI-assisted quality checks. Individually, none of these is particularly groundbreaking. But together, they create an infrastructure that helps content stay current, structured, and ready for both people and AI.
As Juliana puts it, “We spend a lot of time talking about what AI can do. But as more of our content becomes the knowledge those systems rely on, we should also be asking: how confident are we in what’s feeding them?”
See how we built an end-to-end content lifecycle and governance system
This campaign made us love The Office even more
Ramp leaned heavily into culture-led marketing by putting The Office’s bumbling accountant Kevin Malone in a transparent box in the middle of Manhattan. For seven hours!
Inside, actor Brian Baumgartner processed expense receipts in real time, making some entertaining live commentary about the drudgery of accounting.
Ramp’s marketing challenge was making accountants feel a pain they’d stopped noticing after years of using legacy software. As their head of creative experimentation put it, the question was how to make that pain feel visceral. When you’re watching the most famous accountant in pop culture trapped inside a glass box doing receipts all day, you can definitely feel that pain, even if you don’t work in accounting.
The stunt drew an estimated 10,000 people in person, and the livestream pulled 380,000 viewers. Across platforms, Ramp pulled 85 million views, plus a steady stream of earned media, social clips, and user-generated content, making a great case for how B2B brands can effectively use culture-led marketing in their campaigns.
Storytelling at its best: The Great KitKat Heist
You probably heard that a truck carrying 12 tons of car-shaped KitKats was hijacked earlier this year, in one of the strangest thefts in recent memory.
Most brands would have rolled out their crisis management team to deal with this, but KitKat did the opposite. They acknowledged the theft with wit rather than defensive press releases, turning a genuine crime into an intriguing mystery for the public to solve. Once interest peaked, they launched a Stolen KitKat Tracker that lets people enter the batch codes on their own bars to check if they were part of the chocolate heist.
90 years of brand building meant Nestlé and KitKat could afford to be playful about how to approach the theft, and it paid off in spades. The campaign earned them $224M in earned media value, 800M+ reach, and over 115 brands made their own KitKat ads to cash in on the drama. In addition, Nestlé also walked away with 11 Cannes Lions awards. Pretty much a masterclass in how to turn a brand nightmare into a huge marketing win!
September’s word: Culture-led marketing
(We’re taking liberties with word count
this month!)
Instead of asking “How do we market our product?” a culture-led approach asks, “What role can our brand play in the cultural moments people already care about?”
For B2B, that doesn’t have to mean tracking what’s happening in the news or on TikTok. Look at the things everyone in your audience has on their mind. It can be as simple as the tasks your customers put off, the meetings they dread, or the work processes they complain about.
Your sales team hears what’s really on customers’ minds every day. Ask them about a common frustration your customers have, make it funny or larger than life, and use that as a starting point for your next campaign.
Need some fresh marketing ideas? We can help you explore them.
Marketing in the wild: The drawer of shame goes public
Perk took one of the most universally avoided business tasks and turned it into a humorous piece of real-world storytelling, using OOH to visualize the chaos of expense management.
Their 3D billboard features a drawer bursting open, with crumpled receipts physically spilling out of it. Together with a witty tagline and bold yellow background, it’s impossible to ignore (and oddly satisfying to look at!).
Instead of advertising their product, Perk leans on a pain point their ideal customer knows all too well. Anyone who lives with the horror of “the drawer” understands exactly who this ad is for.
Got your own “marketing in the wild” find? We’d love to see it!
Send a pic to max@invisomarketing.com with your favorite bits of IRL ad genius.
Let culture lead the way.
See you next month!
The Inviso Marketing Team