Across the tax filing category, there was a delay in consumer demand leading up to the final week of tax season. With only 8 days until the deadline, 121 million eligible people had not yet filed likely due to a combination of factors – consumer expectations of deadline extensions and lower average refunds, and potentially, some impact of TurboTax’s cheeky campaign message encouraging consumers not to do their taxes. The campaign comes full force at H&R Block’s legacy assisted tax-prep business by offering assisted services of its own. To help underscore the importance of filing, H&R Block set out to challenge that approach and hijack TurboTax’s campaign to tell a humorous story about the consequences of following our biggest competitor’s advice. In doing so, H&R Block aimed to steal share from TurboTax, drive late filers to H&R Block’s Assisted business and punch above its weight by grabbing headlines.

In casting for H&R Block’s Definitely Do Your Taxes campaign, we sought a diverse range of performances that conveyed a sense of regret and disappointment that comes along with listening to bad advice. In order to do so, we let our voice actors do a bit of improvisation so that all of the emotions would come off as unscripted and as natural as possible. With a limited budget, we sought voice actors that could do different voices, so they could potentially read multiple scripts as different characters without the audience ever knowing.

In a year where the entire tax filing category saw a dip in consumer demand, H&R Block’s campaign created an urgency to file, resulting in an increase of about 30% more Assisted appointments during the same period last year. H&R Block challenged their top competitor in media with 16.7M impressions from OLV, Social & Radio paid media, 10 earned placements, yielding 190M+ earned impressions, while also driving increased chatter on Social where mentions of H&R Block increased 170% compared to the previous week. Meanwhile, TurboTax net sentiment dropped 13% from the previous week. The Definitely Do Your Taxes: Plants radio spot ran on Spotify and yielded 6.06M impressions.