Making taxes sweeter with our summer campaign for Tide

MTD-ready means summer-ready

According to data 85% Sole Traders don’t know how often they need to file as part of Making Tax Digital. It's a topic that many sole traders don't fully understand and let face it, tax is nobody's idea of a good time. But for the UK's sole traders, it's about to become unavoidable. Making Tax Digital (MTD) - the HMRC-backed shift to digital tax records, is coming, with a deadline of 7th August.

It's one of our most ambitious AI-generated campaigns to date, turned around from concept to production in two weeks (yes we used AI, but we used humans as well).

Making taxes impossible to ignore this summer

Tide's goal was simple to say and hard to do - Get sole traders to open a Tide business account and sort their Making Tax Digital before the deadline. The trouble is that tax admin is a grudge task. People delay it, dread it, and scroll past anything that reminds them of it. Our job wasn't to explain MTD all over again. It was to make sorting it feel worth doing now, so you can get back to your summer. This campaign was delivered collaboratively with Propellernet, whose campaign proposition and research helped shape the strategy. Tide wanted to own the MTD movement, so we made getting tax-ready feel like the start of summer, not the end of it.

The campaign line 'MTD-ready means summer-ready'

The promise was simple: sort your tax, and summer is yours again.

We brought that idea to life and made the benefits of getting Making Tax Digital sorted feel immediate and tangible. Bright inflatables, vibrant colours and a headline that transforms a compliance deadline into something to look forward to - a countdown to summer, rather than another administrative chore. The campaign turns a practical business message into something joyful, memorable and impossible to ignore.

AI production at a new scale

This was a real turning point in our production workflow. The campaign imagery was generated using with AI tools directed by human minds. This provided us far more creative flexibility, but at the same time it posed new challenges. AI generated outputs are never a certainty. They require patience and plenty of iteration. This artwork needed to be scaled, several metres high in places. Generative imagery that holds up at billboard scale is a genuine milestone and demonstrates what's now possible with AI production. Credit to our incredible AI production team at Sidekick.

Owning Waterloo

As part of the OOH activity, we took over London Waterloo station with 16 panels, which meant plenty of exposure in one of the busiest stations in the country. With hundreds of thousands of commuters passing through each day this was brilliant opportunity to capture the attention of sole traders, freelancers and side-hustlers before the tax deadline. The stakes were high and we had two weeks to take this concept from ideation into final production.

Adapted into video

OOH kicked off the brand awareness campaign which was then adapted into a video campaign across key social channels. This campaign was another feat of AI ingenuity. The OOH creative was reimagined frame by frame, developed into motion, and adapted into social edits, giving Tide a 360 campaign delivered in record time. Because there was no shoot to schedule around, the team could iterate quickly on pacing, framing and messaging right up until launch.

The ice cream van that makes taxes sweeter

The campaign went on the road. With our partners, we designed a fully wrapped ice cream van as the activation piece trading free ice cream for a sign-up, across various locations from London to Manchester, spreading a little joy and helping commuters get their taxes sorted and get back to enjoying summer.

Why this was a turning point in advertising

This campaign is a signpost for where advertising production is heading. AI let us create bold, bespoke, brand-perfect imagery at a scale and speed traditional shoots would struggle to match, then execute it across out-of-home, a station takeover, video and experiential, all singing from the same song sheet. For a challenger brand backing an HMRC-backed initiative, that consistency matters: every touchpoint, from a metres-high billboard to a van parked on the seafront, tells the same story in the same voice.

A subject as dry as tax became something genuinely fun. That's the whole point.

If you've got an ambitious idea and a budget that needs to work hard, that's exactly what we do. See how we work with AI video, explore more of our work, or get in touch.