The core insight behind Office Hours was that the audience didn’t just want information — they wanted access and connection. Instagram Live offered something a webinar or branded content series couldn’t: the ability for viewers to post questions directly to the guest in real time, and to see and connect with each other in the same space. The format made the audience participants rather than spectators, which was exactly the dynamic small business owners were missing.

Guests were recognized entrepreneurs from industries hit hardest by the pandemic: Alli Webb of Drybar, David Chang of Momofuku, Jonathan Adler, and Joey Gonzalez of Barry’s Bootcamp, among others. Each brought their own audience and their own story of navigating an impossible business environment. The conversations were honest in a way that produced content we couldn’t have scripted.

Challenges

Launching the program with no budget and no agency meant building it from scratch. I reached out to personal contacts and existing Amex brand relationships to secure the first guests, then used the growing audience and credibility of the program to attract larger names over time. On Instagram, when a guest went live, their own followers received a notification and could join in — a built-in discovery mechanic that grew the audience with every episode. Several episodes drew more than 10,000 live viewers.

Getting the program off the ground also required building the internal infrastructure to support it. Office Hours was the first live programming American Express had produced, which meant there were no existing guidelines to work from. I developed conversation frameworks and topic guidelines, trained guests on those parameters before each episode, and documented a crisis communications plan. I worked across PR, legal, brand, and content teams to ensure alignment before anything went live.

Atomized Content

From the beginning, I structured Office Hours to produce more than a single live broadcast. Episodes were organized into themed question blocks rather than open-ended conversations, a deliberate choice that made the recordings easy to edit into standalone clips for web and social distribution after the fact. In response to audience requests, we also converted full episodes into podcasts and made them available on demand.

By treating each live episode as source material rather than a finished product, we were able to generate three times the content output from the same investment. One conversation with David Chang became a live broadcast, a series of short-form social clips, a podcast episode, and written content for the web. The production effort was the same; the reach was significantly broader.

Outcome

Within 6 months, we doubled the number of our Instagram followers. But the best success metric were the number of positive comments from followers.

The program also added to our content pipeline. We structured the questions in the episodes to be in themed “blocks” that would later guide our video cut-downs for distribution on web and in social. And, in response to audience requests, we also turned the episodes into podcasts and made those available. By “atomizing” our content across channels, we were able to get 3x the output.