TurboTax is in a category of its own. They literally created the DIY tax category owning the vast majority of share over competitors. Their business success has been greatly attributed to their marketing success, with years of brand advertising before doing any product communications: purpose over product.
As a brand looking for growth, TurboTax began seeing in their data that they were underperforming with Hispanics.
While we believed that the campaign from the general market agency would work for Hispanics, we recommended that it was important to first establish the brand’s purpose for an audience that had lower familiarity, as they didn’t have the benefit of having years of advertising targeted at them as Non-Hispanics had. This presented a challenge as the years’ campaign focus was on product and there was a desire from the client to stay close to this creative campaign construct. Our work had the double duty of establishing a relationship with the Hispanic audience as well as introducing the new mobile product and ease of use.Thus, we chose to transcreate the work to ensure a greater degree of customization of the message for the audience. We later extended the work more into the adaptation and co-creation spaces as our relationship with clients and lead agency deepened. During the creative development process, we not only worked closely with general market agency to align strategically and visually, but also with the clients and their legal teams to ensure compliance with strict financial regulations.
This approach was so successful that at the end of the 2017 tax season, the work we did for Hispanic contributed to 29% of all new TurboTax users while being only 4% of the total marketing spend. And while both we and the clients were happy with the performance of the translated work, every single year, the more customized (transcreated/adapted) videos that captured more Hispanic nuances significantly outperformed the translated one. This has also been seen in other client work that we’ve done, and studies by the likes of Nielsen show that custom-created Spanish-language creative has higher recall, memorability and ROI. And thus, this is why we continue to use our "Ways To Great Work™" framework when evaluating how best to leverage assets and determine the optimal approach for connecting with the Hispanic audience in an efficient and effective manner.
There are times when there are existing assets that we can work with, but in order to resonate with the Hispanic audience, we need to inject some cultural relevance into the message, while ensuring that we maintain the intent, style, tone and overall content.
The premise of this campaign was that the product is so easy to use, that you don’t need to be a genius. The brand employed geniuses to play a hero role in the ads. For Non-Hispanics, the genius would walk into a situation where someone was trying to do their taxes on their phone with TurboTax and answer the obvious. For Hispanic, we believed it was important not to come across as too simplistic or talking down to the audience. We decided to portray instead a fallible genius, with the joke on him. The end scene really made this spot, and not because we say so, but because neuro copy testing proved it to be so. It got a killer rating shattering all other spots of the General Market campaign (128 index vs. GM) and the test norm (205 index vs. benchmark).
There are times when we cannot work with existing assets, and instead it makes the most sense to align creatively (campaign approach, same look/feel), but with a Hispanic specific production that ensures strong resonance with the audience.
In addition to the transcreations that we created for Turbo Tax, there were stories that extended the campaign into concepts that aligned with the GM tone and look/feel, but were more original in execution to resonate with our audience. The first leveraged Mexican superstar Karla Souza with a storyline around the cultural household dynamics of extended families overdoing their stay. For the second spot, while the general market spot created a moody spot to express fear of the dark as a metaphor to the fear of doing your taxes, while matching the look/feel and tone, we used fear of an iconic cultural folklore and urban myth character - the Chupacabra (aka Goatsucker), to connect with our Hispanic audience. These two spots outperformed all brand norms for Hispanic in terms of consideration, likeability and brand memorability.
There may be situations where there is an existing strategy, but original work is needed to be created for the Hispanic market. In 2016, the campaign was celebrity-driven and TurboTax invited both us as well as the general market agency to bring them a list of celebrities. We proposed to TurboTax a list of Hispanic celebrities who we felt would connect at the core with Hispanics and also be relevant for Non-Hispanics. For this spot and at our recommendation, the client chose David "Big Papi" Ortiz, a bilingual talent who was not only popular in the general market, especially given that he was just on the heels of his highly talked about retirement from the Boston Red Sox, but also is huge within the Hispanic community. We brought the talent to the table, the general market agency took the lead on the storyline, and then we produced the spot together.
We are a collective of smart, creative, culturally attuned trailblazers with unique cultural and consumer sensibilities that enable us to help brands stay in-step & grow with today's "new" consumer in ways no other marketing group can.