Xero is encouraging small business owners in Canada and the U.S. to simplify how they run their businesses by using its accounting software.

The global small business platform, headquartered in New Zealand with a presence in Australia, the U.K. and the U.S., offers business owners a core accounting solution along with connections to apps, banks and other financial institutions to provide their financial position and performance in real time.

“Evolving the global Xero brand for North America was at the heart and centre of this campaign,” says Patrick Razon, brand marketing manager at Xero. “The task at hand was to rethink how we could express the Xero brand and explain what we are, while also connecting to the needs of small business owners.”

Razon says that the rate of cloud accounting software adoption is high in the southern hemisphere, which means “more opportunity to get deeper into specific benefits and more technical details in brand and marketing efforts.”

“Thinking about this campaign in North America, where cloud adoption is lower, we took the chance to take a step back and focus on the benefits of accounting software – opting to be as simple and clear as possible about the pros of using Xero,” he says.

The campaign, by Fellow Human Creative, includes OOH that features big, punchy headlines overlaid on Xero’s blue brand colour, specifically targeting small business owners.  The TV spot features a woman navigating confidently through a maze of orange hallways, a metaphor for the complicated financial decisions a small business owner must make. She repeatedly passes by a man who can’t seem to find his way, to reflect the challenges of traditional accounting.

“The Xero brand has a personality to it and we wanted this to come through in the work,” says Travis Cowdy, founder and CCO of Fellow Human Creative. “A bit of whimsy and fun, and a beautifully designed set with a lot of ‘poppy’ colour helped us deliver a lot of information to the consumer but keep them entertained and engaged at the same time.”

Cowdy admits that typically, creative people aren’t great with numbers. “Being a small business ourselves, this brief was an easy one to wrap our heads around,” he says, of the agency he co-founded in 2020. “When we first launched Fellow Human, the financial side of the business was our biggest learning curve.”

Xero entered the U.S. market in 2011 and the company has been in Canada since 2018. It started with a core team in Canada, which expanded when it acquired Hubdoc, extending its offering to also include data intake capabilities. In 2020, Xero named Toronto its North American Tech Hub, and in 2021 acquired TaxCycle, expanding its tax offering and increasing its presence across the country.

The integrated campaign includes placements across digital, OOH, TV and other brand media channels that will run across key markets in North America. In Canada, the OOH ran in the fall while the digital video is live now. Dentsu X handled media for the campaign in Canada.