#330: How to Build a Brand in B2B with Ryan Narod (VP of Marketing at Rippling)

#330 | Dave is joined by Ryan Narod, VP of Marketing at Rippling, to break down how Rippling has built one of the stand outbrands in B2B right now. Ryan walks through real examples of campaigns they’ve run over the last year, from scrappy iPhone videos and webinar promos to high-production customer stories and their 2026 Super Bowl commercial. They talk about how Rippling shifted from being great at growth marketing to building a brand people actually recognize, how they inject more personality and “human” into everything they ship, and how they measure brand marketing without losing pipeline accountability.

To see Ryan's real campaign examples, head over to youtube.com/@heydavegerhardt.

Timestamps

• (00:00) - - Why Rippling is going all-in on brand
  
• (02:51) - - Ryan’s background and why he joined Rippling
  
• (04:14) - - What Rippling does and how they position the platform
  
• (08:14) - - What “brand marketing” means at Rippling
  
• (10:34) - - Building a story that makes HR the hero
  
• (19:47) - - Ryan shares Rippling marketing examples (ads, videos, webinars)
  
• (27:17) - - High-production customer storytelling (Berries)
  
• (32:39) - - The “HR Deserves Better” campaign
  
• (35:37) - - How Rippling measures brand and pipeline impact
  
• (43:14) - - The Super Bowl commercial and what it takes to pull it off
  
• (45:17) - - Final takeaways and wrap-up

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Dave [0:00:01]: You're listening to The Dave Gerhardt Show.

Dave [0:00:02]: My guess on this episode is Ryan Narod.

Dave [0:00:18]: He is the Vp of marketing at Rippling.

Dave [0:00:20]: He runs a marketing team over at Rippling.

Dave [0:00:23]: Is a really fun episode because he pulled up a bunch of examples of marketing they've done over the last year.

Dave [0:00:27]: They've done a lot of growth marketing in the past emails ads, but he's come in over last year and a half, and they've had a really strong focus on brand, And how do you become the number one brand for Hr professionals and we talked about that in this episode.

Dave [0:00:39]: He showed me examples We talked about their upcoming Super Bowl commercial.

Dave [0:00:42]: All the way down to, like, little short social media videos they make on the street, eating hot dogs to promote webinars.

Dave [0:00:48]: If you love marketing examples and want some specific examples of how to do B marketing that doesn't suck and feels good and it's fun and it's actually fun to work on this episode with Ryan gave me a ton of energy.

Dave [0:01:00]: I know you'll get something from it.

Dave [0:01:02]: Here's my conversation with Ryan, who runs marketing at Rippling.

Dave [0:01:05]: Super excited to have you here, Ryan because I've been connected with you for a while.

Dave [0:01:10]: But you join Rippling playing a year and a half ago.

Dave [0:01:13]: Rippling is one of those companies I think is doing great marketing, and it's everywhere, and it looks like you're having a lot of fun.

Dave [0:01:18]: And so I just dm you, like, a week or so I like, can you come on the podcast?

Dave [0:01:21]: And we had a great little prep call and I'm excited to get to hang out and chat with you today.

Dave [0:01:25]: Can you just do quick intro on yourself?

Dave [0:01:27]: And what is Rippling and what did you do before Rippling?

Ryan [0:01:30]: Sure.

Ryan [0:01:30]: First of all, excited to be here.

Ryan [0:01:32]: Thanks for having me.

Ryan [0:01:33]: Have been a long time fan of yours and have listened to your show back in then drift days.

Ryan [0:01:39]: So excited to be here.

Dave [0:01:42]: Alright.

Dave [0:01:42]: That's all.

Dave [0:01:42]: Thanks for listening folks.

Dave [0:01:43]: We'll catch you on the next episode.

Dave [0:01:45]: That's it.

Dave [0:01:46]: We're good.

Dave [0:01:46]: We got what we need We got the clip.

Ryan [0:01:50]: That's.

Ryan [0:01:50]: Yeah.

Ryan [0:01:50]: So I...

Ryan [0:01:51]: Let's see.

Ryan [0:01:51]: I think you nailed it been here about a year and a half I joined Rippling after bleeding marketing and started as the first marketing higher at mutiny where we got to market marketers, which was a lot of fun.

Ryan [0:02:05]: Before that, it was a other early stage startups and Google mostly doing developer marketing.

Ryan [0:02:09]: My background is in growth type of marketing, but at Rippling, I initially joined to build all the brand parts of marketing, So which is really fun because I love doing things that are new to me and Rippling had a pretty robust growth motion built out.

Ryan [0:02:26]: So really good at ads and emails, but everything else from what's the story.

Ryan [0:02:32]: It's a content a brand was fairly nascent, so it's been a lot of fun building that over the last year and a half.

Dave [0:02:39]: And, a bunch of people probably use Rippling.

Dave [0:02:41]: I would describe it as the new Hr payroll benefits vendor that everyone is using, but that's probably not how the head of marketing would like it explained, how how do you...

Dave [0:02:50]: What does Rippling do for anybody and know.

Ryan [0:02:53]: We think of it as this is the one system you need to run your entire workforce.

Ryan [0:02:57]: And so we offer everything from Hr and payroll and talent products, which, again are already fragmented.

Ryan [0:03:05]: You've got different systems normally to run your payroll to store your Hr information to do applicant tracking.

Ryan [0:03:12]: We bundle that all in one suite, but then we also offer products for finance.

Ryan [0:03:16]: So everything from Bill pay to corporate cards, and then products for It.

Ryan [0:03:21]: So everything from device management to access to security.

Ryan [0:03:25]: And the reason we put this all under one roof is because all these things are very interconnected.

Ryan [0:03:30]: A really good example of this is onboarding, when you onboard a new hire.

Ryan [0:03:34]: I think everyone has started in a new job before, you have to get input some information in your Hr system so that you can get paid and get your benefits.

Ryan [0:03:42]: But then someone on the back end has to go run to the Apple store buy you a laptop, and someone else has to go enroll you in different corporate cards and things like that with Rippling it all just happens automatically.

Ryan [0:03:55]: So that's a little bit of why we put everything together.

Ryan [0:03:59]: There's a cost saving thing, but then there's also a time saving automation thing and onboarding is a really good example of that.

Dave [0:04:07]: And then revenue, you don't have to say...

Dave [0:04:08]: So you don't get trouble away.

Dave [0:04:09]: I did a Google search.

Dave [0:04:10]: It looks like Rippling revenue over estimates over five hundred million.

Dave [0:04:14]: So, obviously, the company has been growing like crazy, and it seems like a super exciting.

Dave [0:04:19]: Rippling is in that kind of bucket of companies in the b b Saas space that I think, a lot of people are talking about.

Dave [0:04:26]: It's like, I don't wanna not name others.

Dave [0:04:28]: So I'm not gonna...

Dave [0:04:29]: You know, Rippling is everywhere ramped.

Dave [0:04:30]: We love our ramp card.

Dave [0:04:32]: We talk about it all the time, Ramps an example of that too.

Dave [0:04:35]: How was your journey from mutiny to taking this job?

Dave [0:04:39]: I know I said, typically, I don't wanna do a lot of career stuff, but I would have assumed you're an impressive guy.

Dave [0:04:44]: I would also assumed though that this was a competitive job.

Dave [0:04:47]: The Vp marketing at Rippling is, like, it's

Ryan [0:04:49]: a big deal.

Ryan [0:04:50]: I thought about my next step was to go start my own company.

Ryan [0:04:54]: I didn't think that added in me ago.

Ryan [0:04:56]: Run a marketing function again.

Ryan [0:04:58]: And so it it sort of happened pretty opportunistic.

Ryan [0:05:01]: I left me at knee, went to go Europe traveled the world with my wife and got connected with starting to think about starting my own company and, yeah, got connected with some folks at Rippling, and the conversation initially was pretty open ended.

Ryan [0:05:17]: It was like, hey.

Ryan [0:05:19]: We've got here are the things we have figured out and here are the things we don't have figured out, and I was just naturally drawn to the things that solving problems that the company doesn't have figured out, and I felt it's a really unique opportunity in terms of there's a lot of upside in that.

Ryan [0:05:34]: When you come into...

Ryan [0:05:35]: If I was to come in here and, like, really focus on growth initially.

Ryan [0:05:38]: The growth function meaning, like, paid channels and whatever, Like, they had that pretty dialed.

Ryan [0:05:43]: Obviously, there's more incremental improvements you could make.

Ryan [0:05:46]: But it felt like, despite Rippling being a big company, a lot of the brand stuff that I initially came into lead was very much zero to one.

Ryan [0:05:54]: And so we can talk about that evolution in more detail today, but that's, like, ultimately where I thrive and even though, again, it's a bigger company.

Ryan [0:06:03]: It actually feels very much, like, building us, startups marketing motion from zero to one where it's very much like, how do you...

Ryan [0:06:10]: What's our story and how do you build trust and how do you make the brand more human and that's a lot of the stuff I've done here.

Dave [0:06:17]: Perfect.

Dave [0:06:17]: Yeah.

Dave [0:06:18]: Let let's talk about that.

Dave [0:06:18]: So you mentioned And I I feel like this is probably true for companies that are very...

Dave [0:06:23]: You find this at companies who make good products for some reason because I think maybe they're often product led or founder, you know, the founder is an engineer type of thing, but they do often have that kind growth thing figured out.

Dave [0:06:33]: And like you said, I like how you said ads and emails.

Dave [0:06:36]: You're a growth guy formerly growth guy.

Dave [0:06:39]: You come in and you just...

Dave [0:06:40]: You said, we gotta do a bunch of brand stuff.

Dave [0:06:42]: Can you explain what does that mean?

Dave [0:06:45]: What does that just mean like hey, Ryan.

Dave [0:06:46]: Here's the budget, go buy some billboards wanna know everything that that went into that and and building the playbook and and what you've done over the last year.

Ryan [0:06:53]: Yeah.

Ryan [0:06:53]: So I would say if I think about the functions that go into brand.

Ryan [0:06:59]: Obviously, a lot of people think about brand as...

Ryan [0:07:02]: I let's do commercials and billboards and all that stuff.

Ryan [0:07:06]: That's not where we started.

Ryan [0:07:07]: I think we started with, like, where I would start...

Ryan [0:07:10]: If I was at an early stage b to b company, which is not with billboards and and Tv commercials.

Ryan [0:07:16]: It's, like, how do we build content and built content that people trust that is good that further our message, but isn't like, too sales, and so we...

Ryan [0:07:25]: All talk about that evolution in a second, that it's all the basics.

Ryan [0:07:29]: It's like content webinars events.

Ryan [0:07:31]: We were doing that before.

Ryan [0:07:33]: It's not like we had no content, but, you know, my read on it was like, it was very much, like, Seo content corporate and stale.

Ryan [0:07:40]: And so, you know, my first order of business was take stock of all the things that we do that every B2b company does before you invest in billboards and ads, which and inject, like, a few principles into it.

Ryan [0:07:53]: So as I thought about the principles, it's like, human first, and I I, like, if I think deep, this is I'm and, here's where I'm gonna flatter you for a second, but I remember when I was, like, first, I left Google.

Ryan [0:08:05]: I went to an early stage start up to run marketing, and I was I was like, okay.

Ryan [0:08:08]: Let me go learn this thing.

Ryan [0:08:09]: And so I I, like, came across this, like, very thin book that you wrote at drift.

Ryan [0:08:13]: I don't remember what it was dis scale.

Ryan [0:08:16]: Yes.

Ryan [0:08:16]: I referenced that because it's...

Ryan [0:08:18]: As I thought about our content, it's like people want to buy from people and people wanna trust a brand where there's, like, humans behind it.

Ryan [0:08:27]: And so if you look at our old version of our blog.

Ryan [0:08:29]: Every blog post was authored by the Rippling lane team, and it's like, who is that?

Ryan [0:08:33]: And there was no style, and there was no voice.

Ryan [0:08:35]: And so, you know, I think part of it was, like, we staffed the team.

Ryan [0:08:38]: I started hiring for all these people with weird Wacky profiles that were comfortable being on camera and being, like, the face of the company.

Ryan [0:08:45]: And and so I could show you a few examples of this, but what we developed was, like this flywheel where we would interview people sort of podcast style similar to what we're doing today.

Ryan [0:08:56]: And then we would we would take those interviews, turn them into written things, slice them up, turn that into videos.

Ryan [0:09:01]: We started upping the production value.

Ryan [0:09:03]: But again,

Dave [0:09:04]: were you interviewing people?

Dave [0:09:05]: Were these, like, internal subject matter experts in the company.

Ryan [0:09:08]: The first thing we did was figure out, like, a strategy for what message do we wanna set.

Ryan [0:09:13]: So we'll talk about Rippling overall marketing strategy in a bit.

Ryan [0:09:17]: But Yep.

Ryan [0:09:17]: For the Hr audience, which is where we sell the bulk of our product today.

Ryan [0:09:22]: The story we wanted to tell was we believe a future where Hr people are strategic and not having to, like, do manual tasks because Rippling frees up time from them to be strategic and have a seat at the table.

Ryan [0:09:38]: Yep.

Ryan [0:09:38]: That they think cross department.

Ryan [0:09:40]: They're not just, like, in their Hr bubble, but they think about finance and It, and all the all the things that are around their function and that they're data driven.

Ryan [0:09:49]: And we think that, like, if Hr people sort of embody those three traits, Rippling is is the best platform for them.

Ryan [0:09:56]: So then we went out, and we said, okay, We have some internal folks who can...

Ryan [0:09:59]: Who have a point of view on this.

Ryan [0:10:01]: But also there's external folks whether their customers or non customers, who we can sort of understand how they think and how...

Ryan [0:10:08]: And their playbook and really just start to tell that story.

Ryan [0:10:12]: And so we interview them.

Ryan [0:10:13]: And again, we have this machine of, you know, turning those interviews into different types of written content.

Ryan [0:10:19]: We run that as a webinar, so that's

Dave [0:10:21]: a lead gen opportunity for us.

Dave [0:10:22]: Would you think about the output of these going in or it would be, like, one of our customers, like, is the...

Dave [0:10:28]: I Vp of Hr at this school company and and, like, she has a really strong opinion about this?

Dave [0:10:32]: Let's just go interview her, get the content and we'll figure out what to do with it later?

Dave [0:10:35]: Did it have, like, an end goal?

Ryan [0:10:38]: Weren't talking about customers.

Ryan [0:10:39]: We started with what are the logos that are sort of recognizable.

Ryan [0:10:43]: Right?

Ryan [0:10:43]: Again, as we're building our brand and like, cool ones.

Ryan [0:10:45]: So we have customers like liquid death.

Ryan [0:10:48]: And so we brought them on board and we made it fun.

Ryan [0:10:50]: Like, we bought liquid death cans and shears, then, again, it makes the whole experience more human.

Ryan [0:10:56]: As we start to have these conversations with...

Ryan [0:11:00]: Like anything we would do a prep call and in that prep call sort of tease out what are the person's anecdotes.

Ryan [0:11:06]: Where do we wanna steer the conversation?

Ryan [0:11:08]: So there's a fair amount of prep of, like, where do we wanna get them to, but, ultimately, we we left the conversation flow?

Dave [0:11:15]: Okay.

Dave [0:11:15]: So we we have this idea of, like, we need to reach more h.

Dave [0:11:17]: We need to tell a better story to Hr people.

Dave [0:11:19]: Here's this concept that we wanna.

Dave [0:11:21]: And we're gonna start just interviewing people, lead with real faces.

Dave [0:11:23]: One of the things we talked about in that book, You mentioned this won't scale, and it was like, a core marketing principle was, like, you could totally lean into this from an Ai standpoint today.

Dave [0:11:31]: It's like, hey, we spend all of our time using Ai tools talk Ai, but, like, we're still humans.

Dave [0:11:35]: We wanna connect with other people, and so you're leaning into something there, which is, like, people don't want all of Hr fully you on, and they wanna know someone like, who runs Hr, and they wanna have opinions about Hr and strategy, but, like, admin and payroll and all that stuff is being done by technology.

Dave [0:11:48]: So let's lean into people, which I think you've done a nice job of bringing into the brand because they would totally be easy for Rippling to be, like, automate everything, Rippling ip jobs, everyone, but you've you've also been able to, like, make the Hr person, a hero.

Dave [0:12:01]: The hero that's gonna use Rippling as opposed to, like, Rippling is gonna be the thing that's gonna replace them.

Ryan [0:12:07]: Totally.

Ryan [0:12:07]: And the thing about it is if you talk to Hr folks and any of our customers, like, they don't want to be doing the manual work.

Ryan [0:12:14]: They join this job because they they love people and solving people problems, copying, downloading Csv and reform them to get it into another system and coordinating with It to ship laptops.

Ryan [0:12:28]: These are not the things they wanna be doing.

Ryan [0:12:30]: And so the message of, you know, we free you up from not having to do that so that you can be strategic and bring insights proactively to your Ceo, like, that message really resonates.

Dave [0:12:42]: Okay.

Dave [0:12:42]: So that that was kinda priority number one, which is, like, getting your hands around the story.

Dave [0:12:46]: Do we have more to say on on that piece of it?

Ryan [0:12:48]: I think it's a couple things.

Ryan [0:12:49]: I I think one is getting the story straight, and the second thing is just injecting the human touch into everything we do.

Ryan [0:12:56]: So that, sorry.

Dave [0:12:58]: Can I ask a question on getting the story straight?

Dave [0:12:59]: Obviously, when you join, the company already was doing, you know, hundreds of millions in revenue or or whatever.

Dave [0:13:05]: Right?

Dave [0:13:05]: Successful company already?

Dave [0:13:06]: You didn't hire, like some, like, messaging agency, did you have long reviews with all the execs in it?

Dave [0:13:12]: Or did you just like, come up with the story and and ship it.

Dave [0:13:14]: What was the level of creating this story.

Ryan [0:13:17]: So I would say there's story on different levels, and it's a work in progress.

Ryan [0:13:22]: I'm, like, really getting this down for the whole company.

Ryan [0:13:25]: So I I would say the easiest story to tell is a story that is for a specific persona.

Ryan [0:13:30]: So I think we have our story down when it comes to Hr.

Ryan [0:13:33]: We have our story down when it comes to finance.

Ryan [0:13:35]: We have our story down when it comes to It, and we have dedicated teams.

Ryan [0:13:38]: The Hr team obviously being the biggest.

Ryan [0:13:40]: That goes really deep on understanding the buyer, understanding the product offering we have kinda connecting the two.

Ryan [0:13:47]: And so that is relatively straightforward, and we ran internal process had a bunch of stakeholders, but, like, we didn't go in hire fancy external consultants.

Ryan [0:13:58]: If you take it one step up, which is what is the Rippling story?

Ryan [0:14:02]: I would say this is sort of, like, a work in progress and one where if you think about companies that do a lot of things, and I'm talking about, like, Oracle or Ibm, a lot of their overarching stories is, like, transform your business with the power of the cloud, like, something that says nothing.

Ryan [0:14:22]: And so we're...

Ryan [0:14:22]: I actively do not want us to tell that story, but to find sort of the click in between a persona story and one that resonates with the C suite, but is not super generic, is not easy.

Ryan [0:14:35]: Right?

Ryan [0:14:35]: And so we talk a lot about Are we an operating system for your workforce?

Ryan [0:14:40]: Do we want the capital operating system or lowercase operating system.

Ryan [0:14:45]: These are the things that, you know, I think, is an ongoing challenge, but it it doesn't slow us down.

Ryan [0:14:51]: Like, I don't think we're blocked because we don't know what to call ourselves At the end of the day, if you go to our website, the way we describe ourselves is we're the one system to manage your entire workforce.

Dave [0:15:01]: Yeah.

Dave [0:15:01]: I just had it up because I think this is a good example of I think it becomes sometimes you try to be too cute or you try to say something like, you know, we used to, like, the headline home homepage headline always had to be so like, pit for some reason when it's like, I don't know.

Dave [0:15:16]: Sometimes just say what you mean, and it's, like, man, you say, manage your entire workforce us on one system, increase savings, automate busy work and make better decisions by managing Hr payroll It and spend in one place.

Dave [0:15:26]: Pretty with a picture of, you know, somebody on an ipad, like, looking at payroll.

Dave [0:15:30]: Pretty damn clear.

Dave [0:15:32]: Right?

Dave [0:15:32]: So we talked about us in our in our little prep call, but, like, the challenges though is how do I make that believable.

Dave [0:15:38]: How do I get people to buy into that?

Dave [0:15:40]: Well, Hr has been around forever.

Dave [0:15:42]: There's a million other pieces of software I could use?

Dave [0:15:45]: How does that play into your your storytelling?

Ryan [0:15:47]: I think the first layer of this is just explaining to people like what we are.

Ryan [0:15:51]: And that on its face is differentiated.

Ryan [0:15:54]: Right?

Ryan [0:15:55]: Like, there's no other platform that has all of the functionality that we offer all in one place.

Ryan [0:16:01]: And so we want people landing on our site or receiving our message, like, at a base level, understand that.

Ryan [0:16:08]: And then I think once we have them, which is, you know, typically comes out in the demo, but you'll see a lot of this messaging woven through our website.

Ryan [0:16:16]: That's when we can talk about our platform differentiation.

Ryan [0:16:18]: And so the story there that, again, we have so much that we're rolling out soon around platform that this story is always developing.

Ryan [0:16:27]: But the story there is we have spent more dollars and time than any other player in the space, building the underlying platform.

Ryan [0:16:37]: And what that means is that for something like, let's just use reporting as an example, if you go with a point solution, let's say, a recruiting tool, you're gonna get, like, one or two reports, our reporting layer is sort of the...

Ryan [0:16:51]: Has the functionality and depth of something like Tableau.

Ryan [0:16:53]: And because we...

Ryan [0:16:55]: Am amortized that across dozens and dozens of products, we can afford to build a tableau level reporting thing where a point solution is focused on building.

Ryan [0:17:05]: Their point solution and therefore, reporting is not really robust.

Ryan [0:17:08]: I mentioned reporting is, like, one example, but there's a workflows engine.

Ryan [0:17:12]: There's an application builder.

Ryan [0:17:13]: There's, like, all this stuff underneath the surface that is, like, a thousand times more powerful.

Ryan [0:17:19]: And those are the reasons by the way that all the point solutions are fine at the application layer, but where it breaks is because underneath the surface, all the people have edge cases around reporting and integrations and all the other stuff that only we can support.

Dave [0:17:34]: I love the the nugget.

Dave [0:17:35]: You...

Dave [0:17:35]: I don't know here I'm your marketing expert.

Dave [0:17:37]: You probably already do this.

Dave [0:17:38]: You're doing it whenever.

Dave [0:17:38]: I get to pretend for ten minutes.

Dave [0:17:40]: But that line about...

Dave [0:17:41]: We've spent the most time in hours on this is actually really interesting.

Dave [0:17:44]: Have you heard the ramp at...

Dave [0:17:45]: Do you listen to Founders podcast at David Sent?

Ryan [0:17:48]: I've heard a few of a percent.

Dave [0:17:49]: Alright.

Dave [0:17:49]: Whatever.

Dave [0:17:49]: Doesn't matter.

Dave [0:17:50]: I'm so cool.

Dave [0:17:51]: Ramp sponsors their podcasts.

Dave [0:17:53]: And the ads are really good.

Dave [0:17:54]: The ads are about how ramp like, they only hire, like, point zero zero one percent of the engineers that apply to work at ramp.

Dave [0:18:02]: And I'm like, that's such a sick line to, like, articulate like, no.

Dave [0:18:06]: We're better, because I think it's so hard as a marketer some to, like, prove that we're better.

Dave [0:18:10]: We try to do it in all these different ways.

Dave [0:18:12]: Right?

Dave [0:18:12]: Like four point eight stars on g two.

Dave [0:18:14]: Like, okay, everyone can talk about that.

Dave [0:18:16]: What's unique to us, and I love this as a marketer kinda like, you're looking for these little nuggets around the company and so, like, maybe there's your angle is that, which is cool.

Ryan [0:18:24]: I love that.

Dave [0:18:25]: Tell me some of your favorite marketing place.

Dave [0:18:26]: Let's get into enough about enough about Rippling.

Dave [0:18:28]: Can What are some of the best marketing plays that you've run in the last year.

Dave [0:18:31]: So spend a lot of time reworking the story?

Dave [0:18:34]: That's a huge thing, but you say you've gone from gross to being this brand, this brand guy.

Dave [0:18:39]: How do you go and execute on the?

Dave [0:18:41]: These campaigns.

Dave [0:18:41]: We got this great message, but what are you going to do?

Dave [0:18:43]: What where some of the best marketing campaigns you run?

Ryan [0:18:46]: Maybe instead of talking about.

Ryan [0:18:48]: It show you some...

Dave [0:18:49]: Okay.

Dave [0:18:49]: I did So like I said, I got Riverside for you.

Dave [0:18:51]: So let's go.

Ryan [0:18:53]: So these This is sort of just, like, a visual representation of before and after, And I think here you can kind of start to see this whole, like, human approach, really woven into everything we do.

Ryan [0:19:05]: This is a screenshot from our Instagram page, but this is sort of the vibe of evolution that that we've been going through.

Ryan [0:19:11]: I'll show a couple since we started on content and webinars, and I think a lot of the folks who listen to this probably are at earlier stage companies not running Super Bowl campaigns, So as much as I'm excited about Super Bowl and we can get to that.

Ryan [0:19:26]: I I do wanna share, like, some tactical examples of things around content and case studies and things that...

Dave [0:19:32]: Okay.

Dave [0:19:32]: Let's do it.

Dave [0:19:33]: Show me.

Dave [0:19:34]: God, this is so fun.

Dave [0:19:35]: More people.

Dave [0:19:35]: List podcast.

Dave [0:19:36]: You should do this.

Dave [0:19:36]: I'm just gonna hang out right now.

Dave [0:19:37]: This is great.

Ryan [0:19:39]: Perfect.

Ryan [0:19:39]: Well, if you have questions jump in.

Ryan [0:19:41]: But I think, like, you know, again, webinar promo, I think this is sort of the vibe of what it used to look like.

Ryan [0:19:48]: The four, again, we're injecting humans, but if we're also trying to figure out how do we stop this scroll.

Ryan [0:19:54]: And so I'll show you a couple examples of, again, this is really just promoting a webinar, but a way more fun way to do it.

Ryan [0:20:01]: This is from a customer chest dot com, and the guy came to New York with mo amount and he wanted to wear this chess piece costume.

Ryan [0:20:11]: And so we made this fun weird video that people love.

Dave [0:20:16]: Looking at this post, we've been talking a lot about this recently I've always bought into, like, real faces, if they just work better.

Dave [0:20:21]: Like, lisa to...

Dave [0:20:22]: When I was at drift for example, the best ads we did early on.

Dave [0:20:25]: We're just like, this seemed, you know, so counterintuitive into at the time I'd take a picture with the iphone in the office and use it as an ad and it outperformed the, like, brand blessed creative.

Dave [0:20:34]: But I'm seeing this with, like, stuff that we record in person because I think, like, even these podcast clips, they don't perform as well as it used to because so much of the social media feed is filled with, like, Dudes podcasting, right?

Dave [0:20:45]: But when you see something like this, it's instant scroll stop, I'm like, what's this?

Dave [0:20:48]: Is that what street is that?

Dave [0:20:50]: And is that a person dressed up as a as a horse?

Dave [0:20:52]: You know?

Dave [0:20:52]: Like, there's something to that?

Ryan [0:20:55]: Exactly.

Ryan [0:20:55]: Exactly.

Ryan [0:20:55]: I'll show you another one just just really quick for fun.

Ryan [0:20:58]: This is a webinar with kraft heinz.

Ryan [0:21:02]: And so what better way to talk about it than hot dogs.

Dave [0:21:07]: Love it.

Dave [0:21:07]: And are those two people on your team?

Ryan [0:21:09]: Two people on my team, super scrappy, you know, production they go outside even in the cold.

Ryan [0:21:14]: Yeah and film this.

Ryan [0:21:15]: So...

Dave [0:21:16]: So are those are videos...

Dave [0:21:17]: Is intended of those two posts on Linkedin specifically?

Dave [0:21:19]: Or is like, hey, let's go make a funny one minute video and we'll figure out what to do with it later.

Ryan [0:21:24]: Well, it's let's still make a funny thirty second to one minute webinar promo that beats stuff like this.

Ryan [0:21:29]: And, you know, we posted on Linkedin.

Ryan [0:21:32]: We included in promo emails, things like that, and it just outperform anything that is static and boring.

Dave [0:21:39]: Is it the simplest reason why is because it's not static and boring It's just the pattern...

Dave [0:21:43]: If you're playing on the pattern interrupt of, like, b to b marketing.

Ryan [0:21:46]: It's pattern interrupt, it's human and it's fun.

Dave [0:21:51]: These are good examples, dude because the oftentimes if I have someone on who's at a, you know, big company.

Dave [0:21:56]: Well, obviously, Rippling can do it.

Dave [0:21:58]: They can spend money in a Subaru but, like, two people and your team can go walk out the street with your iphone and go do this totally.

Ryan [0:22:04]: I'll show a couple other examples.

Ryan [0:22:05]: Like, again, this is how we used to do case studies.

Ryan [0:22:07]: There's actually a good segue into, like, you could do case studies in a in a way that is expensive in a way that's not.

Ryan [0:22:14]: So, like, this is, you know, someone on my team going to a customer's office and just doing this.

Ryan [0:22:19]: Anyway, so that is, like, completely shot on iphone.

Dave [0:22:23]: Yeah.

Dave [0:22:23]: Yeah.

Dave [0:22:24]: Look the one on the left instantly, my brain goes, case study, You know, like, if some brand is promoting themselves we're on the right.

Dave [0:22:33]: I'm like, what's up with this dude but the hat?

Dave [0:22:35]: Totally.

Ryan [0:22:36]: Yeah.

Ryan [0:22:36]: So we make it fun.

Ryan [0:22:37]: And then

Dave [0:22:38]: sorry, This this person on your team, just...

Dave [0:22:40]: I'm just curious about her her role.

Dave [0:22:42]: Social media person.

Dave [0:22:43]: She's the social media person.

Dave [0:22:44]: And what is her job?

Ryan [0:22:49]: Her job is...

Ryan [0:22:50]: She partners, basically, we've got a team that is focused on different teams focused on different areas of the business.

Ryan [0:22:56]: Right?

Ryan [0:22:56]: We've got an Hr, It, finance, a team focused on Rippling for startup up founders.

Ryan [0:23:02]: And so her job is sort of be like the gatekeeper for all of our social media, Like, don't just post what people ask you to post.

Ryan [0:23:09]: And keep a high bar.

Ryan [0:23:11]: And what that ends up meaning is like, people will come to her.

Ryan [0:23:14]: Say, I have this product mantra of this webinar Or I have something, and she'll will partner with them to make it great.

Dave [0:23:20]: That's why I was trying to think about how to ask back question.

Dave [0:23:22]: You know sounded like idiot.

Dave [0:23:23]: You know, when this one guy left a review for my podcast I wanna sudden.

Dave [0:23:26]: He's like, this host.

Dave [0:23:26]: This guy was really a Cmo.

Dave [0:23:28]: He knows nothing about marketing.

Dave [0:23:29]: But the reason I asked is because I love this role, but I've always like, thought it hard to incentivize this person and, like, are they gold on how many followers Rippling has, but there's actually an interesting model where.

Dave [0:23:41]: If they're set up to be the person that has taste and humor and knows how to make good content on social media.

Dave [0:23:47]: I love the idea of, like, they work with everyone on the team to help promote their thing and make it better.

Ryan [0:23:53]: Exactly.

Ryan [0:23:53]: Exactly.

Ryan [0:23:54]: And, you know, I think in between, she's got her own agenda of, like, things we wanna do.

Ryan [0:23:59]: But in practice, there's so many things we wanna say across the business that the job sort of becomes, like, air traffic control, but also really up leveling things so that everything we do on social is both good and consistent.

Dave [0:24:13]: Alright.

Dave [0:24:13]: Keep going.

Dave [0:24:13]: You're doing a nice job.

Dave [0:24:14]: You're hired.

Ryan [0:24:16]: Alright.

Ryan [0:24:16]: I'll show you an example of, you know, what...

Ryan [0:24:18]: This is a shortcut cut down from full length feature film we did with Berries, which is one of our customers.

Ryan [0:24:24]: And this is what it looks like if you're bigger and have a little bit more budget than sending a person out with an iphone.

Ryan [0:24:31]: So just to show you and and again, we test we think that we need an arsenal of, like, all of these things together.

Ryan [0:24:37]: It's not one or the other, but we run do solemn in parallel.

Ryan [0:24:40]: I'll you an example.

Ryan [0:24:41]: So that's an example of a more higher production hype video.

Ryan [0:24:47]: Again, there's a longer version of it with a little bit of talking heads, but even that, I think feels really different in this distinct from typical case study videos we'll be out there.

Dave [0:24:58]: Can you just go into the process for creating that?

Dave [0:25:01]: Like, as as much as you can share if you're comfortable like, How did you find the agency to do that?

Dave [0:25:05]: What did it look like?

Dave [0:25:06]: How long did it take?

Dave [0:25:07]: What did it cost?

Dave [0:25:07]: Roughly what was the deliverable?

Dave [0:25:08]: I think someone who wants to do something like that would really benefit from hearing from you?

Ryan [0:25:12]: Yeah.

Ryan [0:25:12]: So we're really fortunate.

Ryan [0:25:14]: We have an internal team that's called Brand studio?

Ryan [0:25:17]: They're sort of our in house.

Ryan [0:25:19]: Creative agency.

Ryan [0:25:20]: And so a lot of what we do here is very much in house.

Ryan [0:25:24]: Obviously, they partner with external folks for larger scale productions.

Ryan [0:25:28]: And so I think the process for us is that was driven by our customer marketing team.

Ryan [0:25:34]: So Emmy, who leads that team really worked hand in hand with Berries and making sure from day one that they are happy and successful as a customer.

Dave [0:25:44]: That's a fun marketing job, by the way, doing customer marketing, company with, like, cool companies, like, work on this shoe with Berries or something very cool.

Ryan [0:25:50]: Yeah.

Ryan [0:25:50]: And not just cool, but I've been at early stage start where you have, you know, a small handful of happy customers here we have tens of thousands, and many of them are big brands and household names.

Ryan [0:26:01]: And so company for something like Berries, we treated it almost as if it's a sports sponsorship, like, as if we, you know, are gonna go and announce that the New York Knicks are the official Hr partner of Rippling lang or something like that.

Ryan [0:26:16]: And so what that meant in practice was the partnership was much deeper than just making this video?

Ryan [0:26:23]: It was like, how do we go and activate this across the entire year.

Ryan [0:26:27]: So, obviously, we shot this film, but also, She, which is one of the biggest conferences for Hr professionals.

Ryan [0:26:34]: We set up a pop up berries class where we actually brought real barriers instructors and equipment outside on the lawn at Sc and had hundreds of Hr professionals do, like, a a lot of various class in the morning sponsored by Rippling.

Ryan [0:26:47]: That's obviously a value add to the conference.

Ryan [0:26:50]: So they were excited about it.

Ryan [0:26:51]: But those are the types of things that we brought to life to to basically, like, make this partnership real and really squeeze a lot more juice out of this customer story.

Dave [0:27:01]: Alright.

Dave [0:27:01]: So I want you to keep going but.

Dave [0:27:03]: I have a question.

Dave [0:27:03]: Let's rewind ten years and you're, you know, first start up marketing, hire, Ryan and you're listening to this and this this guy is this, you know, famous Vp of marketing at company.

Dave [0:27:13]: They have all these resources they got a brand studio team.

Dave [0:27:15]: Instead of letting someone listen this and say this is possible at my company.

Dave [0:27:19]: We don't have the budget.

Dave [0:27:20]: Let's make the case for the scrappy version of this.

Dave [0:27:22]: How can you apply this kind of brand thinking to a startup up baby that doesn't have the same budget that you guys do.

Ryan [0:27:27]: Yeah.

Ryan [0:27:27]: I mean, I think that this example that I showed first with the iphone shot camera cost nothing.

Ryan [0:27:33]: And then there's varying degrees of cost and sophistication in between.

Ryan [0:27:39]: So, I could show a few more examples because I think a Rippling we do it all.

Ryan [0:27:43]: But I would say without, like, talking about the actual stats because I don't have it in front of me.

Ryan [0:27:48]: The thing that cost order of magnitude more doesn't actually outperform by an order of magnitude.

Ryan [0:27:53]: Like in many cases, is this social thing we'll do just as well as as the thing that is high production value.

Ryan [0:27:59]: So as much as people get excited about these, and I get excited about them too, I would say there's really nothing stopping you as long as you can cultivate happy customers to go and either create content at their offices that that's fun.

Ryan [0:28:14]: And then there's also, I pull up an example, but there's somewhere we didn't even get the customer's permission to go create the case study.

Ryan [0:28:22]: We just use, like, you know, the on social media, There's, like, the green screen feature.

Dave [0:28:27]: Yeah.

Ryan [0:28:27]: And so our social media manager would, you know, basically talk about the customer story, just, like, reading it from a case study that we wrote internally, obviously, making it more fun.

Ryan [0:28:38]: With imagery or graphics from the customer if it's a coffee shop, maybe they'll...

Ryan [0:28:43]: They have stuff online, we can Rippling or things like that.

Ryan [0:28:46]: And so that kind of stuff does almost as well as as this.

Dave [0:28:49]: So I believe...

Dave [0:28:50]: Look, I think that if you're in V and you sell to a persona that is online all the time.

Dave [0:28:54]: Hr is a good one marketing, sales.

Dave [0:28:56]: There's a bunch.

Dave [0:28:57]: Not all.

Dave [0:28:58]: I understand that not not all is gonna be perfect fit here, but I love this idea of just, like, forcing yourself to try to make content that costs nothing with the phone and having somebody on the team do that because that's where you can get all these ideas and, you know, you can get one of these quick scrappy, funny video ideas.

Dave [0:29:13]: Two people and your team go down to the streets in New York and can get a hotdog dog and that becomes something that cost nothing and you turn it out that day.

Dave [0:29:20]: I love that approach.

Ryan [0:29:21]: And Hot dogs in New York, I will say, I've heard they can be up to fifty dollars.

Ryan [0:29:25]: So almost fine.

Dave [0:29:26]: That's true.

Dave [0:29:27]: Yeah.

Dave [0:29:27]: Forget it.

Dave [0:29:27]: Forget.

Dave [0:29:28]: Alright.

Dave [0:29:28]: Show me some more examples.

Dave [0:29:29]: Keep going.

Ryan [0:29:30]: Okay.

Ryan [0:29:30]: Since we're talking about production value, I'll show you, like, high production value, medium and low.

Ryan [0:29:36]: And I put this on the slide in terms of funnel stage.

Ryan [0:29:40]: So about the first campaign that I ran when I joined here that was this campaign called Hr deserves better.

Ryan [0:29:46]: So we've even bought a domain for it.

Ryan [0:29:49]: And the thesis for this campaign was Hr people are sort of, like, stuck in long term relationships with their old platform, and it's fine.

Ryan [0:29:58]: It's fine.

Ryan [0:29:59]: It's just they're held back by it.

Ryan [0:30:01]: Right?

Ryan [0:30:01]: And so we did this analogy where it's, like, remember when you were starting out, you had all these dreams, but your Hr software is holding you back.

Ryan [0:30:09]: So we did this, we released it around Valentine's Day, and we made this fun video that was essentially this guy breaking up with his Hr system.

Ryan [0:30:18]: So anyways, example of sort of higher production value, but this is the type of thing that we can get a lot of mileage out of running that on Tv, Ct tv, all of those more premium channels.

Ryan [0:30:31]: And then I wanna compare it with something that we spun up, like, very inexpensive, which is sort of on the same theme, but we wanted something to test against that, and that was Hr love songs dot com, No.

Dave [0:30:46]: That's what I call Hr.

Dave [0:30:47]: I love it.

Ryan [0:30:48]: This I made with Clog.

Ryan [0:30:49]: So, you know, again, no all vibe photos I was like, make me the ugliest website you can make it retro.

Ryan [0:30:55]: And it went along with this video, which I think is a bang, so I'll play it.

Ryan [0:31:00]: You get the picture.

Ryan [0:31:02]: Yeah.

Dave [0:31:03]: How did you make the video?

Ryan [0:31:05]: So, I mean, this is...

Ryan [0:31:06]: We worked with, like, an external agency.

Ryan [0:31:09]: It was actually free because this is a a bit of a hack.

Ryan [0:31:12]: But when we spend a decent amount on Linkedin and so they when you do that, they unlock, like, value added partners, and so one of their partners is quick frame and quick frame plug for Quick frame, they hook you up with, like, a a video person.

Ryan [0:31:27]: So they spun this up for us in, like, a matter of weeks.

Ryan [0:31:29]: But it's a lot of fun.

Ryan [0:31:31]: And perform really well.

Ryan [0:31:33]: We do, like, hack things with this.

Ryan [0:31:35]: Like, for example, At Sc, which is the Big Hr conference that I mentioned.

Ryan [0:31:38]: We partnered with all of the hotels where all the Sc attendees stay.

Ryan [0:31:43]: And we had this add on loop.

Ryan [0:31:45]: So, like, when you turn on the Tv instead of the Mario Lopez extra.

Ryan [0:31:49]: Yeah.

Ryan [0:31:50]: You just hear this song.

Ryan [0:31:52]: So, like, this song, I don't know heads, which is.

Dave [0:31:56]: That's insane.

Dave [0:31:57]: This is great.

Dave [0:31:58]: This is fun, man.

Dave [0:31:59]: This is the stuff that, like, I love about marketing.

Dave [0:32:01]: I love I'm glad you took this approach of coming on here and showing stuff like that.

Dave [0:32:05]: So you...

Dave [0:32:06]: You have more?

Ryan [0:32:07]: I won't bore you with the rest.

Dave [0:32:08]: Show me the Super Bowl ad.

Ryan [0:32:09]: Yeah.

Ryan [0:32:09]: We have stuff that's more like product centric.

Ryan [0:32:11]: So it's not all fun in games.

Ryan [0:32:13]: And then we can talk about Super Bowl.

Ryan [0:32:17]: There's a lot to this one.

Dave [0:32:18]: Wait.

Dave [0:32:18]: But before the Super Bowl though...

Dave [0:32:19]: Though...

Dave [0:32:19]: So something like that.

Dave [0:32:20]: Right?

Dave [0:32:20]: That Rippling the Hr hits.

Dave [0:32:22]: Right?

Dave [0:32:23]: You just kinda do that, does anybody have any expectations around, like, measuring that?

Dave [0:32:28]: How do we know if that worked or not?

Dave [0:32:30]: Or is it just...

Dave [0:32:30]: You have a free pass to just do a bunch of fun stuff and they trust you and pipeline goes up?

Dave [0:32:36]: Like, how does this all work in the machine

Ryan [0:32:38]: As much as I like to think?

Ryan [0:32:39]: There's that I'm trusted.

Ryan [0:32:40]: We you have a fair degree of measurement and instrumentation in place.

Ryan [0:32:45]: So first thing is we have Mma mixed media model.

Ryan [0:32:48]: So we have that in place where when we flex up and down budget and specific channels.

Ryan [0:32:55]: We can measure the incremental of that on website traffic and on opportunities and also pipeline.

Dave [0:33:03]: Was there a product that use for that people love the tools and tech

Ryan [0:33:06]: and whatever.

Ryan [0:33:07]: We partner with Para on that.

Dave [0:33:09]: Oh, cool.

Dave [0:33:09]: Nice shout out to P Good guy.

Ryan [0:33:12]: So we do that.

Ryan [0:33:12]: Also with Para, we do incremental testing.

Ryan [0:33:15]: So that's essentially, we pulse media and a specific market and look for the incremental mentality of that on revenue subsequently.

Ryan [0:33:23]: Those are important measures of, like, how is the channel performing overall.

Dave [0:33:29]: Yeah.

Ryan [0:33:29]: So, first, we prove out that things like Ct tv and all that is actually, like, incremental to the business.

Ryan [0:33:34]: And then we can get into, like, is create may better than creative b which we could talk about too.

Dave [0:33:40]: So these things you might do organically would eventually become paid creative that would then allow you to measure and show some type of lift.

Ryan [0:33:48]: Unless it's free.

Ryan [0:33:48]: I wouldn't do anything that's, like, purely organic.

Ryan [0:33:51]: Like everything we're doing is fuel for our paid engine?

Dave [0:33:55]: Got it.

Dave [0:33:55]: Perfect way to say that.

Dave [0:33:56]: So that's the guard rope.

Dave [0:33:58]: And are you all looking at...

Dave [0:33:59]: Will you do something?

Dave [0:34:00]: Do you ever do an organic thing Or, like, all, that kind popped off?

Dave [0:34:02]: Like, we should run that as paid or is it all the creative we're doing is to serve paid.

Ryan [0:34:07]: Sometimes like these webinar promos, will do organically, and we'll we'll do minimal paid behind it, and it's really targeted.

Ryan [0:34:13]: But when we're talking about, like, advertising, these things are...

Ryan [0:34:17]: They're not expensive, but they're not free, and so we definitely wanna make sure that we maximize the number of I've all seeing it.

Dave [0:34:23]: Cool.

Dave [0:34:23]: Okay.

Dave [0:34:24]: What else?

Dave [0:34:24]: You had some other good thoughts I kinda cut off.

Ryan [0:34:26]: So we'd test a lot of creative within each stage of the funnel.

Ryan [0:34:29]: We have just take for a given product area.

Ryan [0:34:33]: And by the way, we have to think about this for all of our products surface area.

Ryan [0:34:36]: But for specific product there in, like, Hr, we think about this in terms of awareness, consideration purchase within each stage of the funnel.

Ryan [0:34:43]: And there's a bunch of creative we test.

Ryan [0:34:45]: Right?

Ryan [0:34:45]: Sometimes we test things that are low ph that are made with an iphone, and we test that against things that are, you know, more polished and professional.

Ryan [0:34:53]: So even for if you take top of funnel awareness for Hr, I showed the example from Hr Love songs, which is Lo, ish, and Hr deserves better, which is more of a production.

Ryan [0:35:06]: And so we run those in parallel to the same audience, and we look at metrics like Cpm, so which is essentially, the algorithms preference for one creative over another.

Ryan [0:35:15]: It's cheaper for us to serve.

Ryan [0:35:17]: That means that we could serve it to more people.

Ryan [0:35:20]: We look at metrics like view rates, so we take for, you know, if thirty second ad, one will have a higher, completion rate than the other.

Ryan [0:35:30]: And then we look at engagement rate, which is essentially on linkedin, for example, the number of likes and comments and all that.

Ryan [0:35:38]: And so, like, you kinda triangulate based on those, like, which creative is outperforming and you couple that with incremental testing it makes media model and just understand, you know, is this the channel we keep investing in, and that's how we keep iterating on both creative and channels.

Dave [0:35:52]: And is all that's of driving to Rippling homepage to create a free account, Like, what's the funnel?

Ryan [0:35:59]: There are Cta and everything we do, but when we're talking about video advertising, typically, people are not, like, take Ct tv, people aren't clicking through or don't even have the

Dave [0:36:08]: aqua like, I noticed one of the Rippling things you said There wasn't a Url there wasn't anything.

Dave [0:36:12]: It was just showing Rippling.

Ryan [0:36:14]: Yeah.

Ryan [0:36:14]: The example I showed is, like, a preview that doesn't show the link.

Ryan [0:36:17]: There's a link.

Dave [0:36:18]: Okay.

Ryan [0:36:18]: But it's not...

Ryan [0:36:19]: I don't expect people to see the ad and book Demo, like, right away.

Ryan [0:36:23]: I don't know when...

Ryan [0:36:24]: You know, if you do that, maybe a very compelling ad.

Ryan [0:36:26]: The goal is, like, with Hr love songs or any of these things like implants, see Rippling into people's brains.

Ryan [0:36:32]: And we have a bunch of mid funnel and bottom of funnel ads that are running in parallel that will the person will see later, whether they get targeted or they fall into the same audience, and we do a bunch of testing even within platform to say, if people are exposed to our awareness ad, then we can convert them down funnel at twice the rate.

Ryan [0:36:50]: And so those are some of the things that if we invest...

Ryan [0:36:53]: At the top of the funnel, you get more bottom of funnel efficiency.

Ryan [0:36:55]: So sometimes we'll show people the Hr Love Songs ad, and then they'll convert through a webinar ad, or sometimes our good old incentivized ads that are, you know, get a free pair of airpods will work.

Ryan [0:37:08]: But those deals are actually likely to convert because they jump on the call and I have so many recordings of this from gong, and they're like, I am so excited to have this conversation.

Ryan [0:37:17]: I promise it's not for their airpods.

Ryan [0:37:20]: It's because I've, like, been seeing Rippling everywhere.

Dave [0:37:24]: Man, that's a perfect way to lay out so much of the challenge in marketing.

Dave [0:37:28]: It's like, if you can sit down with the Cfo or Ceo whenever and explain all of the touch points, then it becomes so many of the marketers that that we talk within our community and just It's like everything you do in marketing is expected to drive?

Dave [0:37:41]: Like, oh, oh, we ran an ad on this channel.

Dave [0:37:44]: Like, how many demos did we book from that ad?

Dave [0:37:46]: And it's like, that's not how it works though.

Dave [0:37:48]: And you've done a nice job of articulating, like, how all of the pieces come together and I can see that.

Dave [0:37:53]: I...

Dave [0:37:54]: I feel like I understand how you would do marketing every.

Dave [0:37:56]: Great.

Dave [0:37:57]: End to the podcast.

Dave [0:37:58]: Yeah.

Dave [0:37:59]: Is this something you've had to learn, Like, you haven't you even run marketing at a at a company at this stage.

Dave [0:38:04]: Right?

Dave [0:38:05]: Few people have, but how do you stay sharp?

Dave [0:38:06]: You have a great team.

Dave [0:38:07]: They teach you this?

Dave [0:38:08]: Are you learning on your own?

Ryan [0:38:10]: I try to listen to a lot of podcasts?

Dave [0:38:12]: Maybe just not a moron.

Dave [0:38:13]: I don't know.

Ryan [0:38:15]: I think about all of this, just like, from first principles.

Ryan [0:38:17]: It's like, I think of marketing unlike any other function or it's, like, not to simplify other functions.

Ryan [0:38:24]: But if you're like a sales leader, I think you manage people who all do the same thing, They sell.

Ryan [0:38:30]: In marketing, my product marketers are very different from my events marketers are very different from content folks and there is other random teams like, you know, channel and broker and private equity.

Ryan [0:38:43]: And...

Ryan [0:38:43]: And so all these teams...

Ryan [0:38:44]: I sort of think of my role as just not having to be smart on any one thing, but just being, like, a good general manager.

Ryan [0:38:52]: And so I I think of this skill set that I try to hone is not, like, marketing stuff and more, like, the same skill that a founder would have to hone.

Ryan [0:39:02]: A bunch of things they've never managed before, which is ask smart questions and just call the bar high and keep pushing for excellence.

Dave [0:39:13]: I love it.

Dave [0:39:14]: Perfect answer.

Dave [0:39:14]: I'm gonna wrap on that note.

Dave [0:39:16]: It's a perfect lesson for anybody who wants to become a a leader in marketing is to think about all of the things combined.

Dave [0:39:23]: I think there feels like there's a lot of pressure.

Dave [0:39:24]: Like, I gotta be an Seo expert.

Dave [0:39:26]: And I gotta be a demand gen expert.

Dave [0:39:27]: And I gotta be a video expert in an events expert that's it's not

Ryan [0:39:30]: the case.

Dave [0:39:31]: So you have to think like you're thinking.

Dave [0:39:32]: So ryan, this was awesome.

Dave [0:39:33]: I know a lot of people will get a a bunch of value out of this showing a bunch of examples.

Dave [0:39:37]: They're gonna ask for more, maybe a year from now we'll have you come back on and and show more stuff after this.

Dave [0:39:42]: This is exciting.

Dave [0:39:43]: You you must be excited.

Dave [0:39:44]: It's Wednesday.

Dave [0:39:44]: Super Bowl is coming up.

Dave [0:39:46]: Are you gonna just, you know, sit on the couch and and see

Ryan [0:39:48]: how many new leads that, come in.

Ryan [0:39:50]: I'm gonna keep refreshing my oregon just...

Dave [0:39:53]: Is that a thing?

Dave [0:39:53]: Like, the company excited?

Dave [0:39:54]: Like, everyone excited that Rippling running a super ad?

Ryan [0:39:58]: Everyone's really excited.

Ryan [0:39:58]: I think our sales org is really excited to just have an in, like, being able to get on the phone with prospects and customers and say, like, hey, did you catch the super Bowl.

Ryan [0:40:09]: I think it's, like, a really exciting moment.

Ryan [0:40:11]: The whole company is rallying around.

Ryan [0:40:12]: So Yeah.

Ryan [0:40:13]: It's definitely a big moment for us.

Ryan [0:40:15]: And it's the first time I I would say, even though we've made a bunch of investment in awareness over the last several months to a year, we've still been, like, very focused on telling the story of the product.

Ryan [0:40:29]: And this the first time we're really leaning into the pain and the emotion associated with that pain.

Ryan [0:40:34]: And so we needed to, like, abstract this for a Super Bowl, high level audience and not necessarily talk about Hr and payroll.

Ryan [0:40:44]: We really just wanted to talk about what is the feeling of a leader who is just...

Ryan [0:40:49]: Has these master plans and wants to take over and build something successful And then these, like, mundane things toward their plans.

Ryan [0:40:57]: And so that's the story we're really telling with the ad, which is what does it feel like to not run your business on playing.

Ryan [0:41:05]: And if we could articulate that, Then I think we have a really great opening with, you know, shutting off the product?

Dave [0:41:12]: I like it.

Dave [0:41:12]: Just quickly, what is the timeline of a super ad?

Dave [0:41:15]: Like, when do you have to decide you wanna do it, commit the dollars work on the creative?

Dave [0:41:18]: What's the reverse timeline been like?

Ryan [0:41:21]: Normally, it should probably be, like, almost a year, but we did it in lightning speed.

Ryan [0:41:26]: So I think we decided we wanted to do it and I don't know.

Ryan [0:41:29]: Maybe September, October time frame, and then we worked, like, crazy over the holidays.

Ryan [0:41:35]: We shot it a couple weeks ago.

Ryan [0:41:38]: Were you there?

Ryan [0:41:39]: I was there.

Ryan [0:41:40]: I was there.

Ryan [0:41:41]: It's a really cool experience we were in La where it should be, felt like a real Hollywood experience.

Dave [0:41:49]: I mean, you're in New York.

Dave [0:41:50]: Well, if you told me you filmed in New York I wouldn't have been, like,

Ryan [0:41:53]: La just feels like where you wanna shoot a Super bowl ad.

Dave [0:41:56]: Yeah.

Dave [0:41:56]: Sure.

Dave [0:41:56]: That's fair.

Dave [0:41:57]: That's fair.

Dave [0:41:57]: That's fair.

Dave [0:41:58]: Alright.

Dave [0:41:58]: Ryan.

Dave [0:41:59]: Good to see you, man.

Dave [0:42:00]: Thank you for doing it.

Dave [0:42:00]: He's a VP of marketing at Rippling, check him out on Linkedin.

Dave [0:42:03]: Around Exit Five.

Dave [0:42:05]: I got a bunch of notes.

Dave [0:42:06]: I'm excited.

Dave [0:42:07]: I just wish I wanna go, like, make some iphone videos right now.

Dave [0:42:09]: Are, like, do some silly stuff.

Dave [0:42:11]: That's how I feel after talking.

Dave [0:42:12]: And it's good.

Dave [0:42:13]: It's fun to see the evolution up from growth guide to brand guy doing Super Bowl commercials for Rippling.

Dave [0:42:18]: Congrats on an awesome ronald.

Dave [0:42:19]: I'll keep following you and rooting for you.

Dave [0:42:21]: Thanks for coming to hanging out with me on the pod.

Dave [0:42:23]: Cool.

Ryan [0:42:24]: Thanks for having me.

Dave [0:42:29]: Hey.

Dave [0:42:29]: Thanks for listening to this podcast.

Dave [0:42:30]: If you like this episode.

Dave [0:42:32]: Do you know what?

Dave [0:42:32]: I'm not even gonna ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that.

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Dave [0:42:47]: On our website exitfive.com.

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