Simply put, an annuity is a life insurance backed investment product that can help you diversify your overall portfolio and hedge risk. Pretty simple (kind of). But also pretty boring. So we tapped into an insight that suggested we should be encouraging people to cover their asses with an annuity (rather than save with one) and humanized a dry topic with stories of very smart people who made very stupid investment decisions. History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it rhymes.

We knew the “Self-Directed” Investor we were going after was a student of history.

With this in mind, we created a vehicle that would allow us to encourage the steady investing behavior inside ALL these people through real, cautionary tales of historical market frenzies.

The idea, “If only they had Gainbridge,” launched on March 7, 2019 with a captivating film about the very first speculative financial bubble in history: Tulip Mania (1636).

The film (“Tulip”), like many of the campaign elements, ends with a question:

Would things have turned out differently if they had Gainbridge?

Print, OOH, and various digital media allowed us to tell more stories where we romanced the virtues of disciplined investing, while we triggered just the right amount of loss aversion at the same time.

We set out to find a way to reframe the preconceived notions these people had.

We didn’t have a lot of time. We needed to be in-market inside of three months. So we turned to experts - experts in Behavioral Economics to be exact. And we started to get more and more familiar with the concept of Loss Aversion and the powerful effect it has on people. It turns out “loss” is twice as motivating as “savings.” Fear of loss has an overwhelming effect on us. Almost an irrational one. That was it - that was the wrench to throw into their decision-making process.

Instead of positioning this investment product as a vehicle for accumulation - one that would be subjected to the “rational” comparisons with more tempting rates and returns - we decided our best way to address the challenge was to make Gainbridge a tool for aversion.

And with that, we had our strategy: Always be hedging with Gainbridge.

Much has changed since the 17th century. And even more has changed in the financial world. But there’s one thing that hasn’t - market frenzies. To demonstrate the value of not putting all your eggs into one proverbial basket, we painstakingly recreated 17th century Holland to tell the story of the world’s first financial bubble. The commodity? Unbelievably, tulips.

Set against Franz Liszt’s manic “Hungarian Rhapsody #2,” we travel hundreds of years back in time to see the price of a tulip shoot into the stratosphere as people lose their minds, and eventually, their homes. After the crash, a man enters frame to pull out a new phone from his old pocket and burst the literal - and figurative - bubble. The lesson? A high-rate, modern Gainbridge annuity can help balance risk from bubbles, bulbs, junk bonds or just about any other market hiccup.

Just six weeks into launch and over 60% of the people that viewed our campaign would consider purchasing a Gainbridge annuity as a result. And, nearly 32% of these people intend to make a purchase “in the next few months.”

That’s 2x the industry average for any financial services brand...let alone a product with as much “stink” on it as an annuity.

"It’s hard to make financial services fun and sexy - [Gainbridge] did it.” - Campaign Magazine