Ramp Runs Three Brand Playbooks at Once and Proves B2B SaaS Can Build Cultural Relevance

I want to talk about one of the most interesting brands in B2B SaaS right now. Ok

Ramp is a corporate card and finance operations platform that helps companies manage expenses, close books faster, and control spending. On paper, that's one of the least exciting product categories in enterprise software. Expense reports. Receipt management. Bill payments. It's the kind of product that wins on demos and procurement spreadsheets.

But Ramp has spent the past year doing something that almost no B2B SaaS company attempts, and none have pulled off at this scale. It ran a Super Bowl ad, then followed it with a live activation in Manhattan that put Brian Baumgartner, the actor who played the lovably incompetent accountant Kevin on NBC's The Office, in a glass box doing expense reports for six hours, generating 112 million views. While that was happening, its lead economist was publishing spending data so valuable that the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and NPR started citing Ramp as a primary source. And underneath all of it, the product kept growing, crossing $1 billion in annualized revenue and earning a $22.5 billion valuation that led Fortune to describe the company as building a brand to challenge American Express. The company is running three distinct brand playbooks simultaneously: entertainment, proprietary data, and product positioning, and all three are reinforcing each other in ways none of them could produce alone.

Entertainment as Top of Funnel

Most B2B companies would never put a sitcom actor in a glass box in the middle of Manhattan to do expense reports for six hours. Ramp did, and the way it got there is as instructive as the stunt itself.

After Ramp's Super Bowl ad with NFL running back Saquon Barkley generated buzz earlier this year, the team started asking how to create viral moments that weren't tied to an annual sports calendar. Kendall Hope Tucker, Ramp's Head of Creative Experimentation, a title that tells you a lot about how this company thinks about brand, described the process in an interview with Rachel Karten's Link in Bio, one of the most widely read newsletters on social media strategy. Tucker cold-DM'd Rohan Kumar, who had spent four years leading social for MrBeast, the most-subscribed individual creator on YouTube, and invited him and his collaborators to Ramp's office for a week-long brainstorm. After more than 50 hours, they landed on the concept. Put Baumgartner in public, make him do the painful version of expense reporting by hand while Ramp's software processed receipts automatically beside him, and let a live tracker show the contrast. That absurdity did the work.

Then something unscripted happened that made the whole thing better. Ramp had plastered flyers and wheatpaste across New York announcing Baumgartner as their new "CFO." Andy Buckley, who played Dunder Mifflin's CFO David Wallace on The Office, happened to be in New York, saw the flyers, and sent Baumgartner a video pretending to be offended that he'd been replaced. Tucker's team turned it around in a day, writing, filming, and posting a response video with Buckley that became Ramp's most-engaged organic TikTok.

Nathan Allebach, Ramp's Social Media Lead, brought his own history to the execution. Allebach previously ran the Steak-umm Twitter account, one of the most recognized brand social presences in recent memory. He described the response on X, Ramp's primary channel for the livestream, as "a nonstop flow of positive quote tweets and replies all day long." The team had borrowed from the playbook of livestreamers like Kai Cenat, structuring the day into 15-minute programming blocks with planned bits, surprises, and cameos. A B2B SaaS company ended up trending alongside entertainment brands.

The strategy underneath the spectacle is what's worth taking seriously. The campaign wasn't about the product. It was about the pain the product eliminates. Everyone who has ever worked in an office understands the misery of expense reports. By turning that pain into a comedic spectacle, Ramp created something that resonated far beyond its ICP. Finance teams who actually buy the product saw it and recognized their own experience. The broader audience saw it and laughed. Both responses build the brand, and only one of them requires the viewer to care about corporate spend management.

Proprietary Data as Earned Authority

While the entertainment team was staging live activations, something entirely different was happening on Ramp's data side that I think is actually the more replicable play for most B2B companies.

Ramp sits on one of the most valuable datasets in enterprise software, which is real-time spending data from thousands of companies across every industry. Instead of keeping that data locked inside the product, Ramp publishes it. The Ramp AI Index, the Advertising Index, and the weekly Econ Lab newsletter on Substack are all written by Ara Kharazian, Ramp's Lead Economist, whose analysis has been cited by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg, and NPR's Planet Money, among others. A B2B SaaS company's in-house economist has become a regular source for the world's most influential financial media. That fact alone should change how SaaS marketing teams think about content strategy.

One finding from the AI Index is particularly worth flagging for this audience. In March 2026, Ramp published data showing that Anthropic now wins about 70% of head-to-head matchups against OpenAI among businesses purchasing AI services for the first time, a complete reversal from 2025 trends. Kharazian's analysis went further, observing that the driver doesn't appear to be purely performance, given that comparable products like Claude Code and Codex exist side by side. That observation, that enterprise AI purchasing decisions are shaped by something beyond benchmarks, is the exact argument I've been making about brand as the differentiator when technology converges. And it surfaced from a finance company's spending data, not a marketing survey.

The strategic logic is simple. Every time a journalist cites Ramp's data, Ramp gets visibility in front of every CTO, CFO, and VP of Engineering who reads the coverage. Those are exactly the buyers Ramp wants, and they encounter the company not through an ad but through an insight that helps them understand their own market. The posture is informational, not promotional. And buyers remember who informed them long after they've forgotten who advertised to them.

Product Positioning as the Through Line

Underneath both the entertainment and the data, there's a product story clear enough to function as brand strategy on its own, and it's the reason the other two playbooks work as well as they do.

CEO Eric Glyman has been consistent about this from the beginning. In a Fortune interview, he explained the foundational insight. The entire corporate card industry was structurally misaligned. Card companies made money when customers spent more, so they had no incentive to build tools that helped customers spend less. Ramp flipped that dynamic entirely. "What if actually we wanted the same things as our customers and what if our goal was actually just help them spend less?" Glyman told Fortune.

That single idea is the foundation everything else is built on. The Super Bowl ad dramatizes the pain of the old way. The glass box makes it visible. The data publishing demonstrates analytical depth. Every touchpoint reinforces the same message. Ramp is aligned with your financial interests in a way that the incumbents structurally cannot be. When your positioning is that clear, you don't need different messaging for different channels.

Fortune described the result as a software company designed to reduce back-office drudgery that has somehow generated a cult-like following among CFOs and rank-and-file employees alike. Employees love Ramp because it eliminates expense report pain. CFOs love it because it saves money. The media covers it because the data is useful. And the broader market remembers it because Baumgartner made them laugh. When every audience is telling a version of the same story, the brand is working.

The Principles That Transfer

I've covered a lot of companies in The State of Brand. Anthropic's trust-first positioning. Clay's taste-driven media engine. Air's creative-without-permission approach. Each represents a single playbook executed exceptionally well. What makes Ramp different is that it's running three at once, and the three are reinforcing each other in ways a single playbook can't achieve alone.

Most B2B SaaS companies aren't going to run a Super Bowl ad, and they don't need to. The principles underlying Ramp's strategy are more transferable than the tactics.

The first is about talent. Ramp's creative team came from the creator and streamer world, and that's a deliberate choice that shows in every piece of output. If your entire marketing team has only ever worked in B2B, your creative is going to look like everyone else's. The talent you hire determines the ceiling.

The second is about data. Every SaaS company sits on usage data, spending data, or behavioral data that the market can't get anywhere else. The companies that publish it become authorities. The ones that keep it locked inside the product remain vendors. Ramp didn't build a media company to make this work. It hired an economist and opened a Substack account. The dataset was already there.

The third is about speed. Glyman told Fortune that Ramp tracks its age in days, not years. At the time of the interview, the company was 2,367 days old. The glass box concept went from brainstorm to execution in weeks. The Buckley video was turned around in a single day. The companies that move fastest create the impression of momentum, and momentum attracts customers, talent, and media in ways that no campaign calendar can replicate.

The Part Nobody Can Replicate

A competitor could copy any single element of what Ramp is doing. Run a funny ad. Publish some data. Launch a newsletter. The advantage is in the system underneath, a company with positioning clear enough to make entertainment, data, and product all reinforce the same story, and the organizational will to fund all three simultaneously. The Super Bowl ad brought Ramp into conversations it had never been part of. The glass box activation gave those conversations something to share. The newsletter and data publishing converted that fleeting attention into sustained authority with the financial media that Ramp's buyers actually read. And the product experience turned curious trialists into the kind of advocates who do your marketing for you. Each layer made the next one more effective, and removing any single piece wouldn't collapse the system. That's what makes it so difficult to compete against.

Ramp is an expense management company that makes you laugh, makes you smarter, and makes your finance team faster. That combination shouldn't work in B2B. The fact that it does tells you everything about what brand investment looks like when the positioning is right, the talent is right, and the commitment is real.

The glass box was a stunt. The playbook underneath it is permanent.