Surprise! SAP Creates Wacky, Whimsical Workplace Vignettes

SAP Concur adds a dash of Alice in Wonderland and Willy Wonka to weird, whimsical vignettes backing the company's business software.

"There's not a lot of positive emotions associated with doing your expenses or waiting for them to get approved. Or, for that matter, with approving those expenses if you’re a finance manager," explains Corey Rakowsky, senior CD at BBDO N.Y., which devised the campaign. "Our approach was to use bite-sized moments of humor to show the difference between how it feels to do expenses and how it feels to do expenses when you simplify everything with SAP Concur."

They're humanizing inhuman drudgery, winking at the audience with a pair of quickie web vids that look pleasingly fresh to my cynical eye.

First, a workspace where more or less everything, even hairstyles, are made of cake:

We bet his scalp's yummy, too. And in the spirit of Barbie, perhaps—though more likely not—a dream job, complete with pink flamingos and giant, smiley ice creams:

Office humor's so 2009. Here, however, we get a novel entry in the ledger, a set-up that tallies on its own silly terms. Too fleetingly absurd for some tastes? Sure. But for others, it's sweet enough to satisfy without growing stale.

It's a vibe, a feeling, an aspiration. Nothing heavy, detailed or complex. (Leave that to actually filing out all those e-forms! Oh, right. SAP simplifies the process. Gotcha.) Mailchimp took a similar tack with its "Clustomer" ball a while back, though this take feels pithier and more tightly focused.

As for the requisite such-a-fun-shoot anecdote...

"The actor playing ponytail guy ate so much ponytail cake he said he wouldn’t go to another birthday party for a year. Not even his mom's," Kleber Menzes, SCD at BBDO, tells Muse.

CREDITS

BBDO
Matt MacDonald - CCO
Corey Rakowsky - SVP, Senior Creative Director 
Kleber Menezes - SVP, Senior Creative Director 
Sam Smith - Art Director 
Nikki Simon - Copywriter 
Damon Garrett - Group Planning Director 
Ankit Mehra - Planner 
Alex Gianni - Group Executive Producer 
Jasmine Batista - Art Producer 
Paul Roebuck - Global Lead, EVP Senior Director 
Jake Krasnow - Account Director 
Tristan Finn Laskowski - Account Executive 
Maria Romano - Senior Business Affairs Manager

Production Company: PF 100
Executive Producer: Malcolm Wax
Director: MAMA 
Line Producer: Jon Dawes 
Director of Photography: Bryant Jansen

Editorial Company: BeGrizzly
Executive Producer: Javier Jimenez 
Producer: Ben Hicks 
Editor: Andrea Macarther 
Lead CG Artist: Robert Hurley