RemoFirst
Employ Without Borders
A medieval king struggles to hire an app engineer.
Watch the full campaign · 1:26
The Strategy
RemoFirst lets a company hire people in other countries without setting up a legal entity in each one. Discovery turned up its real competitor, and it wasn't another global-hiring platform. It was an assumption: that hiring across borders is too slow, too risky and too expensive to bother with. For a lot of companies, hiring at home doesn't feel like a choice. It feels like the only option.
So the campaign goes back to the Dark Ages. A throne room that has seen better days: weathered stone, threadbare tapestries, hay on a dirt floor. A pompous king who turns every hire into an ordeal, and an advisor who is loyal, buttoned-up and one bad decision from despair. The hiring process is exactly as medieval as it sounds. The candidate for Data Analyst is being tested on whether he can pull a sword from a stone.
Every spot ends on the question the whole campaign asks: employing like it's the dark ages? It ran for a year across LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube and streaming TV.
The Process
We started where we always do, with a deep dive into RemoFirst's product, its audience and how the market saw it. That's where the insight about the real competitor came from, and every concept we pitched was built on it. RemoFirst picked the one that went back to medieval times.
Once the scripts were written, the hardest job was casting. The sword in the stone only works if the man pulling it looks like he could. We needed a damn-near literal giant, and we found one.
What came out of one throne room: five spots, each with its own job. A 15-second teaser to hook people who've never heard of RemoFirst, the 30-second hero to tell the whole story, a 15-second follow-up to drive the point home, and two 10-second reminders to keep RemoFirst in front of buyers until they're ready to talk.
The Results
Employ Without Borders won the 2025 Demandy Award for HR Tech Marketing Program of the Year. The judges pointed to what the brief asked for: a category full of dry, jargon-heavy ads, and one campaign that stood out by making buyers laugh at the problem. It also cut the cost of a demo request by 30%. RemoFirst came back for a second campaign.
“700K+ video views, 3M+ impressions, and record-breaking deals in June.”
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“45+ days ago, we launched our Employ Without Borders brand ad campaign. So far? That translated into 700K+ video views, 3M+ impressions, and record-breaking marketing-sourced deals in June (a typically slower month!).”
“We had our best month ever by a lot last month… probably 20% higher than any other month.”
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“We had our best month ever by a lot last month, so it was, like, probably 20% higher than any other month we’d had in terms of leads generated.”
Angelica Krauss Jarmel VP of Marketing, RemoFirst2.5x
Higher video completion rates
RemoFirst, Employ Without Borders — TechnologyAdvice, 2025 Demandy Awards2x
Conversion-to-meeting rate
RemoFirst, Employ Without Borders — TechnologyAdvice, 2025 Demandy Awards
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