With tax season upon Canadians, H&R Block has launched a new campaign to comfort and guide newcomers to Canada who may be feeling stressed and confused while filing their taxes.

H&R Block’s new multicultural campaign offers the simple message that tax refunds can be “surprisingly great.” The new campaign includes ad spots where friends one-up each other with fun facts, the trump card being the campaign’s “surprisingly great” tagline about tax refunds. All together, it’s meant to show that filing taxes doesn’t have to be a daunting experience.

“There’s a general consensus that nobody wants to do their taxes, but I find it interesting that the vast majority of Canadians and newcomers get a refund. It’s something we don’t like doing, but we sure like the result afterwards,” says H&R Block Canada director of marketing David Loria. “There’s a lot of dread around the situation, but the vast majority of outcomes are positive.”

The campaign creative comes from primary research H&R Block completed with newcomers to Canada through focus groups where the company found that their fear of getting their taxes incorrect is significantly higher than the average Canadian.

“The vast majority of our newcomer clients actually get a refund, so we wanted to turn the dread of doing your taxes into something surprisingly delightful,” Loria says.

Stradigi Marketing helped H&R Block craft the campaign. Stradigi leveraged technology like adaptive video streaming in programmatic display ads, as well as AI- and human-driven nuanced contextual targeting on YouTube. This tech was set up to ensure culturally resonant campaign materials were directly reaching target audiences online.

The campaign includes 12 videos with tailored in-language content that was written to resonate with South Asians, Chinese, Filipino and West Asian communities, among other groups.

H&R Block has targeted newcomer Canadians in its advertising before, but Loria says that in the past they’ve treated all newcomers more or less the same. But there are sub-segments like international students, couples or younger new Canadians, and in this iteration of H&R Block’s advertising, there’s more assets designed to appeal to more specific groups.

Canadians’ reluctance to switch tax filing methods always makes it a challenge for H&R Block to find new clients each year, and its answer to this problem has been segment marketing, with newcomers to Canada being an important one.

“[The challenge is] how do we get Canadians to file their taxes for the first time with H&R Block, because we know once they file, those clients are sticky and will stay with us for a while,” Loria says.