Pension Attention campaign boosts engagement, organisers say
Pardon the Interruption
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Big Zuu has paid dividends as 7.9m people recalled the Pension Attention engagement campaign with the Bafta winner, and 91% of these took some form of action about their pension afterwards, organisers have said. This year, they want to ‘go bold’ again to reach even more people.
The engagement campaign inviting people to ‘pay your pension some attention’, led by the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association and the Association of British Insurers, was up against it last year as the Queen passed away in September when the campaign was due to start, and news was later dominated by Liz Truss’s resignation as prime minister.
Even so, it seems to have had an effect. Figures revealed at the annual conference of the Pensions Administration Standards Association in London on Tuesday showed that 19% of people recalled the campaign, which had 28m advertising impressions and 2.3m video views, having run mainly on social media.
The next instalment is already in preparation. “We’re busy planning our season two for this year. We want to go bold again,” Hetty Hughes, manager for long-term savings policy at the ABI said speaking at the conference, and invited people to feed in ideas they may have.
Last year’s campaign resulted in an increase in engagement as 91% of those who recalled it took some form of action – 44% said they spoke with friends, family or others about pensions, 42% looked for information about pensions, and 30% checked their own pension information.
“We wanted to reach an audience that doesn’t normally engage with pensions,” encouraging an intergenerational discussion, Hughes said.
People between 30 and 45 were those most likely to notice the campaign, which had a broad age-group target of 25 to 50 years.
Providers that used the campaign’s content in their communications materials reported that 32% more people updated their contact details in the wake of the campaign. It appears that even people who had not engaged in a long time could be reached. At one provider, 15.6% of those that updated their details had already been considered ‘gone away’.
“The holy grail of updating contact details and registering accounts was majorly up against benchmark,” said Hughes. “One thing that really struck me was the nomination forms – one provider said it had an eight-times increase in people updating that information than they would normally at that time of the year.”
Account and mobile app registrations were also up for some providers, with one noticing a 20% increase for the period and another a 36% rise in online account registrations against their benchmark.
The Pension Attention campaign overlaps with the ongoing cost of living crisis, which had some in the industry ask if directing people’s attention towards their retirement savings might not be an invitation to withdraw these.
Hughes acknowledged that this had been a concern, but said: “We’ve come to the view that putting people in a position of knowledge is not a bad thing. If you can get people to realise they have money they didn’t know about, that is brilliant.”
The question as to what people are invited to do once they have realised they have a pension is, however, not going away. mallowstreet understands that some in the industry are in the process of relaunching a taskforce on pensions advice, which will seek to find a consumer-focussed way to bridge the advice gap.
