QuickBooks' 'Adiós Cuadernito' serenades the paper ledger goodbye — WARC B2B Grand Prix

In 2021, QuickBooks had never run a campaign aimed at the 14% of US small businesses owned by Hispanic entrepreneurs, many of whom ran their accounts in a paper cuadernito. The notebook had kept their finances together for years, yet it was also what stopped them from moving to digital tools, and alma's research showed the gap was hurting them: 49% of Latino business owners had loan applications rejected versus 23% of non-Hispanic whites.

alma's strategy was to see the problem as a relationship that needed to end. Instead of telling owners their beloved notebook was obsolete, the agency had a modern singing trio perform an epic bolero — the Hispanic breakup song — saying goodbye to the cuadernito with humour and affection, then showing QuickBooks as what came next. The campaign ran in Spanish, English and Spanglish because, as strategy director Jorge Becerra put it, 'it is not one or the other, it is all of them'.

The results came from cultural specificity rather than reach alone: total awareness and familiarity each rose 20%, the share of Hispanic SBOs who had ever used QuickBooks rose 25% after the campaign, and the work was 54% more efficient at acquiring incremental new customers than a similar-spend campaign that preceded it. Brand search volume rose 3%, traffic 12% and installs 12%, and 89% of the traffic the campaign drove came from first-time prospects.

The campaign won the B2B Grand Prix at the inaugural WARC Awards for Effectiveness North America in 2023 and the Grand Prize at the ANA 2022 Multicultural Excellence Awards, and it became the proof case for alma's argument that specificity in multicultural marketing pays.