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.

Our approach was to create a show, not a campaign. Instead of telling our audience about a product, we told them a story. So, while retirement was the subject, entertainment was our primary goal.

The result was a five-part web series hosted on a partnering website. Our story featured comedians Pete Holmes and Jamie Lee, stars of the hit HBO comedy series Crashing. It aired just a couple weeks after the season two finale of the show, capitalizing on a cultural moment and tapping into the loyalty of a pre-existing fan base.

We wanted to talk to a younger generation about retirement.

But not the kind of retirement they were used to hearing about. There was no Bingo, no monogrammed hand towels, no impossibly large yachts. We’re weren’t going to cram a “number” down their throats, and we certainly weren’t going to intimidate them about how unprepared they might be for the future.

Far from it.

Instead, we wanted to spread awareness by asking a question: what do you want to do with your life? Where do you want to go? What do you want to see? And when it’s time for you to throw in the towel on your career, will you inherit your grandparent’s idea of retirement or will you build your own? Because retirement isn’t about how much you spend, it’s about how you choose to spend your time.

John Hancock wanted to get more people thinking about retirement, earlier in life. The target was a younger generation of people who should be thinking about retirement– but definitely aren’t.

By eschewing the category’s unrelatable tropes and overused tools, we realized that we could connect our target audience to retirement on a much more human level. So, we worked with some unexpected talent to create entertaining content– supported by valuable information– to shift the focus from how much you’ll spend, to what you’ll spend your time on. A little change in perspective, some purposeful targeting, and a lot of comedy helped point the conversation in the right direction.