Why brands like Ramp, Whataburger, and Hellmann’s are sponsoring weddings

Getting married can be quite a production. There’s the venue, food, drinks, dessert, flowers, decorations, and invitations to think about, not to mention the couple’s attire, officiant, photographer, videographer, entertainment, and a wedding party to choose as part of the perfect day.

So it’s no surprise that some couples are keen to have pros at managing massive productions take the reins. We’re not talking about wedding planners, though—we’re talking about brands.

Last month, the expense management platform Ramp held an experiential activation in New York City, during which the company conducted a wedding for a couple, with The Office star Brian Baumgartner serving as the officiant and Christian Joseph, aka The Rizzler, serving as the ring bearer. Ramp joins a growing list of brands to play host to a couple’s nuptials: In July, Hellmann’s mascot, Manny Mayo, married a couple in Vegas after they won a contest for a brand-sponsored wedding, and in February, Whataburger sponsored a “WhataWedding” for a couple in Las Vegas after first supporting six weddings at different locations across Texas on Valentine’s Day in 2020. Since 2017, Taco Bell enthusiasts have gotten married at the brand’s Las Vegas Cantina after the brand first held a contest offering couples the chance to tie the knot at the location.

That brands would want to be associated with weddings isn’t surprising to agency execs, who say that as companies look to associate with positive, breakthrough moments, it’s possible that sponsored weddings could see an even bigger surge.

“This is a peak emotional moment for people,” Heather Miller, managing director at McGarrah Jessee, the ad agency behind Whataburger’s wedding work, told Marketing Brew. “If you can associate a brand with love and happiness and commitment, it’s just creating this positive memory…that transcends transactional loyalty.”

Beyond that, weddings get people to pay attention—often for the right reasons. “Especially for such a divisive hellscape that we’re in right now, I feel like legally marrying two people is probably the easiest thing you can do to raise eyebrows without raising eyebrows,” Katie Dyer, strategy director at Mother LA, said.

Wedding bells

For Ramp, the wedding, part of an hours-long in-person activation, the initial plan was for the wedding to be a staged bit. A week before the activation, Kendall Tucker, head of creative experimentation at Ramp, realized she kept getting asked whether the stunt was a real wedding, and decided it was worth listening to.

“I messaged the Ramp team, the entire company, and I said, ‘Is anyone willing to get married next week?’” she said. “I got three couples within an hour who said they would do it. I got eight couples that were like, ‘We’ll renew our vows.’” (The company ultimately went with the first couple who reached out.)

The final execution turned out even better than she expected. “They wrote their own vows,” she said. “I cried watching it. It was so beautiful.”

The turnaround time on a brand-sponsored wedding can vary. For Ramp, it all came together in a week. According to an account from Heather Schroering, the bride from the Hellmann’s-sponsored wedding, she and her fiancé found out “two and a half weeks” before their wedding that they’d won.

“Our mayo-fueled wedding was an unhinged fever dream which spared no feral joy,” Schroering wrote in Bon Appetit.

Finding ways to make the wedding true to the couple while also “keeping it fun, real, and culturally on point” was crucial for Hellmann’s, according to Brent Lukowski, senior director of marketing for US condiments at Unilever. The idea for the wedding came about as a promotion for the company’s new Chicken Tender Dips line—a play on the union of chicken tenders with the dips.

“For Hellmann’s, the magic is in the details—from a marriage certificate signed in mayo to Manny hitting the dance floor with guests,” Lukowski wrote in an email. “Tying it all to National Chicken Tender Day added the perfect timely twist and boosted engagement even more.”

The wedding and the content generated some 2 billion impressions and 270 earned media placements, according to Lukowski, who noted that sentiment was 95% positive.

In the case of Whataburger, McGarrah Jessee held “several planning calls” with the couple to find out ways to make the big day feel authentic to them, Miller said, adding that the couple was awarded the wedding a month prior to the nuptials.

“We of course had creative ideas, but we wanted to make sure they felt really comfortable with them,” she said. “So it was conversations and planning like you would for any wedding. We just ended up being the wedding planners, which is a fun role for an advertising agency to take on.”

Are brand weddings here to stay? To Miller, the next brand wedding will need to raise the stakes in some way, as “the bar for creativity and spectacle is constantly being raised.”

If the recent fascination with simple brand pop-ups is any indication, though, brands don’t necessarily have to go all-out if they find a way to be part of some consumers’ big life moments.

“It feels like we’re kind of harkening back, in a way, to a simpler time when it comes to brand activations right now,” Dyer said. “I would like to see brand-sponsored paying off mortgages or car loans…student loans would be nice.”