Bench Accounting
Get bookkeeping off the brain brand campaign
The challenge: How do we address the most pressing complaints about do-it-yourself finances?
This campaign personifies the stress of busy small business owners who are stuck doing their own bookkeeping and taxes. It was developed based on customer research and personas.
This surrealist approach shows what’s going on inside the minds of small business owners’ heads, reinforcing the tangible stress of finances spilling over into daily life. The goal was to show that with Bench, you can finally “get bookkeeping off the brain” for good.
Deliverables: Paid ads with copy variants, landing pages, social media posts, 12 week timeline
Comical—Absurdist and unexpected.
Whimsical—An unfamiliar yet familiar world.
Entertaining—Weirdly wonderful.
Bold—Defies conventional logic.
Campaign tone
Imagine a reality where everything you do—whether it’s walking your dog, reading on the beach, eating cereal, or talking on the phone—is transformed into a world overtaken by finances.
We began by creating the campaign tagline, using the pain point as our foundation. We drew inspiration from surrealist campaigns that were attention-grabbing and over-the-top. We recognized that embracing surrealism would be an effective strategy to represent the unseen stress faced by small business owners.
The Process
In the next stage, we created different setting options such as breakfast, birthdays, game nights, movie nights, and more. The sketched designs allowed stakeholders to see the direction of the campaign, which helped us get approval to proceed with the concept we proposed.
We then began refining the concept even further to fit feasibility and budget and chose three core settings—breakfast, movie night and birthday party.
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.
The deliverables
“Stress-free movie nights? Ya they back.”
Netflix and finances? Movie night essentials like a bucket of popcorn are replaced by crumpled up receipts and the popcorn holder looks like a file folder.
that’s me 😜
↩
“Your finances? Not the life of a party.”
Birthdays are usually joyous occasions, so we thought it was a great scene to contrast the stress of finances. Keeping the colors bright with balloons and the confetti receipts. It’s not a birthday party without cake, which is turned into a calculator that says “Happy Birthday” on the screen.
“Mornings, without a side of finances”
Your classic breakfast spread reimagined. The cereal is replaced with keycaps. On the table there’s a pitcher of juice, oranges, and a coffee mug. Replacing the bread with forms and documents flying out from the toaster.
Additional deliverables such as emails, social, and a campaign landing page to drive paid traffic.
Behind the scenes 🎬
Reflection 💭
This was the first set of concepts we decided to move forward within the pipeline. Visually these concepts were clear even without copy and carried consistent layouts.
Originally there were two other variants:
Board game night — scrabble board replaced with finance tiles.
Someone eating spaghetti and meatballs—replaced with receipts.
However, after the blocking exercise and high-fidelity mockups, the game board idea had the risk of being too small to instantly understand from a glance. The spaghetti and meatballs idea in concept was fun but lacked visual interest, which is why it was replaced with another food setting - breakfast. This pivot ended up being my favorite of the three options, especially with the visual of the tax forms popping out of the toaster.
The impact 📈
Bench’s brand campaign has had a significant impact on brand affinity, industry share of voice, and customer leads, contributing to Bench’s highest revenue-generating month on record.
Credits:
Creative direction: Emily Copp, Arshi Chandranath
Team members: Noemi Cisneros, Sarah Johnson
Project manager: Ariel Kellet