Behind the scenes of Blackstone’s trailblazing video operation

• Blackstone’s outlandish holiday videos have become must-see TV for Wall Street and beyond.
• Love them or hate them, they are smart marketing, and other companies are taking notice.
• Business Insider went behind the scenes to see how they’re made and who’s in charge.

On a Thursday in December, a small crowd stood outside the office of Blackstone’s heir apparent, Jon Gray. A woman was holding a martini glass and asked the nearby film crew how she should toss its contents at her colleague.

Laurie Carlson, Gray’s executive assistant, wanted to know how high she should throw the liquid and worried aloud about the office equipment, including a printer.

A member of the crew told Carlson to aim for the face — for comedic effect. A minute later, Joe Lohrer, the head of US retail sales for Blackstone Private Wealth Solutions, was dripping wet, and the head of Blackstone’s video team, Jay Gillespie, called for another take.

“This is the first stunt we’ve ever done in a holiday video,” Gillespie, who’s spent his career in the film industry as a director, producer, editor, and cinematographer, told a reporter on set.

Since 2018, Blackstone has been releasing increasingly zany videos in time for the holiday season. Think of them as the house with the over-the-top Christmas lights: Some people love it, some hate it, but everyone is talking about it. It’s become must-see-TV for Wall Street, and this year’s video was among the zaniest. It included a series of mock reality-TV shows and ended with a country-western song-and-dance routine about leveraged loans and data centers.

Blackstone’s viral holiday video is the work of Gillespie’s team, which has been quietly helping to transform the public face of the private-equity giant since he joined the firm full time in 2019. The video operation now includes about 20 full-time staffers and produces an enormous amount of content, including 2,200 videos this year alone. It is the brainchild of Christine Anderson, Blackstone’s global head of corporate affairs, who also oversees the team as the head of marketing.

While the holiday video is the most outlandish, much of what Gillespie and his team produce for Blackstone differs from other financial firms. Rather than focusing on how smart its employees are, the videos seek to humanize them, including by dressing them up in funny outfits and letting them sing and dance. Watching its videos, one can learn that Joe Zidle, the chief investment strategist for the private wealth group, is a Deadhead, and Kathleen McCarthy, the cohead of real estate, rocked out to indie band The Beths at the Coachella music festival in April.

It’s arguably smart marketing in an era when being powerful and secretive can backfire, leading to questions and even conspiracy theories, especially for a firm as large as Blackstone, which manages over $1 trillion, making it the largest alternative asset manager in the world. On the “Today” show recently, Dan Roth, LinkedIn’s editor in chief, said companies around the world are taking notice — even if some of the videos can attract haters on social media.

“They are watching to see what he’s doing, and they’re copying it,” Roth said of a recent Blackstone video in which Gray discusses the company’s earnings as colorful emojis (a handshake, a bicep, a gold medal) pop up on the screen. “We are seeing companies in Australia, companies in Europe, doing exactly the same thing,” Roth said. “It’s wild.”

Origin story

Blackstone’s holiday video tradition started in 2018 as a replacement for the New York holiday party, which was canceled because the investment firm, with more than 2,500 employees at the time, had grown too large.

Gray, together with Anderson, decided to mark the holidays instead with a video that parodied their workplace in the style of NBC’s sitcom “The Office.” Gray, who had just been tapped as president and COO, would play the role of the loveable but incompetent boss Michael Scott, played in the show by Steve Carell.

The video was initially intended for clients and employees, not the general public. Even as the videos have gained a wider audience, however, the company has continued in the tradition of using them to poke fun at the firm’s inner-office dynamics.

One of the biggest jokes over the years was the firm’s casting of Gray as the guy who drives his colleagues crazy with his special meetings and big ideas, several people who work with him said. Even the way he yells from his office for Carlson, his assistant, to jump on his latest pet project has a ring of truth to it, colleagues told BI.

“People tell me that I have an excess of enthusiasm, and many people I work with roll their eyes at it,” Gray acknowledged to BI.

Other inside jokes included CEO and cofounder Steve Schwarzman’s relentless hawking of his book, “What It Takes,” and the head of tactical operations David Blitzer’s obsession with teams he owns, including the NHL’s New Jersey Devils. In 2019, the video featured Bennett Goodman, the cofounder of GSO, wearing a Hawaiian shirt in the office while sipping on a tropical cocktail — counting down the days till his retirement.

Over the years, the audience for the video has grown. In 2023, it attracted 8 million views across platforms, up from just 60,000 views in 2018, a spokesman told BI. The production has also grown more ambitious, with 200 of the firm’s 4,900 employees starring in it this year compared with 20 the first year.

The video, which takes months to produce, is also popular inside Blackstone — so much so that it has raised Gillespie’s profile within the halls of 345 Park Avenue. Indeed, one sign of his newfound status was his appearance in this year’s video — as a reality TV show producer.

“People come up to me throughout the year, and they’re like, ‘My daughter is helping me rehearse so I might get a line next year,'” Gillespie told Business Insider. “People are really into lobbying to be in it.”

Blackstone TV

Gillespie, 38, has been working on and off with Blackstone since 2012 but was only hired full-time after working on the 2018 holiday video. After graduating from Bard, a small liberal arts college overlooking the Hudson River, in 2008, he went straight to work in reality television, documentaries, and some corporate work. At Blackstone, he oversees both full-time production employees and outside contractors.

His team films, edits, and produces from Blackstone’s headquarters at 345 Park Avenue. The company releases the content on its website and via email lists, as well as social media sites like LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and X.

Some of what they produce is traditional: an executive sitting in an office opining on the state of the economy or a growing business opportunity. Gillespie appears to have a lot of freedom, however, to get creative.

More recently, he has taken to interviewing the firm’s executives using his iPhone in a series of walk-and-talk interviews the firm has dubbed “Between Two Meetings.” In one recent episode, Gillespie catches the firm’s head of private equity, Joe Baratta, in the hallway and asks about the company’s portfolio of owned and operated companies.

As Baratta starts to answer, a black bar with the word “REDACTED” appears over his mouth, and a closed caption appears on the bottom: “NOT APPROVED BY BLACKSTONE LEGAL AND COMPLIANCE.” The audio of Baratta speaking is replaced with some loungey bossa nova as he walks through the halls to the elevator.

The audience (hopefully) walks away from that video chuckling at corporate America, but also with a sense of what it is like to work at Blackstone. Before the censors cut him off, Baratta was explaining that he was coming out of the firm’s “weekly private-equity Monday morning meeting,” which includes the entire team from around the globe. Schwarzman had been at the meeting, Baratta says, telling them about his recent trip to Asia.

In another series, Gillespie’s video team interviews a series of managing directors. It’s shot with upbeat music and spiffy editing like something you might see on the Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.” The series seems geared toward highlighting Blackstone as a place to work, with questions like,” What qualities do you look for in junior employees?,” and “How do you overcome a career setback?”

Gray acknowledged that the videos can help with recruiting.

“I was interviewing someone yesterday who said they wanted to work here because of the holiday video,” Gray told BI while filming a scene for the holiday video. “‘You guys know how to make fun of yourself.'”

Showing that you can laugh at yourself is an important “humanizing” touch, Gray said, adding, “It shows you’re a human-scale place.”

“Jon Gray’s baby”

Blackstone declined to comment on the cost of its holiday video or its internal video team, but Anderson said the company is saving money with its approach instead of relying on outside contractors.

“We started realizing that by having an in-house team, you could produce this stuff so much more efficiently and cheaply, and then you could just use this stuff for more moments,” she said.

A BI reporter watched the filming of a few scenes adding up to 45 seconds in the final video. It took more than an hour to film these scenes, with a coterie of video and marketing professionals on set.

A video professional who has worked with both Blackstone and other financial institutions confirmed much of what Blackstone’s executives said about their video-production process.

This person, who asked to remain anonymous to protect career opportunities, said Blackstone differs from other financial firms in its decision to forgo a costly production studio in favor of a team that shoots from wherever they can within the office. The end product takes viewers inside the firm’s hallways and executives’ offices, giving the videos a documentary feel.

The video professional said too many financial firms are “trying to make one room with four walls look interesting.” They also said few financial firms have realized the benefits of investing in full-time video teams.

This person referred to Blackstone’s holiday video as “Jon Gray’s baby” and said Gray appears to have a great working relationship with Gillespie.

“They met and had a meeting of minds and just got each other,” said this person, adding, “They brainstorm very well.”

Gillespie credited Gray and Anderson with having the vision to invest in video.

“It feels like if you’re not fluent in video these days, you’re missing something,” he said. “I think Jon and Christine caught that really early.”

Gray is usually the first person to come up with the idea for the holiday video, Gillespie said. Sometime in the early summer, Gray will reach out to Gillespie and Anderson with some themes. Then, Gillespie, Gray, and Anderson work together on the script before shooting starts later in the fall.

It’s a far cry from the firm’s first holiday party in 1985, which included just nine people, Schwarzman told BI. When asked about the new approach, the firm’s billionaire founder took a philosophical view.

“This is like your home and this is where you spend more time than you do at your home,” he said earlier this month while decked out in a 10-gallon hat between video shoots. “So you have to have a range of experiences from intense work stuff to more casual stuff to the theater of the absurd. So here we are, the theater.”