Skeptical about QuickBooks Live?

QuickBooks Live had a perception problem. Intuit was offering bookkeeping services directly to small businesses, and a lot of accountants saw a company they depend on moving onto their turf. That sentiment was real, it was being talked about openly in the profession, and it was not going to be fixed by a marketing video.

Intuit brought in Gorilla Creative, a corporate video production company in San Francisco, to produce something else. A thirty minute unscripted fireside chat between Itai Jeczmien, VP of QuickBooks Live, and Blake Oliver, the CPA who hosts the widely popular 'The Accounting Podcast.'

The Challenge

The audience was skeptical by definition. These were accountants who had already made up their minds, and the more scripted the video sounded, the more it would confirm what they already believed.

That ruled out most of what a brand video normally leans on. No tidy script where the concerns get raised and comfortably resolved. Anything that read as message control would have proved the point of the people it was trying to reach.

The risk runs the other direction too. An unscripted conversation can wander, and thirty minutes of two people agreeing with each other is its own kind of failure.

Our Approach

We agreed early on that the format only worked if the accountant in the chair was someone the audience already trusted. Blake Oliver hosts The Accounting Podcast and follows the profession's relationship with its software vendors closely, Intuit included. An accountant watching knows he isn't going to let anything slide, which is what makes the rest of the conversation worth watching.

We worked with Intuit to create the talking points in advance and then left the dialogue alone, so Itai and Blake knew the territory they needed to cover without anyone working from a script.

Production was multi-camera, with a mix of wide shots and close-ups, so the edit could move between angles without ever asking them to stop and restart the conversation.

Post production stayed deliberately light. We trimmed out pauses and a few false starts and let the substance be the honest, unfiltered conversation. Then we pulled two short clips, each built around a single topic, to run as teasers pointing back to the full conversation.

The Outcome

The only honest way to answer distrust is to let the other side ask the questions on camera and leave the answers where they land. That's an uncomfortable thing for a brand to agree to, and it's the reason this video could do something a traditional marketing campaign couldn't.

We built the format around that idea, filmed it so the edit could stay minimal, and delivered the long version along with the short cuts that carried people into it.