It’s possible to try out most things in life, but not retirement. However, this is precisely what Swiss Life’s “Retirement Trainees” content-marketing campaign does – it provides an experience of this phase in life. Four documentary films by famous author-film-makers portray meetings of young people with a range of senior citizens. The campaign makes Switzerland aware of an increasing life expectancy and puts its ideas about determining one’s own life to the test.

Based on the scientific study by GDI, we portrayed four different aging types that have totally different approaches to dealing with the golden years. We linked both the scientific relevance and likelihood of the experiences our protagonists had to different measures for each stakeholder.

Four young Swiss were “apprenticed” with four pensioners and spent time with them, in order to find out how life in old age will be. This generated four impressive documentary films, which were celebrated at the premiere of the 51st Solothurn Film Festival.

On the launch date we started the international seeding and outreach to media, bloggers and relevant opinion leaders to make them aware of the films and the high relevance of their two essential points. Internal communications, sales force training and social media outreach were undertaken simultaneously.

Experiencing life in later years was key. To obtain a broadly based response, “Retirement Trainees” events were held in different Swiss cities. Younger people had the opportunity to spend a couple of hours with inspirational seniors. Even journalists, bloggers and opinion leaders attended the events which resulted in additional content on owned and earned channels.

Tier 2: The viewing time of all the doc-films on YouTube: 6,000 HOURS (amounting to 250 x 24-hour days!) – With 16.69% view-rate at the top level of the Google benchmark.

Tier 2: A total reach of 1 million Swiss residents with 100% positive editorial and sponsored content.

Tier 3: Accessed pages at www.proberentner.ch: 65,000 unique visitors

Tier 3: A reach of 900,000 Swiss residents on Facebook. 14,000 Interactions – 99% were positive.