The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

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By Natan Edelsburg, SVP

December 15, 2015 | 4 min read

Life insurance company Prudential, just launched a major new campaign called "Race for Retirement." The campaign, created by agency Droga5, was launched after a Prudential study revealed the following scary truths about the future.

  • 10,000 Americans will be retiring every day for the next two decades, yet 52% of households are at risk of being unable to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living in retirement
  • 40% of Millennials are not saving at all for retirement today
  • Only 21% of people consider themselves very well equipped to make wise financial decisions

To kick off the movement a TV campaign was launched in addition to a 4.01k race with thousands of participants. The first TV spot is above. Found Remote interviewed Ben Brown, Senior Strategist and Duncan Owen, Group Communications Strategy Director at Droga5 about the new creative.

Found Remote: What are the TV components of this new campaign and why are they unique for the brand?

Ben Brown: We've created two new television spots for the launch of the Race For Retirement. Both build on the formula that we pioneered over the past few years in which Prudential representative, Professor Dan Gilbert, illustrates a behavioral or financial concept through people-powered experiments.

The unique part of this pair of commercials is that it they are borrowing a page from cause-based marketing - and putting on a race for retirement. The first commercial highlights the "The Prudential Race For Retirement" and encourages people to save a little more for a cause that sometimes goes overlooked.

FR: How is social being incorporated?

Duncan Owen: Social has been a part of this from the very beginning - from raising local awareness of the event and driving registration for The Race For Retirement event, to encouraging a national user-base to run a 4.01K on their own, social has been an integral part of this campaign. In addition to the usual social channels, we used our partnership with Map My Fitness to drive additional engagement. Within the social workout app, we challenged users to run their own 4.01K and incentivized them to take the 1 Percent More Pledge.

FR: How do you create a TV campaign in today's environment where audiences are fragmented, cutting the cord, and watching content on some many different types of devices and platforms?

DO: Don't think TV, think film. Film remains the most powerful communication vehicles advertisers have at their disposal, but the delivery mechanics for getting film in front of consumers has shifted enormously. So instead of thinking of a traditional TV campaign , we started thinking about all the different channels that can be used to distribute film. TV still has a big role to play, but other channels such as cinema, online video, social, mobile and rich media display were all utilized to ensure the campaign reached a mass audience. From a creative perspective, we always start from a behavioral insight that gets people to think differently about planning for their future -- our goal is to create relatable, interesting content that people actually want to watch.

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