In contrast to traditional financial communications, TIAA-CREF employed music to encourage engagement, counter the mood of financial angst and create opportunities to reach our audience in new media spaces while exploring synergies in traditional platforms.

TIAA-CREF stepped outside their comfort zone by identifying country music band Lady Antebellum as a relevant brand expression. The band’s award winning music was integrated within TIAA-CREF advertising. We extended this connection by creating a custom radio station on popular digital radio site Pandora and utilising genre specific streaming radio, Internet, TV and domain targeting to reach participants in their unique online apertures. All online creative linked to TIAA-CREF landing page, encouraging brand conversation and engagement.Contextual adjacencies within traditional radio, print and TV further integrated content and advertising. In the Country Music Awards, where Lady Antebellum was nominated for best Vocal Group and Single, a TIAA-CREF spot ran immediately following the band’s in-programme performance.

As brand awareness and engagement were important objectives, we created a dashboard of analytics and interaction metrics to track the digital effort in real time. While this campaign represented only 6% of budget, metrics indicated it was extremely successful, generating high impressions and interactions.- Digital impressions: 44.8 million- Targeted Pandora impressions: 28.5 million- Domain targeted streaming audio: 11.5 million- CTR pre-roll (industry average 1.5%): 2.21%- CTR display (industry average 0.08%): 0.24%Prospects tuned into the custom Pandora radio station an aggregate of 400 hours. While the campaign was live, website traffic on TIAA-CREF landing page increased 20%.