'MTD-ready means summer-ready' our latest AI-built campaign for Tide

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. Tide wanted to own the movement. So we made getting tax-ready feel like the start of summer, not the end of it.

It's one of our most ambitious AI-generated campaigns to date, turned around from concept to production in two weeks.

The brief was to make a dry subject impossible to ignore

Tide's goal was simple to say and hard to do. Get sole traders to open a Tide business account and sort their MTD 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.

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

One line did the heavy lifting: "MTD-ready means summer-ready."

The promise is baked into the words. Sort your tax, and summer is yours again. We brought it to life with a hero visual that lands instantly, a hand holding the Tide app, wrapped in an inflatable swimming ring. It's playful, it's warm, and it turns a compliance deadline into a countdown to the good stuff.

Then we made it loud. This was a deliberately colourful campaign - bright, sun-soaked and impossible to walk past on a grey commute.

AI at a scale we've not done before

Here's the part we're proudest of. The campaign imagery was generated with AI, and not for a throwaway social post. This artwork ran as out-of-home, several metres high in places.

That's a genuine milestone. Generative imagery that holds up at billboard scale is a different discipline entirely: every edge, texture and detail has to survive being blown up to the size of a building. A pixel that looks perfect on a phone can fall apart at three metres, so the craft is in the finishing - art-directing, refining and retouching AI output until it earns its place on a premium site. Getting there, and onto OOH across the UK, is exactly the kind of ambitious, budget-smart production Sidekick exists to make possible.

Owning Waterloo

To plant a flag, we took over London Waterloo - one of the busiest stations in the country. A full station takeover puts the campaign in front of hundreds of thousands of commuters a day: precisely the sole traders, freelancers and side-hustlers Tide wants to reach before the deadline.

A video campaign to match

OOH kicked off the brand awareness campaign which was adapted across social channels. Our video campaign brought the OOH creative into motion with AI.

The ice cream van that makes taxes sweeter

Then we took the campaign on the road. We designed a fully wrapped ice cream van as the activation piece trading free ice cream for a sign-up, across various locations across the UK to spread the joy of getting your taxes sorted so you can get back to enjoying summer.

Why this was a turning point with AI

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.