People’s Pension has launched its first national TV campaign as it looks to build mainstream brand awareness and reach millions of UK workers who are disengaged from their pensions.
The UK workplace pension provider serves more than seven million savers but says many people still do not know what it stands for or how it differs from its competitors.
Television gives it the scale to change that, with October activity expected to reach around 31 million working adults.
The new brand platform, “Famously Fair”, is built around the provider’s structural difference.
Its parent, People’s Partnership, has no shareholders and reinvests surplus profits for members, including through its Savings Reward programme, which returns more than £4 million to eligible savers each month.
David Meliveo, Chief Commercial Officer at People’s Pension, said: “Pensions don’t always feel like they are for everyone. We think that’s wrong, and we wanted to bring that unfairness to life through our first national TV campaign.”
The strategy is also a deliberate break from how pensions are usually marketed. Created by Bountiful Cow and directed by Sye Allen, the campaign stars comedian Joe Wilkinson as the provider’s “Fairy Godmother”, set in an “unfairground” where traditional fairground games are rigged against the people playing them.
Adam Foley, CEO of Bountiful Cow, said: “Financial services advertising can look a bit like wallpaper to most people, an entirely forgettable blizzard of numbers and people with grey hair smiling at laptops, with media bought in the same old places.”
“Famously Fair” is intended as a long-term platform rather than a one-off campaign, spanning consumer advertising, employer and adviser communications, social content and the provider’s wider voice on fairness in pensions.
It will run across linear TV, video-on-demand, YouTube, radio, social and out-of-home.
The campaign is also the first work delivered by Bountiful Cow since its remit expanded at the end of last year to cover creative, media and organic social.
UK pension providers are increasingly turning to mainstream brand advertising to reach workplace savers, as competition for engagement grows across a largely auto-enrolled market.