Blackstone on Thursday launched its most ambitious holiday video yet on Thursday, featuring 200 employees, two cameos, and a country music song-and-line-dance routine.
The video series, which has become must-see TV for Wall Street, is in its seventh year. Last year's version attracted widespread attention, resulting in 8 million views across various platforms, the company said. The videos seek to poke fun at the people behind Blackstone, which manages $1 trillion in assets, while also touting its investment prowess.
This year's video ditched its usual framing around NBC's hit sitcom "The Office" in favor of reality-TV parodies and included a brief appearance by the "Real Housewives of New York" star and fashion designer Jenna Lyons. Some of Blackstone's portfolio companies, including Supergoop and Jersey Mike's, also got airtime.
It kicks off with a recap of last year's video, which depicted Jon Gray, Blackstone's president and chief operating officer, compelling the firm's executives to go on tour like Taylor Swift. In a "Behind the Music"-type parody, the executives lament the poor reception they received for their "cringeworthy" song titled "The Alternatives Era."
"People just stopped talking to me," Jon Korngold, the global cohead of technology investing and head of Blackstone growth, said. "CEOs, LPs, even my mom."
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink makes an appearance to turn his nose up at the company.
"Can you believe people confuse us with them," Fink says.
The story takes a turn when Christine Anderson, the head of corporate affairs at Blackstone and one of the masterminds of the firm's holiday video tradition, decides that the next logical step is reality TV.
The video, a metatextual reference to its own popularity, then hits overdrive with a series of reality television spoofs, from the "Real Housewives" to "The Bachelor."
"I'm private equity's biggest asset," Joe Baratta, the head of private equity, says in a braggadocious manner while being introduced in the faux series, "The Real Executives of Park Avenue."
Even the firm's international offices get in on the act with the London office starring in "Love Island Blackstone" and the Tokyo team competing in the infamous "Human Tetris" game-show stunt.
Back at 345 Park Avenue, Gray's executive assistant, Laurie Carlson, throws a martini into the face of Joe Lohrer, the head of US retail sales for Blackstone's private wealth group.
"Sorry, Joe, they wanted me to do something dramatic," Carlson says.
The head of Blackstone's video team, Jay Gillespie, makes an appearance as a reality-television producer and calls for another martini to try the shot again.
Perhaps the funniest bit is Schwarzman's appearance in a parody of "Keeping Up with the Kardashians," in which he is filmed awkwardly cutting a cucumber à la Kendall Jenner.
Back in the conference room, Gray tells the firm that they're going down the wrong path. A running gag in the series is that no one wants to go along with Gray's hare-brained ideas and it seems like he's finally come to his senses. Instead, he proposes another zany idea.
"Blackstone needs to go country," Gray says.
The video is capped off by the firm's second original song as executives sing and dance around the office, in Midtown traffic, and on the back of a mechanical bull.
The song's chorus, lip-synced by Schwarzman in the video, is "You can build. You can build with Blackstone," a reference to the firm's first television ad, which was released earlier this year.
