The Office Cast Become the Masters of Small Business for AT&T

When AT&T Business teed up a brand campaign targeting mom-and-pop shops with a reunion of The Office cast, The Masters provided the perfect grounds for an opening drive.

Actor Rainn Wilson (The Office’s Dwight Schrute) joined AT&T and its partners on an integrated Omnicom team led by BBDO, teasing the latest installment of AT&T Business’s “Next Level Network” campaign on his Instagram and newly minted LinkedIn profile.

Wilson and AT&T used LinkedIn to announce the actor’s new company—Dream With Rainn—before airing a teaser during the Sunday broadcast of The Masters’ final round on CBS.

In the clip, Wilson announces that he has a product that will change the world, but needs a team of coworkers to help him bring it to life.

Fellow The Office actors Jenna Fischer (Pam Beesly) and Craig Robinson (Darryl Philbin) say yes, citing a lack of better options. Former co-stars Brian Baumgartner (Kevin Malone) and Kate Flannery (Meredith Palmer) are less certain. The eponymous Creed Bratton provides a tacit endorsement of Wilson’s product—the Sleep With Rain pillow—by snoozing on it.

The teaser foreshadows the launch of a fuller campaign on April 18, but AT&T has good reason to covet that Sunday sports marketing spot at the Masters.

Last year, the round’s 12.06 million viewers on CBS were the ninth-largest for a non-NFL sporting event and, according to CBS, the largest audience for any golf broadcast in five years.

Meanwhile, The Office has remained so beloved after it went off the air at NBC in 2013 that the 57.1 billion minutes of viewership it racked up on Netflix in 2020—just before it was moved to Peacock—were a streaming record only broken by Suits’ 57.7 billion minutes last year.

“We know that among viewers of The Masters, there is a large propensity toward business owners,” said Valerie Vargas, svp of advertising. “So what better place than on Sunday and, fingers crossed, it’s a nail-biter that we will have a level of viewership for when this teaser comes out.”

Playing the whole course

AT&T Business launched its “Next Level Network” campaign last summer, aiming at large businesses and government entities that value both security and network stability, which the company branded as “connectivity.”

This year, AT&T shifted the message to small businesses that required a more personal approach. The company wanted to show it could help with hiring talent, launching a website, building a social media presence, selecting an internet provider, and establishing roles and responsibilities within their team.

“They need someone who can be their tech support,” Vargas said. “So we were seeking something that would be different in the marketplace, break through and allow us to tell the plight and challenges of small businesses.”

AT&T’s partners at BBDO pointed out that actors are often stereotyped by their most famous roles, so why not have the cast of The Office start a small business and face some of its challenges?

They also noted that most of a business’s early successes and failures play out on social media—and many small businesses gravitate toward LinkedIn—so Wilson’s new LinkedIn page will share his struggles in putting together a team, designing a logo and drawing customers to his company’s site. 

The Masters, meanwhile, serves as a surprisingly fitting small-business backdrop for the campaign. According to data from Mastercard’s Economics Institute, the economic impact at hotels, restaurants, shops and other businesses around the event in Augusta, Ga., in 2023 was 1.2 times greater than it was in 2022 and 2.3 times more than what was spent in pre-pandemic 2018.

The first day of the Masters increased local spending by 85%, while the 10 days surrounding the event were an average of 53% more lucrative for local businesses than the preceding or ensuing weeks. That includes golf tourists, whose share of hotel and restaurant spending in the area jumps from 26% before the tournament to 46% during the event.

AT&T Business plans different iterations of this campaign around its reliability, backup services and internet, and will extend it through Small Business Week, which runs from April 28 through May 4. Eventually, it will culminate in a long-form video on YouTube that combines all of the campaign’s parts and lets The Office crew do their thing while showing off AT&T Business’s offerings.

“There is nothing like the challenge that small business customers are faced with,” Vargas said. “It’s highly emotionally charged.”