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.”
