The conventional wisdom in advertising has long held that small business owners view their accounting software the way most people view dental floss: necessary, perhaps, but unlikely to inspire devotion.

Xero, the cloud-based financial platform that dominates in the United Kingdom and parts of the Asia Pacific region, is betting that conventional wisdom is wrong — or at least malleable. The company has named Argonaut, the San Francisco agency, as its lead creative shop for what it calls its largest marketing effort to date in the United States, part of a global campaign spanning eight markets across five continents.

The budget was not disclosed, which in advertising parlance generally means it is either embarrassingly small or large enough to attract unwanted attention from competitors. Given that Xero completed a $2.5 billion acquisition last year of Melio, the New York-based bill payment platform, the latter seems more likely.

The campaign, which carries the theme "Love Changes Everything," attempts to reframe the relationship between entrepreneurs and their ledgers. The insight, developed through research by Argonaut and the client, is that small business owners thrive when they embrace all aspects of their enterprises — including the bookkeeping, which is often regarded as a somewhat thankless chore. (What, you were expecting the insight to be that people hate paperwork?)

Under Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, the chief executive, Xero is pursuing what it calls a "Win the 3x3" growth strategy, focusing on three core functions — accounting, payroll and payments — across its established markets and, now, North America, where it hopes to challenge Intuit's QuickBooks.

To execute the global effort, Argonaut worked with the production house ArtClass and used artificial intelligence tools to generate some 600 campaign assets in eight weeks, with variations tailored to regional markets. The spots feature actual small business stories, with localized details including accents and shopfronts.

"This was a bold swing for us," said Shahin Edalati, general manager and global head of creative at Xero. He added that the AI-driven approach allowed the storytelling to remain specific rather than "flattening everything into one global version."

Whether small business owners in eight countries will learn to love their accounting remains to be seen. Learning to tolerate it might be victory enough.

Original story published in MediaPost: "Xero Taps Argonaut For Global Brand Campaign"