The history of business-to-business advertising is, on the whole, a history of earnestness. Software companies announce features; executives stand before cameras; the word "revolutionary" appears with metronomic regularity. What the history has not much included, until now, is cringe comedy.
Air, a creative software company that has been repositioning itself around artificial intelligence tools, decided last week to announce its new "agent for creative tasks" positioning by publishing a short film on LinkedIn in which its head of content, Ariel Rubin, appears to mistake the phrase for "an Asian for creative tasks" and hires Eric Toda, a well-known marketing executive, on that basis. The room turns on Mr. Rubin. He crumbles. Mr. Toda arrives holding a kitchen sink and announces, "Let that sink in."
The film, which runs several minutes and plays like a lost episode of the BBC version of "The Office," was produced by Air's internal team with the director Mike Lavin and the creator Jaeki Cho. It is, by any measure, an unusual product launch.
Mr. Rubin, who leads Air's content operation, was unapologetic about the approach. "We are living in a deluge of agentic feature launches and they're all basically the same thing," he told The Drum. "Maximal discomfort is the highest praise I can imagine."
Mr. Toda, who has previously held marketing positions at Nike, Google and other large concerns, said he required only a brief pause before agreeing to participate in a film whose central joke involves his being selected, in his words, "like a Pokémon."
"I wasn't thinking about the risk of looking ridiculous," Mr. Toda said. "I was thinking about how rare it is to get a company willing to look ridiculous with you, on purpose, for a reason."
(One notes that Mr. Toda did not, apparently, think he was joining Airbnb, despite what the film suggests. The sink was a prop.)
Whether the approach will prove effective as a repositioning strategy remains to be seen. What can be said with certainty is that it is not, in the traditional sense, a founder standing before a camera. The sink alone would have ruled that out.
Original story published in The Drum: "The bravest thing in B2B, or the craziest? | The Drum"