Mission: Pension provider Delta Lloyd wants everyone in the Netherlands to start thinking about their pensions before it’s too late.

Problem: As soon as the word ‘pension’ is mentioned, people stop listening.

Idea: We decided to bring a nightmare scenario from the future into the here and now. The Budget Retirement Home: a former prison converted into a retirement home for those people who failed to make provision for their retirement in time. Here the pensioners are kept alive as cheaply as possible through a policy of no-frills, bare-bones facilities, mandatory shared rooms, the replacing of costly staff with computerized care and use of the existing camera system to monitor residents.

We used the stir caused by this controversial plan to make our point: make sure to start thinking about your pension in time to prevent these kinds of initiatives from ever becoming a reality.

We launched the Budget Retirement Home as an authentic plan for development, complete with:

- an available location: the Koepel prison in Breda.

- a successful entrepreneur posing as an investor.

- a video press release in which the plan was presented.

- a website giving more information about the plan.

- a 3D artist’s impression to give everyone a preview of the Budget Retirement Home.

What we hoped for happened: our plan caused outrage and instantly became national news, which led to us being invited onto several talk shows and revealing the real reason behind our plan live on national television.

The morning after the television appearance, the campaign was completed with a full-page advertisement in the main print news media and a video press release in which Delta Lloyd explained why they had chosen to use this different approach. This once again gained a lot of media attention.

- Delta Lloyd managed to earn 2.1 million euros in PR value on a limited budget and in only two days. That’s a lot for a small country like the Netherlands.

- But more importantly, we got people to think about something they would normally never consider: their pension arrangements.