NYC out of home
Challenge
TurboTax was making a fundamental shift from a digital product to a brand with real physical presence in New York City. The campaign had to announce that TurboTax was arriving IRL in a way that felt grounded to locals. In one of the most visually saturated media markets in the world, the work had to be unmissable and unambiguous.
Solution
Spring designed a city-scale OOH system that turned New York into a pre-season launch platform. From Times Square digital walls to subway kiosks to taxi tops, the campaign announced TurboTax's physical arrival with clarity and confidence. Contextual copy, bold color, and placements chosen to meet New Yorkers where they already were. We announced that TurboTax is here, in real life, right around the corner.
TurboTax is arriving
Spring and Instrument developed a visual and copy system announcing that TurboTax is no longer just on your phone. Bold typographic treatments announced "TurboTax is now IRL" in a market where subtlety doesn't survive. The system ran across digital walls, liveboards, taxi tops, and kiosks across New York City, each placement calibrated to the context it lived in.
The commute is a sales funnel
Spring mapped New York's highest-traffic environments and built a placement-specific messaging system where every surface had a distinct job. Large-format digital walls in Times Square built broad awareness. Street-level placements near store locations drove consideration. Expert-forward imagery in subway environments made the human presence of TurboTax tangible to commuters at eye level. Every placement knew where it was and what it needed to do.
Impact
Full overview
TurboTax had spent decades living on screens. The New York OOH campaign was one of the brand’s largest scale announcement that something had changed. TurboTax now existed in real life, in real neighborhoods, with real experts you could actually meet. Spring designed the creative system. Instrument executed production and motion. Together, the campaign ran across digital walls, liveboards, taxi tops, and subway kiosks across New York City from November through the heart of tax season.
The creative challenge wasn't awareness since TurboTax already had 88% aided awareness in New York. The challenge was shifting how New Yorkers thought about the brand. A pre/post brand study conducted by Billups confirmed the campaign delivered: a 14% lift in users associating TurboTax with in-person tax preparation, with no other competitor seeing lift on that metric. Billboard placement recall surged 375%, from 4% to 19%. 74% of surveyed users correctly identified the campaign's main message as TurboTax opening in-person locations, a rare level of message clarity for an OOH campaign at this scale.
The system worked because it was built for specificity, not just scale. Large-format digital walls in Times Square built the broadest awareness layer. Street-level placements near store locations translated awareness into consideration. And the Bedford Ave station takeover — a block from the Williamsburg store — brought the campaign to its sharpest, most contextual point. Deep pepper colorway against floor-to-ceiling white tile. Copy that used the station's own geometry: "You're 30 stairs away from filing." The commute became a three-act sales funnel, and TurboTax owned every step of it.
The total campaign delivered an estimated 217 million impressions across pre-season and in-season flights — driving local awareness and brand presence for TurboTax's retail store expansion at a moment when making the physical presence of the brand undeniable was the entire point.
Spring role
- Concept and creative direction
- Copy and design
- OOH system strategy
- Placement-specific messaging
Collaborators
- Buck - motion production
Next Project
Expert headshots