Bench • Brand Campaign • Creative Direction • Advertising • Social Media (2023)

Bench Accounting is America’s No. 1 professional bookkeeping services and tax advisory fintech platform with over 12,000 U.S.-based customers supported by 650 employees.

The task → Do-it-yourself bookkeeping is not only a major time drain, but a significant mental burden for small business owners. Create a campaign that addresses the pain point and positions Bench as the solution.

The campaign → Bench’s “Get Bookkeeing Off the Brain” campaign plays into the mental burden pain point by creating a visual reality where thoughts and objects are transformed into a world overtaken by finances. The surrealist approach personifies what’s going on inside the minds of small business owners’ heads—reinforcing the tangible stress of business finances spilling over into daily life. The campaign takes various situations that are common to a small business owner’s personal life: eating breakfast, celebrating their birthday or having a movie night— and shows the stress of their business finances consuming them, literally.

Campaign tone →

Comical—Absurdist and unexpected.
Whimsical—An unfamiliar yet familiar world.
Entertaining—Weirdly wonderful.
Bold—Defies conventional logic.

The process→ We started by developing the campaign tagline by using the pain point as our foundation. Diving deep into some research, we were inspired by surrealist campaigns that were over the top and grabbed the viewer’s attention. We realized that going down the surrealism route would be a good strategy to personify the stress that small business owners face that isn’t necessarily seen.

The next stage included crafting various setting options—breakfast, birthdays, game nights, movie nights, and more. I drew out some rough sketches (seen below) to help stakeholders visualize the campaign direction, which allowed us to get approval to move ahead with the concept we pitched.

We then began refining the concept even further to fit feasibility and budget and chose three core settings—breakfast, movie night and birthday party. I decided to take the surrealism a step further and have the head of the model be replaced by a financial element as this really enhanced the absurdist world we were creating.

Since this was a brand awareness campaign, I decided to stick only within the core and secondary palettes of the brand—blues and yellows—which added to the highly stylized visual identity of the campaign. I ran a workshop for our Brand team to collaborate on a basic blocking exercise in FigJam to map out the all the elements we wanted for each set. This allowed us to really nail the exact composition we wanted and to be very intentional with the props we wanted and their exact placement.

The final step before the shoot was to create high fidelity mockups with very specific direction to provide to our freelance photographer, prop designer and stylist.

Providing such specific detail for the production book for the photographer really paid off and lead to a very smooth shoot day. We had a blast at the photoshoot and it was an amazing experience being able to collaborate with several talented individuals and also exercise my art direction skills on set. Sadly, our beautiful prop calculator cake was made mostly out of shortening and was not very tasty to eat 😭.

My role→

• Pitching the concept to the Marketing Director and securing budget for the campaign

• Collaborating with the Copy Manager on the creative direction of the campaign

• Developing the art direction and visual identity for the campaign

• Creating a concept deck with low fidelity mockups to present to internal stakeholders for approval and high fidelity mockups with specific detail for the freelance photographer

• Providing direction to the models, stylist, and photographer on set

• Reviewing drafts provided from the photographer and providing for feedback for edits

• Producing paid ad videos on AfterEffects for each of the concepts based on assets provided from the photographer

• Designing and building out a campaign landing page

• Creating design assets to be used in campaign emails

The deliverables → Paid ads, emails, social media posts, landing page

The impact → Increase in brand affinity, industry share of voice, and customer leads, contributing to Bench’s highest revenue-generating month on record

Credits:

Creative Direction: Emily Copp, Arshika Chandranath

Copy Direction: Emily Copp

Art Direction: Arshika Chandranath

In-house Creative Team: Sarah Johnson, Jessica Nguyen, Noemi Cisneros

Project Manager: Ariel Kellett

Photographer: Jens Kristian Balle

Visual Editor: Jens Kristian Balle

Photo Assistant 1: Jon McMorran

Photo Assistant 2: Gaelan Glenn

Prop/Set/Wardrobe Stylist: Robin Del Pino

Stylist Assistant: Alexander Ferries