Xero, leading cloud accounting software for small businesses, has launched phase one of its widest-reaching advertising campaign to date, in conjunction with APN News & Media (APN) companies including Emotive, Australian Radio Network (ARN) and Adshel.

The campaign addresses the burden that many small businesses have to deal with: the piles of paper receipts and invoices that often fill desks, back offices, and shoeboxes. Just like Xero has made accounting beautiful, the campaign turns paper receipts and invoices into objects of beauty: ‘Xerogami’.

Tapping into the combined power of the APN’s assets, the Xerogami campaign sees Emotive join forces with Adshel and ARN to create a truly integrated strategy for Xero across online video, radio and OOH that aims to entertain, educate and engage the core Xero audience.

Hero video content created by Emotive speaks directly to the target audience by emphasising the autonomy, power and freedom Xero affords small business owners, leveraging the wide reach of ARN and Adshel to accelerate distribution.

“Just like an idiom transforms the meaning of words, Xero has transformed the finances of 600,000 small businesses around the world into beautiful accounting,” said Trent Innes, managing director of Xero Australia. “With Emotive, ARN and Adshel we created a campaign that used popular idioms and the concept of receipt origami, to make something beautiful out of the often chaotic paper-based accounting systems that many Australian businesses continue to use today.”

Simon Joyce, CEO & founder of Emotive, said: “Emotive led the core strategy and hero content creation for this campaign. Our challenge was to create an engaging content idea that would demonstrate how business finances could really be something insightful. Using a simple visual mechanic we were able to craft a content-first strategy that helped land the message and works seamlessly across social video, radio and outdoor.”

APN CEO Ciaran Davis said: “The audience ARN and Adshel provides advertisers is unrivalled in power, combination and reach. When you overlay this with the content expertise and creativity by Emotive, you can see the sort of effectiveness APN assets can offer. The collaboration between Xero, Emotive, ARN and Adshel has led to this unique and high-impact campaign that delivers ease to business owners nationwide.”

The Xerogami campaign is accompanied by a number of activities from Xero’s retained PR agency Sling & Stone, to show how they can make their finances more efficient through cloud accounting.