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IPG creative agency R/GA has won Intuit TurboTax’s business, following a creative review that began in March.
Intuit brands include Intuit TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mailchimp. R/GA will work on increasing consumer adoption of TurboTax offerings TurboTax Live and TurboTax Full Service. To do this, it will take a full-funnel approach to strategy, spanning TV, digital, audio, social media, sponsorships and other activations. The partners expect the work to launch in 2024.
R/GA’s win comes after it recently won work with Intuit QuickBooks Australia. IPG and its partner agency FCB New York are leading that relationship, and R/GA will focus on building QuickBooks’ brand positioning.
The business leaves Wieden+Kennedy, which defended its position during the review. Aside from confirming its involvement, the agency declined Adweek’s requests for comment on this story. Soukas declined to name the other agencies invited to pitch, but said he evaluated “a broad range of creative agencies.”
Wieden+Kennedy will continue managing Intuit’s media strategy, planning and buying, while also supporting the brand’s measurement and analytics functions.
MediaLink led the RFP process for TurboTax, and Soukas described a “long-standing relationship” with the advisory firm.
“Having been a strategic advisor to Intuit on their marketing transformation journey for the last few years, MediaLink was thrilled to have the opportunity to work with the wonderful team at TurboTax for this creative review,” Sosti Ropaitis, executive vice president at MediaLink, said in a statement provided to Adweek.
The remote pitch team came together from locations as varied as LA, San Francisco, Austin, Atlanta and New York. The R/GA team’s honest conversations, Washington said, were crucial to win. “Your tax return is an incredibly intimate document, and so when you’re talking about it, you have to have a space where you can bring some of that to the table,” Washington said. “I was really happy that we were able to create something where sometimes when we weren’t in the same room, it felt like we were in the same room.”
According to data provided by COMvergence, TurboTax spent $239 million on measured media in 2022, with $85 million of that being spent on digital media.
Talking taxes and money
The agency team set up a War Room to brainstorm ideas for the pitch.
Getting the messaging right was crucial. This is because tax season, Washington told Adweek, “Is the one time that most Americans really think about their financial past.”