The news: Bilt has stealthily been behind the vertical short-form social series Roomies, in a long-term game to broaden its brand recognition across Gen Z and millennial renters.
- The series has 66,000 and 80,600 followers on TikTok and Instagram.
- On TikTok, Roomies has passed 906,000 likes across 10 episodes.
About the series: Roomies is stylized as a made-for-social mockumentary series following a 25-year-old woman from Ohio’s attempt to make it in New York. (An expired Backstage ad for day players described the project as “What would a roommate sitcom like "Friends" or "New Girl" be like if it was set in 2025 and made for social?”)
Two-minute episodes are pushed out on its TikTok and Instagram @RoomiesRoomiesRoomies, where algorithms serve up the content without users even knowing they’re watching branded videos.
Concealed branding: While Bilt’s marketing team wrote, produced, and directed the series, the average viewer won’t know if the show pops up in their feed. Bilt is only mentioned briefly in the show’s bio. No word of Bilt products has even been made in the first 10 episodes.
Why so secret? Bilt’s content chief Cyrus Ferguson told journalist Rachel Karten that Roomies was designed to cultivate relatability and authentic connections with key audiences. Bilt CMO Zoe Oz underscored the point: “Audiences are so adept at spotting advertising,” Oz told The Wall Street Journal.
Bilt’s marketing team is betting that watchable social media content trumps traditional marketing. The aim is to have the audience discover Bilt through entertainment instead of disruptive advertising, which Ferguson described as the “holy grail of content marketing.”