Getting people to engage with pensions
What d’you get if you combine former TOWIE star Gemma Collins, money expert Iona Bain and pensions?
A refreshingly engaging campaign about retirement saving – with bags of personality, lip gloss and huns to boot!
Tackling pensions apathy
The country is moving towards a slow-moving retirement crisis.
The older population is growing putting a strain on the state pension system, people aren’t saving enough for later life and many actively avoid thinking about retirement planning.
We were hired to launch Pension Attention 2024 – an industry-led campaign to get people to engage with their pensions. Our brief was to target 35–55-year-olds with a focus on women who face a ‘pensions gap’ due to pay gaps and childcare work breaks.
Our campaign was based on the insight that people don’t think about pensions because they don’t want to think about getting older – an insight almost universally true, apart from one exception: the beauty industry.
Anti-ageing treatments are enjoyed by women and growing numbers of men, and our target audience is no different. So, we used beauty to pull people in and deliver messages about pensions.
The revolutionary Future Face Cream
We created a comedic parody of an anti-ageing face cream ad, starring the straight-talking Gemma Collins. In it she unveils Future Face Cream – a new groundbreaking moisturiser that helps you face the future … quickly revealed not to be about a pot of face cream, but your pension pot and how it’s important to take simple actions now for the future.
Gemma would generate headlines, but it was vital to add expertise – enter money expert Iona Bain who could provide credible pensions advice.
This was delivered via three ‘edutainment’ films, showing simple actions to take such as how to track down lost pensions. The films, along with the spoof ad were hosted on the Pension Attention website.
Cross-channel amplification
Assets were created for industry partners and stakeholders, including Gemma-branded T-shirts for employees to wear at launch.
The campaign runs until the end of November across paid social, YouTube pre-roll, digital display, Gum Gum and OOH in major shopping centres such as the Trafford Centre in Manchester alongside actual beauty ads.
Results
The campaign achieved widespread coverage across more than 400 media outlets, including 35 national media and highlights including Sky News, Mirror, The Standard and BBC Online. Paid activity generated more almost 200m paid impressions leading to a huge spike in web traffic. Crucially the content strongly resonated with the female target audience, with an 11% uplift in female viewers and 27% of female 35-55 year-olds looking at their pensions after seeing the PYPSA campaign (vs 25% of men).
