A Giant Story

Read the campaign story

Intuit introduced A Giant Story on 1 February 2018 as its first corporate brand campaign. The four-minute animated film followed Pari, an engineer and entrepreneur, who created a giant helper for her friend Pete’s flower shop. The giant represented the combined support of Intuit’s products, allowing the business owner to focus on customers rather than only the financial tasks surrounding the business.

Phenomenon created and produced the campaign, with AAO directing through Passion Animation Studios. Intuit’s announcement described distribution on YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat, plus a separate fifteen-second Super Bowl spot planned for 4 February. The full animated film did not run as a four-minute Super Bowl advertisement. The source documents the campaign and its metaphor, not a verified improvement in business performance among viewers or product users.

Editorial interpretation: the corporate-brand problem is one of organisation. People may know individual products without understanding why they belong together. A single character can give that portfolio a memorable shape, but the character must express a shared customer benefit rather than simply decorate a list of names. Here the narrative makes the helper large while keeping the small business owner’s purpose visible. Scale becomes a way to picture support, not an instruction that every business should become enormous.

Editorial interpretation: a metaphor can also overpromise. An animated helper appears to remove complexity effortlessly, while real financial administration involves choices, responsibilities and limitations. A responsible adaptation would use the story to create interest, then explain exactly what each service can do and where human judgement remains necessary. It should avoid implying guaranteed prosperity or current integration between products merely because a past campaign presented them within one imaginative world.

Find the shared job across the portfolio

Interview customers about the work that connects your products or services. Do not assume that common ownership creates a meaningful customer story. Identify one practical benefit that genuinely spans the offer, then build the metaphor around that. If different products solve unrelated problems, a clear map may serve the audience better than forcing them into a single emotional narrative.

Keep the customer capable in the story

A helper should make the customer’s work easier without erasing their knowledge or agency. Show the goal they are pursuing and the decisions that remain theirs. This is especially important for business and financial services, where effortless-success imagery can become misleading. The brand should support a person’s competence rather than present them as helpless until a magical product arrives.

Create a literal explanation beside the metaphor

After a memorable character or story, provide a simple account of the actual service, requirements and limits. Check that the short edit does not imply capabilities absent from the longer explanation. Keep historical product references separate from current availability. A portfolio campaign should make navigation easier, not require people to decode an imaginative world before finding the help they need.

A small test for another brief

Proposed test: a small multi-service business could create a short illustrated helper story and a plain service map, then test whether the story improves understanding of how the services relate.

Measure correct association between the parent brand and its services, understanding of limits and ability to select a relevant next step. Ask participants what they believe the helper promises before assessing emotional appeal.

Stop if viewers infer guaranteed success, nonexistent integration or removal of responsibilities that remain with the customer; revise the literal explanation before extending the story.

• Define one shared customer job supported by the existing offer.
• Write a modest metaphor with no guaranteed financial or operational result.
• Pair it with current service descriptions and test with people unfamiliar with the business.