Ramp's Tony Hawk Series Shows Taste Is the Moat When AI Makes Competence Free

Tony Hawk skated a mini ramp outside the New York Stock Exchange on the night of October 17, with Bam Margera behind him, to close out a three-episode comedy series Ramp built around him. Inside, invited guests traded on a recreated 2006 trading floor and watched the last episode live. The finale came eight days after Bloomberg reported that Ramp had raised about $1.85 billion at a roughly $60 billion valuation (The Next Web has it without the paywall). We covered that round for what Ramp's spend data tells a SaaS buyer before renewal.

The series is called Tony Stock: Pro Trader. Hawk plays a man in witness protection hiding out on Wall Street, and the episodes play inside a fake late-90s "Ramp XP" desktop or a "RampBerry" phone on the series' own site. The sell is one line ("Tony Hawk loves ramps. Your finance team will too.") and a box for your work email. Ramp's co-founder and co-CEO, Eric Glyman, posted the day before the finale that the team had made another commercial with Hawk and Margera and that "things are escalating." On October 21 he posted the final episode, titled "Progress is a Ramp," filmed live on the exchange floor.

This is Ramp's third big brand campaign in under two years. In February 2025 it ran a 15-second Super Bowl spot with Saquon Barkley that Glyman said was conceived, shot and finished in seven days. In October 2025 it put Brian Baumgartner, Kevin from The Office, in a glass box in Flatiron Plaza doing expense reports by hand for seven hours. Ramp estimated at the time that the stunt drew at least 85 million views. State of Brand already laid out the playbook behind those stunts in April.

B2B ads have copied consumer ads for years, and three things changed this time

"B2B is becoming B2C" is an old line. Workday put Ozzy Osbourne and Joan Jett in a 2023 Super Bowl spot, and Salesforce sent Matthew McConaughey into space the year before. My read is that the campaigns working now reach buyers as people, outside their B2B jobs. Creativity decides which of them land.

Cost changed first. AI made competent content close to free. A clean explainer video or a thousand personalized emails are a prompt away for every team in your category. When competence costs nothing, it stops separating anyone. The scarce input becomes the creative call, meaning which idea and whose face is on it. I put it this way when I opened Revolt this month: "Everyone has the same AI. Not everyone has the same ideas." Kieran Flanagan, HubSpot's SVP of agentic GTM, made the same case on October 22, writing that content marketing "as we knew it is over." The playbook Flanagan listed in its place runs on creators, founders with a point of view, original data (he named Ramp's data journalist) and entertainment.

The bill for being merely good is already in. Airtable was valued at over $11 billion in 2021. In August, Bending Spoons agreed to buy it at an enterprise value of $1.28 billion, with its recurring revenue still growing more than 20% a year. Miro was valued at $17.5 billion in 2022 and agreed in September to sell for $1.355 billion, on about $600 million in recurring revenue. Both were good products that customers liked. Our reading is that once AI makes good enough cheap, being good stops earning a premium, and the premium goes to the work that stands apart.

The second change is the buyer. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater came out on September 29, 1999. The kids who played it are now in their late 30s and 40s, and some of them approve the corporate card program. Forrester's 2023 buyer research put millennials and Gen Z at 64% of business buyers. Ramp is aiming at a generation's memory of a PlayStation game, and many of today’s finance leaders belong to that generation. WERSM's write-up of the campaign made the same point: "Your audience does not suddenly stop having taste, nostalgia or a sense of humor."

Then the feeds merged. A CFO scrolls the same TikTok, YouTube and podcasts as everyone else. Ramp is one of the sponsors TBPN lists in its show notes (the NYSE is another), so a finance buyer meets the brand in the same place they meet tech gossip and sports clips. The finale traveled the same way. Complex, a streetwear and culture outlet, posted the skate session to its followers, and the skate news site Shredder wrote it up. Neither is where a finance team goes for vendor news.

Any company can do this, because the expensive part is the idea

This year's winners out-created their rivals. The NYSE night wasn't cheap, though Ramp hasn't said what it cost. The idea underneath it costs little, and two campaigns from earlier this year show the same shape at a fraction of the budget.

Clay's AI writing policy is a blog post. Engineer Sophie Alpert wrote it for roughly 100 engineers in mid-June. Clay rolled it out to all 550 employees in early August, Business Insider reported. Co-founder Varun Anand's LinkedIn post about it had nearly 10,000 reactions and more than 700 reposts by September 3, per the same report. The creative was a stance, and a stance costs an afternoon of writing.

A stance works at any budget. When OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT, Anthropic answered with its first Super Bowl campaign and one line: "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude." It backed the spots with a commitment on its own blog to keep Claude ad-free. The airtime bought reach, and the creative took a position its biggest rival couldn't take without walking back its own plans.

Wispr Flow launched its Android app on February 23 with CEO Tanay Kothari offering five people a Porsche 911 GT3 RS if they could get the dictation app to make a mistake. A few days later Kothari said 3.5 million people had watched and opened the challenge to everyone. It cut both ways. Viewers spotted errors in the launch video, and "Give her the Porsche" started trending. The cost was one video and a car, and some of the reach came from people arguing about it.

Ramp's own distribution shows the same math. Its finale clipping campaign on Content Rewards pays creators $1.50 per 1,000 views on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. As of October 26 it had spent about $3,900 of a $5,000 budget across 74 creators. By our math, $3,900 at that rate pays for up to roughly 2.6 million views. The production was a big-company expense, but a small team could afford the distribution. Jon Frederick, CEO of Freddy Media, called it "the best B2B creator marketing campaign I've ever seen." Frederick singled out the finance creators posting from the trading floor in their own voices, with the clipping campaign keeping the footage moving afterward.

Ramp's campaigns share a structure a smaller team can copy

Tony Stock is a series with its own site and a live finale. That gives people a reason to come back and gives Ramp a run of moments to post. The Barkley spot and the glass box were single beats, while the Hawk campaign was built to run for weeks.

The org chart matters too. Exit Five reported in June that Ramp has no CMO. Brand has its own VP, and growth and demand reports to co-founder Karim Atiyeh (then CTO, now co-CEO). That split appears to let the brand team run a five-month project like the glass box without defending it on a pipeline dashboard every week. Five months is the planning time Ramp's head of creative experimentation gave Marketing Brew.

Then there's the physical footage. A man in a glass box and a skater on Wall Street are things you can film once and clip a hundred ways, and neither reads as generated video. Ramp buys the distribution the way a consumer launch does, through podcast sponsorships and paid clippers. The footage makes those clips worth paying for. Alexander Pinkin, a founder who builds creator media for action sports, made the point in his post on the finale: "And no, it's not AI. Not today!"

Most of the applause comes from marketers, and nobody has published CFO recall

Most of the LinkedIn reaction to Tony Stock is marketers praising marketing. Adam Schoenfeld, who writes Adam's GTM Report, put the complaint about the category bluntly two days before the finale: "Typical B2B ads don't stop my scrolling." Ramp's campaign stops marketers' scrolling, which is a different test. No one, Ramp included, has published whether finance leaders remember it. The view counts circulating on LinkedIn come from creators' own posts rather than from Ramp, whose glass-box figure was also its own estimate.

The defense of brand work rests on the 95:5 rule, John Dawes's heuristic for LinkedIn's B2B Institute that only about 5% of business buyers are in market at any given time. If that's right, click attribution only ever sees the 5%. Forrester's John Arnold argued in 2025 that 5% is too low for many B2B categories and put martech closer to 15% to 30%. Even that leaves most of the market where a click report can't see it.

Buyer survey data points the same way. In 6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience Report, drawn from more than 4,000 buyers, 94% of buying groups ranked their preferred vendors before first contact. They bought from that preliminary favorite 77% of the time. Most of the decision happens before a click report can see it, and brand work pays for that window.

Ramp's best answer is its revenue curve. Bloomberg reported annualized revenue past $1.5 billion by June and 70,000 business customers, up from 50,000 at the start of the year. Those numbers can't isolate the brand work, since the product, the pricing and the sales team feed the same curve. The honest version of the argument, I think, is that Ramp's brand and product can't be pulled apart.

What this means for B2B marketing leaders without a Super Bowl budget

Spend your early time on the idea and let production follow. If your campaign brief would work just as well with a competitor's logo on it, AI can already write it, and so can they.

Start with a stance before a stunt. Clay's policy was a blog post. Ask what your company believes that your buyers argue about, and publish it in your own words.

Build a series instead of a single spot, even a small one. Three short episodes with a recurring character give you three times the posts and something a buyer can remember.

Buy distribution cheaply once the footage exists. Ramp is paying $1.50 per 1,000 views through a clipping marketplace, which is a budget a seed-stage company can test.

Measure memory as well as clicks. If your best campaign this year ran with the logo removed, would a buyer in your category know it was yours? Run a recall survey with your ICP before and after a campaign, and track branded search, since a click report won't show the 95% who aren't buying yet.

By Jared Robin