H&R Block’s new advertising campaign is one of the more ambitious in the company’s 62-year history. It hired the actor Jon Hamm for his first on-camera spokesman role, a significant coup. And the company ditched its “Refund Season” slogan in favor of a more aggressive pitch: “Get your taxes won.”.
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One contingency is to line up a third-party spokesman who can help if the brand’s image is dinged.
That is essentially what H&R Block did in signing Mr. Hamm, the “Mad Men” star, who has had voice-over roles in ads for Mercedes-Benz and American Airlines but had yet to appear onscreen as a pitchman. He said in a telephone interview that he had been an H&R Block customer for years.
.....“The fit between H&R Block and myself seemed copacetic and natural,” Mr. Hamm said. “And the tone of the creative was clever and outside the box for something as humdrum as taxes.”
There is no mention of Mr. Trump in the first two 30-second ads featuring Mr. Hamm, and CEO Bill Cobb...
Donuts - H&R Block Commercials & Videos
To bring the Get Your Taxes Won campaign to life, Block landed actor Jon Hamm. Hamm is featured in each of the television and radio spots throughout the season. He plays an actor in several roles, among them a 1930s New York policeman and a Roman emperor, all of which give him an opportunity to talk taxes with other cast and crew members.
"When I was starting out as an actor, I had no idea what to do with my taxes," Hamm said. "I went to H&R Block and they helped me file the right way. I didn't give anything extra back to the IRS. H&R Block helped me win my taxes from day one and I'm proud to be the spokesperson for the leader in tax preparation."
Hamm, a native of Missouri, is proud of the Midwestern background he shares with the Kansas City-based H&R Block. He is probably best known for his iconic portrayal of America's most famous ad man, Don Draper, in AMC's hit television series Mad Men. But Hamm now finds his role reversed as he stars as himself in a national advertising campaign aimed at helping taxpayers get their maximum tax refund.
"We are thrilled to have Jon," Collins said. "He is such an engaging and versatile actor. Those skills really shine through in conveying our message that taxpayers can win at taxes -- if they have the right help and the right tools."
review H&R Block ad
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Would that these spots were good. The campaign comes from a great agency — Fallon — which makes the whole creative exercise even more of a head-scratcher.
After all, no expense was spared in the celebrity-endorsement department: the spots feature Jon Hamm, who brilliantly played the main character, Don Draper, on the monster TV hit, Mad Men.
Hamm’s career has taken a bit of a dive since. Along the way, he’s done a few ad things, including supplying the annoyingly stentorian voiceover on Mercedes commercials. (It almost comes from another time, when voiceovers came from very authoritative men and there were dreamy-looking male creative directors with stiff white collars and Brylcreemed hair who … oh, sorry, I nodded off into a Mad Men reverie, I guess.)
And that’s the thing. Even though as Draper, Hamm’s character was an uber-flawed antihero whose callousness and self-destructiveness were not attractive, he looked great in a suit.
And even though the show ended its run (literally on a high) in 2015, Jon Hamm and his hugely ambivalent DD persona is still worshipped by ad people.
When Hamm appeared at the Cannes Festival years back, he was mobbed by real-life successful ad execs acting like moon-y teenagers.
So he does seem an odd choice here, other than that ad people love to hang with Don Draper on the set. And I guess the tone is supposed to be breakthrough clever/quirky: suggesting everything from the pop culture-invading character “Mayhem” for All-State Insurance to the way the movie The Big Short broke down boring, complex banking rules into entertaining metaphors.
A teaser opens on an office that bears a striking resemblance to Draper’s mid-century agency (nice production work there) and starts with a decent joke: a guy filling up a coffee cup that says “I’m an accountant, not a magician.” He wanders around as things blow up around him. It’s a weird special effect that is slightly more fireworks than bomb but still seems utterly tone-deaf for our terrorist-riddled times.
Then the spot cuts to a modern kitchen and modern people also experiencing these blow-ups all around them.
Out of nowhere, we see Hamm, weirdly static and upright, standing his ground like a major domo. “The old way of doing taxes isn’t good enough,” he says. “So we’re about to blow it up.”
So many ad people talk about “blowing up” business as usual that it’s just another inside-the-industry cliché by now.
And then, even Hamm seems embarrassed to have to say this (ham-handed?) wrong-headed tag line with a straight face: “Don’t just get your taxes done. Get your taxes won.”
Who could blame him? What does “winning” your taxes mean, anyway?
The tone of the second spot is “mad” as well, but this time in a more manic way. We’re dropped outside a (movie?) set, with Jon Hamm in a tiny (Thom Browne?) suit with bowtie, (why?). He’s standing over a row of donuts at craft services, talking to the server about her tax options. It’s not only weird, it’s really condescending for a rich actor to lecture the craft services person in this way.
He uses all the different variations of donuts to tell her that one of them gets her the most money back. It’s the one with sprinkles, which he then scarfs down and gets entirely too excited over.
The only comprehensible line comes from the poor lady in the apron, Amy, who says, “You’ve touched all these…”
Too bad she doesn’t work up enough outrage. He just ruined all of her inventory but gets to go back to his high-paying performance without a concern in the world, except to throw her the “Get your taxes won” line as he runs.
So let’s see: these spots don’t offer any specifics that might help people do their taxes. But they do talk about blowing things up, beating the system, and stiffing the little guy.
Jon Hamm is a commanding figure in front of the camera. His character “Don Draper” could sell ice to Eskimos. As an actor playing an insurance pitchman, he’s not bad either. There’s drama in his delivery, and that’s what top tier clients pay out the large dinero for—some sizzle to help them stand out in the crowd of over-produced, say nothing spots (that we’re about to see much of during the run-up to Super Bowl Sunday). But let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet. We have some Hamm to deliver.
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H&R Block's CMO, Kathy Collins
Why did you choose Jon Hamm as a spokesperson?
-Because he has range. He had us cracking up on set, and in the next set of ads, you'll see a more dramatic and serious tone. He can pull it all off. The first ads are purposely funny because we wanted people to get engaged quickly and use one of our products. In Chapter 3, the humor fades and we talk about the importance of our expertise and how it can help you win.
There's also a Missouri connection. H&R Block is headquartered in Kansas City, and Jon Hamm is from St. Louis. He really liked the brand, and he's so liked by men and women across every demographic. So we feel like we hit it out of the park.
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/hr-blocks-cmo-jon-hamm
Andrea Sullivan: This is the first time you’ve used a celebrity, if I’m not mistaken. Why change that this year?
Kathy Collins (right): We had been running a campaign that was very focused on “It’s refund season, get your refund back.” It was very celebratory, and our spokesperson was one of our own tax professionals, and it worked for us really, really well. Then last year we had a tough season, so we knew we needed to do some big things around innovation and technology, client experience and campaign........
We’re really lucky to have Jon Hamm. He has never done TV commercial work, beyond voiceovers for Mercedes-Benz, and this was the first time he’s been on-camera for a brand—we feel like we won. He was also an H&R Block client for many years, we later found out!
AS: What’s the response been like to the campaign so far?
KC: Very positive. The first 11 days we saw random brand demand go up in search and web clicks, and we also saw that social media was 89% positive in terms of Jon Hamm and the campaign, for men and women alike. So we feel really good, but it’s still very early in this tax season.
http://brandchannel.com/2017/01/12/hr-block-kathy-collins-011217/
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/hr-blocks-cmo-jon-hamm
Kathy Collins (right): We had been running a campaign that was very focused on “It’s refund season, get your refund back.” It was very celebratory, and our spokesperson was one of our own tax professionals, and it worked for us really, really well. Then last year we had a tough season, so we knew we needed to do some big things around innovation and technology, client experience and campaign........
We’re really lucky to have Jon Hamm. He has never done TV commercial work, beyond voiceovers for Mercedes-Benz, and this was the first time he’s been on-camera for a brand—we feel like we won. He was also an H&R Block client for many years, we later found out!
AS: What’s the response been like to the campaign so far?
KC: Very positive. The first 11 days we saw random brand demand go up in search and web clicks, and we also saw that social media was 89% positive in terms of Jon Hamm and the campaign, for men and women alike. So we feel really good, but it’s still very early in this tax season.
http://brandchannel.com/2017/01/12/hr-block-kathy-collins-011217/
How do you save your business? Jon Hamm
I still feel the loss of Jon Hamm from the TV series circuit. His work as Don Draper on “Mad Men,” which ended in 2015, was an annual gift.
But, in addition to a few small roles here (“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”) and there (“The Last Man on Earth”), Hamm has been showing up on my screen regularly these days. Turns out playing a morally confused ad man hasn’t hurt his career in advertising, and he is all over the place right now — and until tax day, April 15 — in a series of H&R Block commercials.
As spokesman, Hamm plays a pushy actor on a Hollywood set, the guy who shows up and lets people know — and maybe lectures them a little bit — about the advantages of H&R Block, and how it’s better than the do-it-yourself brand TurboTax. “Don’t just get your taxes done,” Hamm says at the end of each spot. “Get your taxes won.”
Who better to deploy than Hamm when Donald Trump has targeted you for termination, having said in August 2015 that he hoped to “put H&R Block out of business” with a simpler tax code?
It’s H&R Block’s first campaign featuring a celebrity, and its Hamm’s first on-camera appearance as spokesman for a brand name. He has been doing Mercedes-Benz spots for years now, but only in a voice-over capacity.
In one of the ads, he advises a woman at a studio donut stand by using a bunch of her donuts to illustrate his points. She likes his advice, but notes that he has touched a lot of her donuts. Walking away, ignoring her condescendingly, he says, “Just get your taxes done Amy.”
In another, he’s dining with a woman dressed up as a zombie. She says she’d use an advance on her refund to go on a tropical vacation. “I’d be careful with your skin tone,” he notes. “I get it,” she answers, “because I’m a zombie. Yeah, that’s funny.”
The ads rely on Hamm’s charm, of course, and the alpha-male arrogance he cultivated on “Mad Men.” They also depend on his comic timing, which is aces.
Mad Men actor Jon Hamm will be featured in an ad for H&R Block that will reportedly push the tax-prep firm’s new partnership with IBM Watson
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The H&R Block commercial, which will air during the first quarter of the Super Bowl, plays up the H&R Block advertising theme this tax season for how on to "Get your taxes won." It also will feature actor Jon Hamm. The tax preparation giant declined to give more specific details on the Super Bowl ad.
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H&R Block's 60-second spot on Sunday will air in the second commercial break of the first quarter. Though it will star Mr. Hamm, who will introduce the IBM Watson collaboration, the ad's tone will be more serious than the previous humorous spots that have recently aired.
"It's not a funny ad," cautioned Ms. Collins. "It's not babies and puppies. It's very much about, 'Woah, what the heck is happening with H&R Block?'"
Future – H&R Block with IBM Watson Super Bowl Commercial
H&R Block – The tax preparer made its first Super Bowl appearance in eight years to promote its partnership with IBM’s Watson. Two questions: Does anybody really wear a bow tie in an H&R; Block office like the guy who used to be in their ads? Does Jon Hamm’s agent ever say no?
H&R Block, C+?
Several tones collide in this spot. What seems like a tech ad turns into a tax ad, but not in a parody kind of way, as the powers of IBM’s Watson computer are said to be harnessed by the storefront tax-prep outfit. Then actor Jon Hamm walks on, giving body to the voiceover. Like the spot for TurboTax, it doesn’t quite come together.
More Money– H&R Block with IBM Watson
Bill Cobb, president and CEO of tax preparation service H&R Block
In addition, the company ran a series of promotions with Hollywood actor Jon Hamm, whom Cobb lauded for his wide-ranging appeal and professionalism.
"We thought he was the right guy," Cobb said. "He was a great partner to us. We really wanted to differentiate ourselves from Turbo[Tax]. They talk about, you know, getting your taxes done. We talked about, we believe we can get your taxes won, which is to find every deduction and credit and maximize your refund."
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/14/hr-blocks-outgoing-ceo-on-making-ease-of-use-part-of-the-brand.htmlThe 2017 campaign was one of the financial services company’s most successful national marketing and advertising campaigns, said Kathy Collins, H&R Block’s chief marketing and strategy officer.
H&R Block will kick off the 2018 tax season with a fresh take on its 2017 campaign, Get Your Taxes Won. The campaign illustrates that the concept of winning at tax time is in finding all the credits and deductions taxpayers are entitled to for the best outcome.
The campaign features the return of actor Jon Hamm, as H&R Block’s spokesperson. Eight new broadcast spots were created that center on Hamm in a variety of behind-the-scenes scenarios on a film set.
“The Get Your Taxes Won campaign was overwhelmingly a fan favorite and one of our most successful national marketing and advertising campaigns,” said Kathy Collins, H&R Block’s chief marketing and strategy officer. “When we saw the early positive engagement and strong response from consumers we made the decision right away to co-create with Jon again and he was all in.”
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The campaign kicked off in early December with one spot promoting the availability of H&R Block’s interest-free loan product, Refund Advance. The main campaign launches January 1 with additional national broadcast buys and digital and social programming scheduled in cadence of H&R Block’s product roll outs throughout the season. Collins said ads will also air during the NFL playoffs, ESPN College Football Playoffs, March Madness and the Winter Olympics.
Dust Bowl – H&R Block Commercials & Videos
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The Method Starring Jon Hamm - Presented by H&R Block
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7poCEISzPM
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