Klaviyo Wants to Be Your BBF: Brand's Best Friend

D'Arcy Carden brings the B2C CRM platform to life

Meet “Your brand’s best friend.” It rocks a power pantsuit, loves ping-pong and completes a global product launch in six days or less.

D’Arcy Carden portrays said BBF, personifying the marketing and CRM platform Klaviyo with abundant SFW energy.

Carden rose to fame on The Good Place playing an automaton, so her casting here feels on point. She turns in a plucky performance that carries the day, ably assisted by Griffin Toplitsky as an exec at the fictional Big Coat Co. who needs a BBF like nobody’s business.

Husband-and-wife directing duo WATTS (Enna Watt and Tripp Watt) deliver brisk pacing and fun sight gags (dig that vidcap above). The approach feels self-consciously wacky but never forced, and provides an entertaining brand introduction.

“Somewhere along the way, B2B became synonymous with functional advertising, and we don’t think it has to be,” says Gus co-founder and CCO Spencer LaVallee. “The people making business decisions are the same people watching comedy, sports and everything else they love. With Klaviyo, we wanted to build an idea that could live in that world.”

The goal, he says, is to position the brand as “funny, emotional and culturally relevant without losing sight of what the product actually does.”

Well, mission accomplished—with D’Arcy headlining videos, OOH and other campaign elements.

LaVallee praises Carden for “so effortlessly tapping into quirk and physical comedy” while also nailing “that Type A, get sh-t-done mode.”

As for commercial craft, “The only CGI in the spot is the ping pong ball, enabling the portrayal of an effortless rally,” he says. “VFX work otherwise was used mostly for environmental clean-up around the office set, tidying the frame and adding a few nods to the scale of the Big Coat office.”

Plus, “a handful of split-screen composites let the edit marry the strongest performance beats from different takes, keeping the dialogue snappy without sacrificing the authenticity of the performances.”

Despite the spot’s tech focus, no AI was used during production or post, he says.

In fact, “the multi-arm phone harness D’Arcy wears mid-rally during the ping-pong scene was a practical, mechanically engineered build, not a visual effect. It was built as a metaphor for Klaviyo’s ability to work autonomously across multiple tasks.”

For the closing vignette, “the team built a custom, oversized laptop for the two leads to share on-screen, another physical object designed to embody the collaboration the whole campaign is about,” he says.

The work breaks this week, including buys across NFL coverage on CBS.

Related: Watch B2B Absurdity Drive Mailchimp Message