We asked two popular comedians to live through a tongue-in-cheek “retirement immersion experience” for a weekend of filming. Following a loosely scripted narrative, the idea was to provide Pete Holmes and Jamie Lee an earnest look at their future lives as retirees in our custom-built retirement community.

Here in the community, we delivered them a series of prompts and activities meant to simulate life in retirement. Each prompt initiated a new learning experience and helped the comedians understand the true meaning of life after work. As they gain new perspective about what it’s like to be a retiree, so too does our audience.

On March 9th, we posted a teaser trailer on the comedians’ social accounts, as well as from the John Hancock and our partner's handles. The content pointed to retirementcomm.com, which also featured info about the series, and a retirement quiz for users wanting deeper engagement.

The second phase was the Activation phase, which took place at SXSW 2018. We filmed five episodes of content over two days, including a live “Unretirement Party” at our partner's Grill in the heart of Austin.

On March 20th we premiered John Hancock Retirement Community as part of our third and final phase: Distribution. Over the next month, two new episodes were released on retirementcomm.com every other Tuesday, with accompanying media placements on our partner's website and on social media. Each episode was paired with a unique piece of editorial content (quizzes, infographics, articles) that featured directional tips on financial health and retirement planning.

The creative idea was supported by a programmatic media campaign that captured an audience during the Teaser phase and retargeted them during the Distribution phase. The strategy capitalized on an active audience and brought them more of what they wanted later in the campaign, as more episodes became available.

While the results of the campaign will be final in June of 2018, initial social engagement rates were 3.5x times better than that of all other John Hancock social content during the same time period. Through the first three weeks of the John Hancock Retirement Community, content reached 5.5M viewers, resulting in 5.3M video views.