"AdConversion has been an incredible partner in helping Rippling scale and optimize our YouTube program. Their team moves fast, brings strategic thinking, and feels like an extension to our internal team. The best thing about the team is how thoughtful, responsive, and easy they are to work with."

Stefanie Yan

Growth Marketing at Rippling

‍

About

Rippling is a workforce management platform that brings together HR, IT, and Finance into a single system of record. Founded in 2016 by Parker Conrad, the company was built on a simple premise: the tools businesses use to manage their people should all work from the same data — not operate as a collection of disconnected point solutions.

‍

From payroll and benefits to device management and corporate spend, Rippling automates the operational work that typically requires coordinating across five, eight, or even ten separate tools. When a new employee joins, Rippling can provision their laptop, set up their software access, enroll them in benefits, and add them to payroll — all triggered from a single onboarding flow.

‍

Rippling serves companies ranging from early-stage startups to global enterprises, and has become a go-to platform for fast-growing SaaS companies managing distributed teams across multiple countries. The company is backed by leading investors including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, and Sequoia, and has raised over $1.2 billion in funding.

‍

Challenge

Rippling was good at capturing demand. The problem? There's only so much demand to capture.

‍

They'd built a strong direct-response engine — bidding on branded and non-brand keywords, converting buyers who were already searching for HR and payroll solutions. It worked. But as they scaled spend, the returns started compressing. You can't keep squeezing more out of a finite pool of in-market buyers.

‍

On top of that, a lot of their pipeline was running through incentivized offers — free trials, promotional deals. Again, it worked. But it's not a brand-building strategy. It's a discount strategy.

‍

The real question they needed to answer: how do you reach people before they're searching? How do you build the kind of brand familiarity that makes a CFO type "Rippling" into Google the moment they realize their payroll setup is a mess?

‍

That's where YouTube entered the picture.

‍

“We knew we were strong at capturing demand — but to keep growing, we needed to create it. YouTube allowed us to do that at scale. The campaign didn’t just drive awareness — it made Rippling the brand people think of and search for when they’re ready to solve the problem” - Stefanie Yan, Growth Marketing @ Rippling

‍

Solution

Rippling partnered with AdConversion to run a YouTube brand awareness campaign timed to their biggest creative bet yet — a Super Bowl campaign featuring comedian Tim Robinson.

‍

The Creative

Two 30-second spots. Both leaning hard into Tim Robinson's signature absurdist comedy. Both designed to be memorable in a software category where most ads are forgettable by design.

The goal wasn't to explain features. It was to make Rippling stick — to be the name someone remembers when the pain of juggling five back-office tools finally gets to them.

‍

Watch them here:

‍

‍

‍The YouTube Strategy

We paired our local Super Bowl investment with YouTube to amplify impact beyond broadcast. While TV ran in select markets, YouTube allowed us to extend the same creative and messaging nationally, reaching a broader audience and reinforcing frequency with high-value buyers. 

‍

The goal was simple: maximize the impact of our Super Bowl creative by extending reach and increasing repetition across channels.

‍

For targeting, we used Google's Custom Segments to reach people actively searching Rippling's non-brand and competitor keywords on Google — then served them the Tim Robinson ads on YouTube. Same intent signal as search. A fraction of the cost per view.

‍

The Measurement

We ran a formal Search Lift Study inside Google Ads. Here's why that matters: it's not an estimate. Google creates a randomized control group — people who were eligible to see the ads but weren't shown them — and measures the difference in branded search behavior between the two groups. It's the cleanest way to prove that YouTube drove incremental brand demand rather than just riding existing interest.

‍

Results

90 days. Here's what the campaign delivered:
‍

• 80% lift in branded search. The headline number — and the one that matters most. Buyers exposed to the ads were 80% more likely to search for "Rippling" than those who weren't. That's not a correlation. That's YouTube directly creating brand demand.
  ‍
• 18,605,571 impressions. Reach that paid search can't touch, at CPMs that paid search can't match.
  ‍
• 4,629,108 views. 4.6 million people watched long enough to count. That's the Tim Robinson creative doing its job — earning attention instead of just buying it.