Cannes Lions Day 1: Anthpo, Ramp, and The Best Ads of the Year

Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to this very special week of the "Colennets and Beer Show." And the reason it's special is because we're in the South of France. Yes, we are here in the South of France. This is our first time at Can Lions. We are here at the LinkedIn Lounge. And we are hosting a show every morning. You just lied to our audience. It is not our first time at Can Lions. We've been here for four years. I said first time. Yeah, I meant to say fourth time. And that's because this is the largest advertising conference in the world. It's a super wall for creators. That is what it's being referred to as this year. And so we're here covering what's happening in the world of creators. And we're doing it in partnership with LinkedIn. We're hosting a show every single day called the Daily Brief. So on our feed you're going to hear us talk to different creators, marketers, talk to each other about what we're seeing on the ground. The world of advertising. You can tune in on LinkedIn. And this is a living and breathing show. So if you want to leave comments here on Spotify. If you want to leave a comment on my personal LinkedIn. First of all, follow me on LinkedIn and also leave a comment on my personal LinkedIn. But you won't respond. I don't know that. You don't know that. I will respond. I will leave a comment. We're going to be here every day. Now to the show. This is the Daily Brief from the LinkedIn Lounge at Can Lion on the Chris set. [Music] Colin, what is Cam? Cam, if you are unfamiliar is basically the Oscars of advertising more recently. It was called The Super Bowl for Creators. It actually started in 1954 in Venice, Italy, inspired by the film festival. And then was brought here in the 80s. So started out mainly to award brands for their advertising and agencies for their advertising with like traditional commercials. And it was really evolved over the years. Now you have parties, you have talks, you have meetings. And as the media landscape has changed, namely like Facebook being here in 2018 and all the digital media platforms. It's really changed. And now you have creators as well, who are at Can? This is being referred to as The Super Bowl for Creators. And we've been coming here for the past four years, but it does feel like a notably different year at Can here as creators continue to take up more of marketing spend. We play a bigger role not only just as talent as distribution, but also we're going to hear from some guests today as creative agencies. People who are actually creating some of the marketing that was seeing on the ground. Yeah, I read an article that said that you know, creators will be here mainly to land long term brand partnerships with some of these major brands. I think some of that will happen. There will be creators that rub shoulders with CMOs and end up landing bigger deals. But I think a lot of it is actually creators being here on behalf of platforms on behalf of agencies to give brands the trust and the comfort that these agencies and these platforms know how to work with creators. So on today's show, we're going to talk about three different things. We're going to keep talking about the role of creators here at Can. Obviously as they stepped on to the scene and become a much bigger part of the media landscape. We're also going to talk about this moment in media. Like this is all about attention. Right. Like people win awards for capturing attention here. So how do you capture attention in this moment in time? And we're going to hear from three different guests who are doing it in different ways. Everyone from creators to CMOs. But let's first start by talking about this moment in attention. We've called it the age of abundance. Yes. So just to give some stats. I give these all the time. But just to give some stats of why do we call this the age of abundance. Every single day there are 95 million photos and videos uploaded to Instagram. There are 34 million TikToks uploaded and 23 million YouTube videos uploaded every single day. It's incredible amount of content. And we've moved from what was originally called social media the way that we would just connect with each other and connect with our friends to interest media, which means of all that content that's uploaded to these platforms. We're looking for pockets that were interested in and going down rabbit holes if things were interested in. And that means that the internet is moving from this like, hey, let me make something for you. And everybody watches it, which is again, what advertising has always been about to now, let me find my own pocket of the internet. Yeah. It's a hyper personalized environment that we're entering into everyone here on the crusade who's walking by. If you open up their phone, they have a completely different feed. Yeah, media is more fragmented today than it has ever been. And that poses a lot of challenges for the advertising industry, but also a lot of opportunity. So here at can lines one thing that happens is people win awards for ads. We wanted to start this episode off by just talking about anything the best ad you've seen is in 2026. I would say when McDonald's leaned into their CEO Chris K calling their big arch burger a product. He said, I'm going to take a bite of our new product and they posted a cross platform saying try our new product and they just leaned in because he was going viral and it could have gone bad. But they leaned in and they've actually done that a lot this year. I think like this form of reactionary advertising being ready to move quickly on social platforms and something happens is in my opinion, one of the most important forms of advertising today, like if media is fragmented, the conversation is constantly changing. You need to be there to take part of the conversation. And they did it with back rooms, they made McDonald's own version of back rooms posted it on YouTube. They also after the Super Bowl had a horizontal ad in Times Square that you had to read like this, implying that like it's the day after the Super Bowl, you're probably tired, you're hungover, you're still in bed, you're going to have to read something on your side. Yeah, I think speed plays a huge factor in marketing today. For me, the best out of the year is the New York Knicks ad from Nike. So also reactionary reaction to the moment obviously filmed beforehand, but it's it's directed by Josh, Josh, it's directed by Josh, and it's one of the most simple ads I've seen. It's New York State of mind playing with a guy just running, running down the street to get to this celebration of the next, he does a cartwheel, there's like this zoom in on a Nike shoe that's incredible. And when he arrives at the celebration, he just takes a deep breath out and looks at it. And first of all, it's a reaction to the monoculture moments sports have provided us this opportunity in a fragmented internet to actually all have one conversation. It's a really interesting summer because you have the New York Knicks winning the championship, which I've never seen a city come together like that. Maybe we have, but not in recent memory. And the streets watching rolling right into the world's cup. And I think leaning into that emotion, the simplicity of that emotion of sports, I think that was one of the best ads of see. I think it's because they had to like you're saying find that monocultural moment like monocultural moments have become more important than ever, because they just don't happen as often. And the most expensive ad of all time, I was looking into it, do you know who made it? What's the most expensive out of all time? Okay. Chanel in 2004 made a three minute fashion film called the film. It was starring Nicole Kidman, it had an entire orchestra doing the soundtrack and it cost 33 million. In 2004, which at this time is around $58 million. That's how much inflation is. I know I had to double check that I was like, are we sure about this? Okay, so this is at cost $33 million. Yeah, 33 million dollars. And there's a couple things to look into here like they could make that bet. One because I think at that time, spending that much showed luxury. You look at luxury brands now and they're actually much more relatable. High production value is not necessarily always as important. You look at like a Balenciaga. So that's part of it. But also when you spend $33 million on one hero asset, it implies that you have a captive audience that's only watching TV or only in movie theaters. Like you could not do that today because audiences are all over right. And that's why monocultural moments are so important because it's the one time when we do finally have people. I don't even think you need to do it. Like how do you spend $33 million on an app? I think Nicole Kidman and orchestra film throughout New York. Nicole Kidman and an orchestra. But I think that's like a source of pride to spend that much. The story is how much they spend. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. I wouldn't advise spending that much. I don't think I've ever seen that today. It's so much more about like I mean back then, of course, the idea always matter. But I think now more than ever speed and idea and story are what trump any sort of level of production value. I think back to the best ads I've seen this year, one of the most interesting ones just to tack on honorable mention of best out of the year is convene convene is a co working space in New York. And during the New York City parade. Basically people are climbing up on top and and and messed up their logo the end of their logo gets taken off. And immediately they change their social avatar to having the end hanging off. And it's just what what has happened is that marketing has gone from even what you're talking about with the most expensive out of all time saying we're going to spend $33 million. We're going to show you this ad to we're going to be a part of the conversation that's happening. So something funny happens and people film that like New York City's crazy and our logo gets messed up. We're going to react to that and mess up our logo on social. And then we're going to talk about the fact that all of your best ads center around the New York Knicks winning the world championship. Well, I think it's actually because it's one of the only moments that we've all experienced like if you walk around. The amount of people that are like you see the next. So like you still bring it up. It's because it's in a world of hyper fragmentation. It was one of the few things that can bind us together. It's overall like. as media is fragmented and people are looking for monocultural moments and moments that feel authentically human. Sports is becoming increasingly more important. Even here at CAN, there's an entire CAN Lion Sports track. There's a Women's Sports Summit. It's even the same way that creators are increasing their presence. That CAN Sports is also something that's continuing to rise. Yeah. It's one of the last things that exists that we can all watch at the same time. It's appointment viewing. We can all agree on it. We can have debates about it and we all just understand that we all watch it. So that's been a very big story here at CAN. All right. Well, we are going to hear from a creator. One of our favorite creators we've had him on the show before. He's a creator. He's a performance artist. And one of the most interesting things about him is that he has recently launched his own creative agency where not only now is he making his own videos. He's supporting brands with their campaigns as well. So let's bring on the show. Antho. Long time no see. Welcome back. Welcome back to the show. It takes for having me. It's been over a year since we've shattered. Yeah. Right. Over years since we've shattered on mics. On mics. On mics. But we have no relationship other than our work one. Let's do it. Yeah. All right. Your first can it is. What are you doing here at CAN? You know, I would consider what I've done the past 11 years to be silly content creation. But now people are considering it marketing. Which I it definitely is. And this is the place for all things art and marketing and entertainment. I honestly up until probably a year ago didn't even know this existed. So really. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting. I think you you occupy this interesting space because if people don't know who you are, typically if I bring you up, someone's like, I don't know who Antho is. I always say, have you seen the Timothy Schell may look like contest? And most people are like, yeah, of course. That was Antho. Bring up maybe one or two other things. You on Instagram, have you seen this character John Chungus? Yes. And you have like you operate in a very different way than other creators because you have projects projects that go out that people can engage with. And those projects have captured an incredible amount of attention. One thing that we bring up a lot in the context of marketing is a campaign you did with Crocs called Kid with Crocs. We talked about it on our show. But you built a character. You built a character. It's kind of like a superhero. Explain it a bit for people who don't know it. Yes. So after the show, my local like competition, a bajillion brands came to me and they're like, well, you know, can you do something for us? And I crocs has been like a dream partner to work with. And they're like full creative freedom. What would you do? And you know, they're, you know, recommending maybe an event or whatever. And I emotionally was like, I think this would be a good idea. I pitched a bunch. And so I made this character. I animated this character who's a little crocodile. And I wore a mask and I put Crocs throughout statues. I put, I made Crocs using blender and then put them on the feet of statues throughout New York City. Did it with a small team, a bunch of interns. And over the course of 40 days, the project was live. We did eight statues. We made these kooky little videos alongside them. And we had gained nearly a million followers across TikTok and Instagram. And then at the end, I revealed it was me. And yeah. And then after that, all the brands came running. What is it that you understand about human attention and psychology that allows you to gather people like this? Right. It's definitely too prong. So there definitely is an element of psychology. Like what me and my team study a lot now is like the psychology and marketing. But the non-negotiable amongst it all is just being a consumer and a lover of the arts. Right. Like it's impossible to do what I do from an outgroup. Right. Like I love social media. I love content. I love movies. I love the way I, like I love the way we communicate about those things. And so it's really easy for me to just remove myself from, you know, my current state of being and ask myself a question of like what I share this. All art is, is taste and execution. Right. So if you're in the in group and you have taste and you're then able to execute upon it, like I'm also fortunate enough to have went to a film school. That's all it is. I mean, and there's going to be lots of failures. But generally, I just tell, you know, my squad and also, you know, those I help. It's like just as many darts as you can. Eventually one of them's going to hit a bull's eye. And then once you hit one bull's eye, the next one's easier and the next one's easier. Eventually just can't stop hitting bull's eyes, you know. Yeah. But, but you can make a great movie or a great short film and put it in the wrong place and no one watches it. Right. Even if it you are part of the in crowd and you understand what people may like, you still may miss. Right. Like there's something that you're doing that I think is a bit. It's another step of kind of like sparking an idea less like the movie and the story. You have like something about all of your ideas. Lend itself to like movements, you know, right. Well, that's interesting. The idea that like if you make something that you like, but people don't watch it, then it's a question of like, is it the right distribution channel? And then it's, you know, it is just a marketing spend to an extent. Right. Like if you're talking about a movie, for example, there's a million variables that go into the success of a movie like back rooms, for example, right. Like I think, you know, his career as a YouTuber, right. Having that like digitally native audience who are essentially marketing for you. I think being a savant, making something that's super shareable. I there's a million variables that go into the into the success of something. I mean, I start with just like what I watch this and find this period. Right. I'm not going to like make a short film if I don't think I can like organically find it. Not the type of thing I would share, but I do believe that at the key of, you know, what I do and now what the team does is like, how do we just get people to care about stuff? Yeah. Preferably good stuff. There was something you said on the show where you said, I just do it for the love of the game. Which I think gets to what you've said initially of like, I just love social media. I love video. I love filmmaking. And that to me is so true, especially within the confines of advertising, it can be easy to make something that people know is not for the love of the game. It's for the sale of a product. And I think you have found a way to start with like the idea and the mission like with kid with Crocs. The superhero is what matters. The Crocs come along for the ride. Right. I think like that to me is what you are so good at. Thank you very much. Thank you. And yeah, I think and I'm sure we'll get to this at some point. But I think there's there's two types of marketing, right? There's like marketing where you're really trying to entertain and show up. And then there's also like if you just have a good product, it's not like you need some crazy kid with Crocs-esque story. Like sometimes a B2B company or a company who's just trying to move XYZ, CPG product is like how do we do some big stun? I'm like, you make a good product like paid ad spend might be for you. But you know, if you do want to show up in culture in a big way and have your brand permeate, then maybe the answer is some big stun or a character, whatever. So let's talk about characters because for all of us who exist on Instagram, this older man named John Chungus comes across our feeds. That was revealed to be your project. Talk to us about like what was John Chungus? How did you come up with that and why did it work? Yeah, so John Chungus was an old man. He looks very young. How do I say this in a not-offensive way? John Chungus is a charismatic former opera singer and he was my neighbor. I met him in an acting class and I used him for a Netflix brand deal to promote Squid Game and then that did super well. It was like I hung up posters as him saying he's looking for a partner to go to the Squid Game experience with and then these two like 19-year-old girls ended up going with him and it was this fun kooky video and it did really good and then I was interested in doing a a slyop to get people off their phones. It's like what would that look like and John came to mind so I just launched his page made funny videos and I want to make sure it doesn't come across like I am John. Like John is a person and my responsibility is to show the world. Like how can I syndicate who he is and what he stands for to an audience of people that are going to understand it and so a lot of the projects that I'm doing now are like you know whether a politician or another actor or other creators is like you have something to show the world like how do we get the world to see it and so on September 27th John Chungus got tagged 115,000 times of people going outside and touching grass and actually in a weird way on the show when I taught you what the word Chungus was maybe that in a weird way led to me picking the name for John. I forgot that's what happened. You say John Chungus is a real person it's a name it's a character. His name is John. His name is John. His name is John. Last name is John. I was like that's a funnier last name and the mission to go outside and touch grass I imagine that was like a collaborative idea. Yes you right. You well it's also like John do you believe people should go outside like I'm not going to like he's like actually both screens like I think we should be on screen but I bring it up to say like you said like politicians and actors it's really not that like you are creating your own character like you're hiring an actor yes to become a story on Instagram which is something I had never really seen before yes and it is becoming a thing now you know we've got a couple more undercover projects that we're working on that are going really good but I do think just like every other arts and culture movement there comes a time where it becomes oversaturated and then people move on right like I felt that way about events right like now there's a bajillion local like competitions wherever and if you enjoy that stuff it's great I think you should but I the heart of what I try to do is you know constantly reinvent myself and put things out there that I want to see so I do think I've got another a couple more months of undercover projects and then probably on to the next. - What are the rules right now of marketing on Instagram? - Or just marketing to young people in general. I think everyone here wants to solve that. Like what are the rules of marketing to young people? - Okay, let me pull up my list. I wrote three. He sent me the questions ahead of time. (laughing) Okay, I wanna make sure I nail these 'cause I did think about this for a long time. Okay. I've got three rules of marketing right now in 2026. And I guess the prerequisite is these rules change all the time, right? Obviously, as culture changes and as the platform change, everything changes. Number one, don't be an outsider, right? And if you are an outsider, find somebody who isn't. Like it's so difficult in the age of the algorithm where every tiny touchpoint matters that you nail every touchpoint, right? Like we talked about this on the podcast before, but like everything matters from the font to the pacing, to the music, to whether you look down the camera, to whether you shoot on cinecams, to the knife, every little piece matters. And it's an emotional art, right? It's, so if you're in the in-group, whether you're making a shampoo or you're selling a shoe or you're just trying to entertain people, like how are you possibly gonna speak to a demographic that you don't know anything about? And it's not impossible, obviously, but find somebody who can advise you on it. Provide value. I think a lot of brands are looking to stunts right now and stunts are great to the extent that you're like showing up consistently and doing them. But the brands I've seen have a lot of success are showing up consistently. You know, if you're having a big win, like the Nike ad, for example, I heard you talk about that earlier, which is awesome. They do that, a good amount, like they have wins pretty often. So if you do something big and splashy, preferably it comes six months after something is as big and splashy. A lot of brands come to us right now, they're like, do a big stunt. Like, have we just make consistent social media content? Safe bet. That's what I'm consuming right now. I think that's my recommendation, I guess. And then lastly, showing up consistently, kind of, parks on both of those points. A brand is consistent value over time. I truly firmly believe that. All of the big creators with tons and tons of trust, it's not like this is some crazy hack. It's like we've just shown up week by week, month by month, and have entertained people. Brands can do that too, you know, whether you're providing educational content or making people laugh. Yeah. Are those good I pass? No, that's good. Yeah, what in your perspective, what's the best marketing or best ad that you've seen in 2026? Well, I mean, it is the Nike ad, it's so good. It's so good. The timing was incredible. I mean, rolling right after was so good. I think it doesn't say, it doesn't need to say a lot. The tagline was fantastic. Every, the best type of advertising is the type of advertising that the marketers and the public loves. Because sometimes there's like the things that the public love, but, you know, the corporate marketing side don't really like it, and then it doesn't get made as much. So I mean, it's incredible. It's traditionally like when a team wins a championship, you expect the major brand to launch the ad with the marquee athlete. Like you expect the first thing that they dropped to be a Jalen Bronson ad. And what I loved about that Nike ad was that it focused on all of us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I calling myself a nix fan, I just, but I felt like it in that moment. Like I get to live through that character who's experiencing this moment in New York, not necessarily the athlete that I can't relate to. Do you know what Larking is? Am I guilty of it? Yeah, do you know what Larking is? I was just saying, am I guilty of it? Means you don't know what Larking is. Yeah, this is another chunk of it. Yeah, I might as well teach you something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Larking is a thing that all the kids are saying. It's live action role playing when you're like a fake nix fan. I'm just making sure you know. He's Larking is a good idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other thing, the last thing I'll say on the nix ad, to your point, like the main actor, he was like commenting all around TikTok, being like this was such an incredible experience. Like that is such a beautiful story that like I'm now telling you, yeah, I love, I love like everyone's talking about that ad. I have so many beautiful touch points. Yeah, yeah, incredible. Okay, last thing I'm gonna ask you is about your tattoo. I was a Adobe one. So like people are doing brand deals are so common for every creator, right? Like a, and not only for every creator, everyone is becoming a creator. So there's brand deals everywhere. That brand deal stood out. Just tell me the story of the fact that you have a permanent tattoo on your body because I'm an Adobe family. My parents hate it. I love it. Shout out. Basically they came to me and they're like, hey, we don't need a whole campaign. We just want to do a brand deal with you. Like what does that look like? I could have gone the easier out and just done an ad read. But I personally, if I saw a random brand deal from myself, I wouldn't watch it. So I pitched them. I will have 100 people make different designs in Photoshop for mobile. And then I'm going to put all those designs on shirts and get a bunch of people in a circle and then give all of them a carrot and then put a bunny in the center. And then whichever shirt the bunny picks, I'll get that tattooed. By the way, there was one design. I was like, I do not want that design. And it was the watch. No way. I was like, I'm going to get it on like my leg. But this was the only one that made no sense to get like on my upper thigh. Because yeah, it was either wrist or ankle. And all I was like, I have to do it on my wrist. And everyone's like, no, don't do it on your wrist. Seriously, don't do it on your wrist. So I did it on my ankle. And yeah, it performed super, super well. I thought I was going to get maybe a million views sitting at like five, which is great. It was super, super fun. And again, it's something that like, I think most brand deals that creators do, they're not-- I mean, you might be proud of working with the brand. But oftentimes the brand deal isn't something you gosh about. But it was so fun. And I mean, even the people that came to the event talked to me about it. I still get DMs or I ran into somebody on the street the other day. And they're like, yo, yo, I was at the bunny thing. And I was like, oh, it's awesome. At the end of it, I think what we're all trying to do is make something memorable. Just make something that people remember. Yeah. So we're fighting for the attention economy. Yeah. Oh, and here's-- Wait, so I'll just-- Yeah, let's see it. There it is. That's a brand deal. Come on. That's a brand deal. That's a brand deal. So you're here not only as a creator, but you're also here as the founder of your own agency, Puffer Fish. Last bit here on just creators entering the world of marketing, not just in the context of brand deals, but now as partners to brands. What's your perspective on that? Yeah. I would much rather use my skillset as a creator to do work for companies than to populate my feed with a million ads. I think creators are great creatives, believe it or not. And I think that the working relationship between creator and brand is being redefined as we speak. I mean, I love working with brands, especially brands I believe in. And so if I can provide that value through consulting, through running a campaign, through introducing other creator friends, that's the other valuable thing I found in having this company is brands come with us to a budget. And I get to be-- I'm tapped in. And I have tons of creative friends. Well, I'm confident it'll do a great job for your brand. And it's super, super, super valuable to see what it's like to scale a company. It's very different than just sitting in my room, typing on my computer. Did that pass? That was good. Yeah, you passed. That's quite good. Well, congratulations, Anthony, for passing. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the daily business. Appreciate it, dude. Well, you're a can. You're the best. We'll see you on the Chris set. Yeah, we'll see you out there. See you, dude. Thank you. All right, next we're going to hear from a brand that in my opinion is sticking out quite a bit in this era of abundance. One that is becoming very recognizable and very known for doing very memorable marketing. So we want to invite Kendall Hope Tucker. She's the director of creative experimentation at Ramp. Kendall, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for being here. Welcome to the daily brief, Kendall. Thank you. Kendall, I think you are the first director of creative experimentation I've ever met. I did not know they made up the title for me. So it's a great title. I would hope so. Yeah, if you explain the title, tell us a little bit about first, like for anyone who doesn't know Ramp, what is Ramp, and what is your role? Yeah. So Ramp is a FinTech company. We started in the corporate card space, grew extremely fast. We're the fastest growing FinTech ever. We now serve 50,000 businesses. And we've scaled far beyond corporate cards. So we're AI finance enablement. We sell only to businesses. So we have 50,000 businesses using Ramp. We're now worth $44 billion. And I was actually a two-time founder. So I sold two companies in my 20s. I was living in Miami, living my best life. And I met our co-founder in CTO Currie. And he said, you've worked with influencers. You love the internet. Why don't you join our marketing team? And I said, absolutely not. I'm not a marketer. I also don't like beat-a-beat. And he said, look, we have built a product that everyone loves. But fewer than 2% of Americans know what Ramp is. So we need someone to come in and do whatever they want to drive shareholder value. And every single person I met at Ramp was smarter and cooler and more interesting than anyone else I had met. And so I said, cool, bring me in. I don't know what my title is going to be. I don't want to be a marketer. and they made up creative experimentation as my team. It actually gives me a ton of flexibility and control because when someone says, "Hey, can you work on a product launch?" Or, "Hey, can you post some Facebook ads?" I say, "No, sorry, that's not in the job description." - Great. - And they're like, "What is your job description?" And I go, "I don't know, anything that drives your older value, but it's not that." - Wow. - And so we started in influencer and video. We were very instrumental in our first Super Bowl ad with Sequan Barkley and figuring out how to make that go viral on the internet. And then last fall, we did ramps first stunt, which was working with Brian Baumgartner, who's Kevin from the office. - Yeah. - And we locked him in a glass box in Flatiron Plaza in New York City. We live streamed for eight hours. We got 215 million views. And ever since then, our founders have said, "Yeah, do stunts do whatever you want." - So can you explain that one? Why did you put Kevin from the office in a glass box? - That's a great question. We knew we were gonna hit a billion dollars of revenue last summer. And we wanted to do something more interesting than a press release that says, "Hey, we hit a billion dollars of revenue." And so this came directly from our CEO and CTO. They said, "Let's figure out something interesting." I said, "Okay, would you mind if I invite a dear friend "of mine from Mr. Beast, Rohan, "who's also a dear friend of yours?" I said, "Let's invite him to the office for a week. "We will come up with ideas that could get noise "about ramp on the internet. "We will pitch you every day for a week." And then at the end, up or down vote from the executives of the budget we need. So we came up with this idea of how do we actually show the pain point ramp is solving? 'Cause it's kind of boring, right? Like, finance professionals, they spend 20 to 40 hours a month closing their books. So they're getting your receipts, your shoebox receipts, and they're going through it and saying, "I don't know that Samir buying Moette in cans "was a business expense, so I'm gonna need you to pay that back." - I tell him that often. - I mean, he doesn't miss it. - Too much Moette. - I know. - Yeah, frankly. - I shared it. So we said, "How do we make that really visceral?" We said, "Okay, what if someone actually competes with ramp "to reconcile expenses and do a month and close?" And so we said, "Okay, what if we live stream it?" And everyone was like, "Wow, that sounds so boring." - Right. - And we were like, "Okay, well then, who could make this "interesting and fun? "Who is a famous accountant?" And we struggled. And so I had a list of something like 40 celebrities. I reached out to their managers, and I remember going to our CEO and I was like, "It's gotta be Kevin from the office." He was the accountant. He played this kind of potentially stupid character lazy. And when I first met Brian, he's so cool. He's so funny, obviously. And so we all decided it needed to be Brian. Brian was like, "I don't get what you're talking about, "but I'm in." And so for that eight hour livestream, we had Brian in there. We brought in celebrities and influencers every 15 minutes. And it ended up being a show. Like people loved it. And on the screen behind him, you could see that he ended up doing something like 100 receipts. We're ramped in 600,000 in the same amount of time. So it showed our value prop. He's a famous accountant, but it all came together in terms of art and entertainment. - And it made so much noise. - 215 million views. - You couldn't be on the internet that day and you could not. - That week, thank you. - That week. - It got something like five times more views than our Super Bowl ad had that year. And it just goes to show if you can own a day, if you can own a moment, that could be more valuable than being one in a crowd. - Why did you know that was gonna stick out? - I did not. - Okay, you didn't. - I got it. - I appreciate it. It did far and beyond better than we could have expected. - I got it. - We felt really confident. We could put on a show and we brought in the best artists to do the live stream and be thoughtful about the programming. But no, I mean, I was doing a creative experiment. I was taking a swing. We got everyone to believe and to lean in. But it ended up coming down to our team and our contractors who just kept yes and in each other. So what if we bring in this other celebrity? What if we send out gifts to people? What if we let certain people go into the box? And I think it just, I mean, we got lucky to some extent for sure. But I also think we were having a great time and the audience couldn't tell. - I think though experimentation is increasing your surface area of luck, right? Like the only way you are getting there is if you are experimenting and it's risky. That's a challenge. So I would also ask you right now, like there's a lot of people trying to solve how to make interesting stuff. How do you have the stomach or the appetite for risk as a company? Because that could have also just been a lot of money and been a dud. - Absolutely. And there's two parts of it. One, it comes down to your founding team. If you are trying to convince your boss to do something and it's just this fight, you're probably not at the right company. They need to trust that you are going to do what's best for the company and you understand your lane better than they do and we're so lucky to have that support. And then the other side of it is you can't do creative by committee. And so I have this amazing team and then I work with these amazing influencers and artists. I don't say, hey, let's all sit down and vote on this or let's get some group together of customers and tell us if this is good. I say, okay, if you're, I have a producer here who ran our funeral for the penny. - Yes, explain that. - Yeah. - We did a funeral for the penny when the penny got discontinued in the fall of last year. We said, wow, this lines up so well with what ramp represents, right? We help companies save time and money. And the penny was costing four cents to produce. So it made sense to the US government and said, hey, we see cost savings here. We're gonna get rid of it. And so we hosted in three weeks, we got this idea. We ended up having 2,000 people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. We had, I think, eight Abraham Lincoln impersonators. We had Mary Todd Lincoln at one point John Wilkes Booth crashed and we just, we ended up getting 35 million views on essentially no budget for that. But in terms of the creative process, I looked at our producer Amber and I said, do you feel really confident about this? Like, are you passionate about the idea? Can you just get this done? And she said, I have it. She'd also been on the team for two weeks. And I said, great, then we'll support you 100% and we'll get you the production support you need. But that always ends up better than a huge group of people like Nickel and Dyming. - Yeah. - Fun intended. - Yeah, good. - An idea until it becomes mediocre. - I absolutely love what you just said that you can't do creative by committing. - No. - Yeah. We had this opportunity to host something with JJ Abrams from Gregory. So it's something very similar. He said, every good film is a singular artistic voice. - I agree. - And I think that's every good project. And one of the challenges here at Cannes is that the old model is this group. And let's get feedback and let's test it. And let's, and the reality is like, we obviously had an Anthempo on the show. He's a singular artistic voice. That has a perspective. And that's like him in a room with other people trying to come to consensus is not great. Him just going, I think this is great. And you're going cool. - You say as a brand, when you're working with people like Anthony, you say, here are parameters. So for ramp, we never punch down. We always stay elevated. And we want accountants to look cool because they're super smart. And we say those are our parameters. Now go run. - That's really good. - And then the artist, they come up with things and not in a million years could I think of. And that's how we get lucky. - So I want to talk about looking cool because that is a pretty hard thing to do. - Absolutely, as a brand. - As a brand, as anyone, it's hard to do. - You do a great. - Thank you. Probably most, like I'd come across ramp quite a bit. It's a very striking brand. The vault is very striking. It's like a very good looking brand. - And it's not a huge spec. - It reminds me of liquid death. - I feel like liquid death came on in the scene. - It was so much. - I'm drinking water, but it looks like an energy drain. - Thank you. - Like, gives me that sort of. - But I bring this up because the most amount of exposure to ramp that I've come across is TPPN. I'm friends with the boys, John and Jordy. But when their show started coming out, we host a talk show. And historically, we do integrations on the talk to host red ads. But I had never seen a show like that where a brand logo is embedded into the design of the show. - And then they struggled when the brand logo was not embedded. - I know. Advertising is back on TPPN. - It's madmen. - It's amazing that advertising makes the show better. I mean, that is how it should be, if you're a creator. Like, it should elevate the experience for your audience, but that it's hard to do. But I wanna talk about the decision to invest in a show like TPPN when it was unproven. Just tell me the story of ramp and TPPN. - Yeah. - And Jordy are good friends with our co-founders. They have been advising the company. I mean, they are marketing geniuses. Maybe not even marketing geniuses, right? They understand the zeitgeist, particularly amongst the wealthy and well-educated crowd. And so they were advising the company when I started. They came to us and they said, hey, we're gonna put out this show. it was not a daily live stream and had a different name. And our founder said, yes, anything you do we believe in you. So we'll give you money and go run with it. And at first, the first few months I was at Ram, they were trying their best. They were super cool. And it wasn't quite hitting. And then they started doing this live stream. And obviously, you know the story. It went mega viral and it made us look so smart to have been there. I think what people don't realize is our integration with them was not just the logo on the screen. Like any of our big partnerships, we expected them to get on calls every two weeks and give us ideas of other things we should do. They would come to events and they would help sell Ram. If someone came through our sales funnel and said, hey, I heard about you guys on TVPN, assuming it was a big enough customer, we had John and Jordi reaching out and saying, hey, we know you're interested in Ram. Here's why I think it's such a good idea. That's interesting. And that is a full spectrum integration. In the same sense, we've done it with Brian. We've done it with SakeOne. Because Ram is a phenomenal product. You never have to worry that you're selling like you're tricking anyone. Right, right. And so John and Jordi were absolutely part of our team. We were proud to have our logo front and center. And kind of like we said, right, there was singular artistic force. We never impacted what was on their show. And it turned out extremely well for us. What's been the impact of that partnership for you guys? Yeah, on a sales metrics, I obviously can't share. But I promise that it has been good. And then in terms of brand aura, we have grown from about 1% name recognition when I joined a year and a half ago to somewhere between 8% and 10%. Now, it obviously varies based on our superlabs, et cetera. And it's not that TBPN is massive in terms of numbers. But the people who listen very similar to founders and colossus and invests like the best of our other partners, the people who listen are very impressive working people. So they're finance professionals, they're founders. And just lining ourselves up there, it makes us look smart. I hope it makes them look smart. And it's overall been a very positive partnership. Cool. How do you look at creators that you want to work with outside of TBPN? Like what matters to you? That's a great question. So this is something that we are continuing to experiment and explore in. We've had tremendous success with comedy creators, corporate comedy creators. But one of our longest standing partnerships is with Colin from Amalphi Jets. He runs a jet company. He is also very funny. But we met him a year ago. And we started sponsoring his videos. We were his first sponsorship, which is where we like to be, ideally. We want to be the first money in. So people are still rooting for that creator and saying, wow, get that bag. So we find them early. And then we try to sign very long partnerships once it's validated. But we're still testing. We just did a video with Sammy Cohen, if you're familiar. She does explain our videos. And so how do we teach a bit more about all of France AI functionality? And I actually have someone amazing joining in two weeks to lead the influencer program. And I imagine we are going to scale it substantially from where it is now. But obviously we're never going to partner with anyone that introduces brand risk. We are a Fintech company. We are very, very careful with people's money. And so as long as we can align with funny or elevated or smart people who haven't done anything potentially unsavory, we are happy to test it. Last question. What makes a good Super Bowl ad? We're sitting with someone who's made a Super Bowl ad. Two Super Bowl ads. Two Super Bowl ads. But then you have to ask me what the best out of this week is. That will be very different answer. What makes a great Super Bowl ad? This is really hard. Because it is the Super Bowl of advertising. At the same time as Super Bowl for football, it is very hard to stand out. And I actually think what matters more than your ad is the surround sound and your ability to grab attention before the game. Because once the game happens, it's chaos. So for our first Super Bowl ad, we did "Sake One." It was 15 seconds, very simple ad. And people were thrilled because it was our first ad. We only had about a week to work on it. If you've heard that story. "Sake One" was investing. And so just very randomly, someone on our team said, "Would you be willing to do an ad because you're in the game?" And he said, "Yes, but we only had an hour to film with him." And so we got lucky that he was in the game. We pulled the whole thing together fast. With Brian, our second Super Bowl ad, we came off the success of the box-stunt. He's not a huge celebrity. He's a really cool celebrity. But we had agencies telling us that he wasn't big enough. We had to work with-- For sure. --an A-lister, which I think is a rude concept. And we said, "No, he's so aligned with our brand." So what can we do not just make a good ad, but to put out content for two weeks before, priming people so that they're excited to see the ad in the game? So if you watch our content, we have-- The whole idea was around multiplying Brian, so multiplying the impact of your finance team. And so the first video we put out was Brian getting off of a private jet with nine other guys that looked just like him. It's the sexiest video you've ever seen. And they're walking away from the private jet with their ramp briefcases, being like something is coming. And then we had all these amazing videos coming up to the game. And the day of the game, we hosted an event where everyone dressed up like Brian. We sent bald caps to people. And then we actually brought 10 Brian's, so lookalikes as well as Brian, to the game. We sat about four rows back. And people went mental. So the UGC, like the earned media we got, was actually bigger than our ad itself. Although the ad itself is wonderful. And we were the number four most talked about brand that day, behind something like Visa, and just these huge beta sea brands. I love that. Yeah. All right. Yeah, go ahead. What's your favorite ad? Thank you. Thank you so much for asking. Oh, I thought it was of the week. Nevertheless, the mix are great. And you talked about that with Anthony. I'm not a sports person. I watch reality TV, which is also sit down, watch with your friends television. It is sports for women. And so if you followed summer house at all, Kyle Cook and Amanda Patula are getting divorced. Amanda has started sleeping with or dating Kyle's best friend West. Okay. It's a massive scandal. Okay. You're not familiar. You need to look it up. So Kyle has a drink brand called lover boy. HubSpot didn't add with him about a week ago, where they said we're for small business. And he was just talking about this scandal. It was so impactful. Every woman I know was sending it around. Lover boy was not doing well. I imagine it's doing great now. And HubSpot looked like they understood the moment in a way that many brands miss on women. Outside of the beauty and fashion space. And so I got a bunch of people sending it to me. I think we should work with Kyle. And I said, HubSpot got there first. Yeah. But he's talking about the scandal. He's making references to it. Okay. So when you need a rebrand or when you need to move on from a bad situation, trust HubSpot, it is phenomenal. That's great. Okay. I'm getting signals that we need to wrap the show. Okay. So Kendall, thank you so much for coming on. That was really helpful. That was really great. I have this written down. That's my favorite quote of the show. You can't do creative by. I'll tell Anthony. I was better than that. Yeah. Thank you so much. All right. Kendall, thanks for coming on. I appreciate you. All right. Today, today, we're going to be joined by theMO and EVP of global marketing at Adobe Lara Belage. Everybody, welcome. Hi. Hi. Sup, Lara. How you doing? How are you? It's so good to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you. How many cans have you been at? Oh gosh. A lot. A lot. Like more than 10? Yes. Wow. Yes. Give us a bit of your background, even free Adobe. Yeah. I have been able to work at a lot of great brands from Gap to Visa, to Nike, to Amazon, into it, and now Adobe. So across those brands and across the past decade in marketing, what do you feel like makes this moment different? What do you feel like in 2026 is different about marketing? Yeah. And you're going to hear a Gentick AI 100 times or more here, but with this change, and we've been through so many changes, if you think about going from the era going to.com, you know, to mobile, from, you know, ultimately on premise to the cloud, we've been through so many, but this one truly is so profound. And I think what's so unique about it is with the repetitive tasks being now automated, whether it's you're working across building content from ideation to putting it into the content universe to being a creator and all those tasks that you automated or that you had to do manually are now automated. So those repetitive tasks go away. And that is so freeing on so many levels. And that's really the seismic profound change that we're experiencing today. What are some of the challenges you face? as a marketer now, and that you think marketers at scale face that maybe they didn't face pre-AI. - Yeah, look, LLMs, I think none of us thought, wow, you would start search somewhere beyond Google. You know, and the LLMs are so powerful and helpful to humans. The idea though that if you're a brand, you're a B. I'm marketing to such a broad range of customers, as I mentioned, to just one day have your search volume fall off, which is such an important engine for discovery. The entire act of discovery has changed. And so for example, we have brand visibility, which unifies Sumrush, we just bought this company that helps with LLMs search in our own tools, which we create, we're Adobe, we dog food, our product all the time. My teams help build it, but all of a sudden, your search volume goes down, well, this brand visibility, it allows you to be able to see, hey, where are these LLMs grabbing my content, right? And that changed dramatically. And so how do you show up? How do you optimize your own website, in our case, Adobe.com, that is a seismic change. And so if you're a brand today, you have to be thinking through, how am I discovered in a whole new world? This just one example. - Are there any tips you can give on that line? Like are there any learnings of, okay, you do need to orient your brand this way? - Yeah. - Maybe you need to be more how to focus in a lot of your content that you put out. - Yeah, I mean, you have to think about trust, authenticity, where you wanna show up is you could be found, but are you being found for the right thing? So for example, Reddit tends to be a source. You guys probably know this. You know, you're out there doing your stuff and your great partners of ours, we appreciate it. But are they finding great things about you or not? And so what you wanna be doing, we can help you understand where you're showing up whether it's Wikipedia or Reddit linked in, the list is long, but when you show up, you better show off like people giving you compliments and that trust is what matters. And so one thing I always recommend is, have you engineered your site? First of all, do you have the right information that is ingestable to your customer that makes sense to them? But then additionally, is it searchable from the LLM? And so that's where now you have an agentic layer and agents are talking to agents. So are you machine readable? And so that's a whole other. - So a whole other consideration. - Yeah. - There are now so many different groups of creators and different types of people here at CAN, everyone from creators like Anthony to CMOS and major brands and platforms. And everyone I think has a different version of like what success would look like by the end of the week? - Yes. - I'm curious for you, like what does success look like on Friday? - Yeah. - For you as a marketer from Adobe. - Yeah, yeah. And again, we have just such a broad range of customers. For me, it's the empathy. Talking about humans, having more customer empathy, having a sat with so many customers, learning what's going on in this new, new, profound world, I will feel like that's, you know, in itself such a takeaway, 'cause you really want to fall in love with your customer problems, not the solutions you want to understand what the pain points are. But, you know, we do have a new activation. We have a creator beach that we're doing for the first time this year with young lions. And in that, we're bringing creators in to play with our Firefly tool, which is an all in one, you know, AI Studio from idea to implementation. And you can just create what's in your mind's eye. And, you know, I'm excited to see how does that go. What do they find that is especially compelling about it? And they see that AI is actually augmenting what they do versus taking away. So that's one piece of it. You know, I think there's so much to love about knowing that you have the stage to connect with people like you. And know that you can, you know, we have so many great announcements from its, whether it's our coworker or tool that's an agentic layer over our tools. So again, if I'm a marketer, I get away from the execution and I can surface up the strategy work, which is why I got into the craft. So just sharing that is really the exciting thing about it. - Nice. - Yeah. - Cool. - Yeah. - Last question for you. A creator is watching and they want to do a deal with Adobe. What's your advice to how creators can position themselves to actually get deals with people like yours? - Yeah, know your audience. So, you know, we do have great partnerships with creators, you know, and I've learned so much from both of you too, by the way, having spent time with you is, you know, know what your niche is and your customer following and what your followership is. Because, you know, when you have such a broad range of customers like we do, and we want to get very laser focus on the cultural passion points that our customers have so we can deeply connect with them in an authentic way. If I know, man, you guys are all over this space. It is something that people tune in to see what you have to say. That matters to me. Because I know you have a debout following and that makes it worth me saying, hey, come on board. I also want to know that you're using Adobe products. And that you love them and that you're going to give us feedback. Because we're only as good as our customers tell us we are. And we, you know, we deeply care what you have to say. - Yeah, I appreciate that. - I have one last question for you. Do you have a favorite ad of the year? - Oh, okay. So, this question is always asked. And to me, advertising feels like an older term, but because of it, like you think about user-generated content. I mean, that's sort of an advertisement, but it's not an advertising. So, some people will say, you know, and the Nike ad, but I actually think it's just the nicks and the nicks fans. - And those are the-- - And the UGC, the user-generated content. And I look a lot at sports teams and those brands. So, I think about what just, the nicks, like their fans created the best content that I've seen, you know? And that's really what I would say to that answer. Yeah, to that question. - That's a great answer. - Yeah. - Well, thank you so much. I know we're gonna get you out of here. We will see you on the crusade. - Excellent. - Thanks for going here. - I could just see you both. - Yeah. - Thanks. (upbeat music) All right, that was our first episode of The Daily Brief. Colin, what did you learn? - I learned. - You can't do creative by committee. - That's one of my favorite quotes. I also loved Anthony's perspective that you can't be an outsider. It's a really simple concept. But like, if you're gonna market shampoo, you gotta be in love with shampoo. And you have to know everything about the shampoo community. - Totally, you can't expect to reach the community if you're not a member of it. - Yeah. - Or if you don't have access to someone who truly is. - And I think the theme of this episode being this moment of like a hyper fragmented internet, if you're trying to reach one of those pockets, if you are not a part of that pocket, you gotta get someone who's on the inside to speak to that pocket. - Yep. - So, I think that's really interesting. The other thing I would say is, you know, in the world of canliance, marketing, agencies, I'm fascinated to see creators like Anthpos start their own agencies, where it's just one person's perspective. Do I think they're gonna have the scale that the large holding companies do? Probably not, but does that mean that we're moving into the era of more like creative directors than big agencies, right? When even you hear Kendall talk about some of these campaigns, they come together in a week. You don't need months of planning. It's just like one person's idea, experiment, try it. I mean, even at the top of the show, when I brought up with McDonald's, whether it was the reaction to Chris K, or back rooms, or that horizontal billboard, after Super Bowl, all of those have to be within a pretty short time frame. I think if the thesis of marketing is speed and reaction, then the teams have to get smaller. Because what slows it down is having a bunch of people who have to say yes to something. It's just like really sharp people being able to react really fast. - I think so a lot of what we're talking about is like the four U-page or social feeds being the main home. I think if that's the main home now for a lot of the ads that we are talking about, it really is about being present and authentic and honest to that community, rather than like being prestigious, right? Like the Chanel ad that costs 33 million, it's very prestigious. But you couldn't do that today and be present. - Right, yeah. - And I think experiment, and experimentation means you might miss sometimes. That I think is the new thing that you have to get comfortable with. It's like you're taking a lot of shots. You're gonna miss a lot, but you're gonna increase your surface area. - But like Kendall said, as long as you have like your guidelines, when you give those guidelines to an artist, you can let them go, let them run. - Yeah. Okay, cool. Thanks for watching episode one of The Daily Brief. If you have questions for us, takes, you can leave them right here on LinkedIn. - You weren't here with us in our pocket of the internet. - Yeah, leave a comment. - Let us know. We'll talk about it tomorrow on the next episode of The Daily Brief. And until then, we'll be here on the Creset, but we will see you back here tomorrow for episode two of The Daily Brief from The LinkedIn Lounge. See ya. (upbeat music)