Humanising HMRC: How Pablo And Unlimited Group Developed "You're On It"

Paying tax isn’t an activity that excites many people and yet we all have to do it. But now, as His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) begins a digital transformation journey, it is also attempting to do the seemingly impossible and make people smile.

To do so, it has produced an offbeat and genuinely funny campaign to raise awareness of its digital tools, especially its app, while introducing a new creative platform.

Created by Pablo in partnership with Unlimited Group, the behaviour change campaign ‘You’re On It’ could be the start of an ongoing strategy by the financial authority to engage with the British public around how it supports them to simplify and manage their tax affairs.

The quirky campaign is led by a 30-second film featuring a young pizza maker who talks directly to the audience about being in control via the app while chaos reigns behind him. That involves jet packs, a yeti and a pizza with a face that tells him “You’re On It”.

Running throughout November, the campaign will feature across various channels including; VOD, digital audio, DOOH, social, influencer and partnerships.

“We recognise that the world is changing and in many ways it has changed faster than the tax sector,” admits HMRC’s director of strategy communications Neil Martin. “It’s changed at a faster pace even though we now do most of our banking and financial transactions kind of online already, tax has been behind that in some respect.”

Even though it currently has around 1.5 million downloads, he acknowledges that, from research, the majority of the public is not aware that it even has an app to support customers (21 per cent), with perception stuck on the idea of filling out paper forms and speaking to advisors over the phone.

Meanwhile, public sector bodies are operating under increasing efficiencies - the latest budget saw chancellor Rachel Reeves instruct departments to make cuts of 2 per cent.

Its main aim is to increase the number of users to around six million, especially among younger digital-native audiences who are used to using apps in their daily lives. To do so, it showcases how managing money and taxes through the app can be easier to help find things such as a National Insurance number, make a self-assessment payment or claim and manage Child Benefit payments.

“We want people to be able to self-serve more and use all of the digital tools and we see the app as a gateway… and once they start using the app, they will inevitably start using the website and tools because that's the entry point,” explains Harriet Knight, managing director of Pablo London.

The Brief And Changing Behaviour Around Personal Taxes

Pablo and Unlimited Group have been working through a consortium with HMRC since being appointed in May 2022 as its creative agency partner. In developing this campaign, Unlimited’s behavioural science arm was key.

For the campaign to kick off successfully, it was agreed that there has to be a mindset shift away from the common views on government taxation and its perceived complexities.

“Needless to say, 18 to 34-year-olds find tax extremely daunting or boring,” admits Olivia Bescoby, campaigns lead for HMRC, who says that the brief was to turn that around and make it somehow interesting. Added to the challenge was the thought that most advertising (around 89 per cent according to research) is almost instantly forgettable due to the constant bombardment of messaging audiences receive each day.

“We want to make people's lives easier. We know this would be helpful for them, but we don't know how to grab their attention,” she continues around the campaign brief. “They came up with a creative solution that was built with an underlying insight that what intrigues people and gets them excited about tax is just the idea that you can be on top of everything at the same time, you can be in control.”

Unlimited’s Human Understanding Lab consists of a team of data scientists, neuroscientists and behavioural scientists who understood the big shifts being sought within such a low interest category as tax. Together with Pablo and media partner MG OMG, they embarked on audience insight-gathering while reviewing other campaigns that aimed to migrate people onto digital platforms as well.

There are few examples of public sector campaigns that choose to take humour as the route to solve a problem. However, Pablo has become the go-to agency when it comes to delivering genuinely funny creative for it clients – see Giffgaff, Dr Pepper and Wilkinson’s Sword for recent examples.

Tim Snape, the agency’s executive creative director, reveals that there were several solutions devised to the brief, which he describes as holding “quite a few golden opportunities” to shift the perception of HMRC towards being an organisation with more humanity than people think. One creative idea would even have included a song, but that didn’t make the final cut.

“We needed to do something with that level of standout,” Snape states. “We know we do everything important on an app, but thus far people haven't gravitated to doing this on an app. We thought that was really interesting. But then when we started to push into it again, we landed on that notion of the human benefit, that feeling of being in control, and then we started to bring that into a character, and play with stories and ways of dramatising that.”

Knight underlines the need for the agency to deliver a memorable campaign despite the odds that does not waste tax payer’s money and drives some form of action including humanising the HMRC ‘brand’, a mission everyone involved knew was vital towards achieving success.

“We knew that humour could be a great way to bring some personality and a human, more modern face to HMRC,” she continues.

That humanity was necessary, adds Martin, as the team recognised that by becoming a more digital organisation and attempting to change people’s habits of phoning directly for help, it could slide backward from that ambition instead.

And to ensure the desired younger audience is reached through the media strategy, Pablo and Unlimited have identified and recruited relevant influencers while thinking about specific points in people's lives when tax is important.

The influencer campaign, created by TMW Tomorrow, includes @bricks.and.disorder, @elent_finance, and @cazza_time.

“We're thinking about child benefits - you have to claim it for the first time, and then you have to manage it for the rest of your life. A mum or a dad as an influencer is a great solution there. But then thinking about younger people going to university talking about claiming student finance - we're very lucky that everyone has to do tax, so there's always an influencer,” says Bescoby.

The ‘You’re On It” Impact

Meanwhile, the accompanying creative would aim to manifest HMRC as the element of control in a world of chaos, featuring unusual moments such as a talking pizza and a yeti rampaging through the pizza shop that aimed to make viewers stop and take note.

“That leaves a sense of chaos as a palette to play with. So almost the more random things were, the better,” explains Snape.

Knight also highlights the double meaning of “You’re On It” as offering a sense of both control but also references being online and on the app too and it is a phrase that Snape feels will be “sticky” in people’s minds as well as being a motivator. The potential for the campaign slogan is to become an overarching message delivered by HMRC campaigns for years to come.

“As we move towards more aspects of the tax system being online and being able to be done through the app, we might need this campaign umbrella, this tagline, to use across other campaigns. So who knows? In the future, you might see a self-assessment ad that says ‘You're on it’,” teases Bescoby.