In 1996, an annuity ad foreshadowed a dire future:
“They say in thirty years a burger and fries could cost $16, a vacation $12,500 and a basic car $65,000.”
Now we're living in the world that advertising predicted – and as a result, it's gone repeatedly viral on Reddit and LinkedInand scored a lot media attention. But until now, no one has explained exactly HOW that ad saw no future – or the brilliant marketing strategy behind it.
The answer is: This ad started as all campaigns should.
“We started with our target audience. What were they thinking? And why?” says Todd Heymanan advertising creative director who created the ad together with the art director Bill Bonomo.
At the time, Heyman and Bonomo were working for the advertising agency Ogilvyand was given a review by a new customer. It was TIAA-CREF (now known simply as TIAA), a financial firm that offers investment and insurance products. The firm was looking for new clients and wanted to deliver this message: “You can count on TIAA-CREF to help ensure a comfortable retirement.”
“It was generic and bland,” Heyman recalls. “In short, we were asked to deliver the same message that almost every financial provider pours into the sea of ad similitude. To us, this was the equivalent of ad abuse.”
So Heyman and Bonomo began researching their audience. They realized that many people – if not most people! — found retirement investing to be intimidating, complicated and scary.
“Because of that, they fail to take action,” says Heyman. “They give in to procrastination, often for decades — until it's too late.”
Advertisers understood: If they just promoted TIAA-CREF retirement services, people wouldn't take action. They needed to overcome people's procrastination and inspire them to take action now.
Heyman explains what they did next:
So with that mindset in mind, what was the next logical step? How can we? PROVES for our investing audience now was it necessary?
We decided to focus on the result of inaction — of failing to invest and letting inflation destroy your dream of a comfortable retirement.
It was easy to do the math. We took the average inflation rate and extrapolated thirty years. Then we wrote the ad.
It was to attract attention. It was informative. It spurred people to action. And it was as close to a product demo as a title can get.
The ad depicts those outrageous prices over 30 years – a $16 burger, a $12,500 vacation and a $65,000 base car. Then he said, “No problem. You'll eat. You won't drive. And you won't go anywhere.”
From there, the ad explained TIAA-CREF's retirement planning services — which can help people afford those $16 hamburgers in the future.
Heyman and Bonomo thought some consumers might accuse them of fear mongering, but they weren't worried about that. “We prefer to believe that we used what you might call the 'emotional hard sell'—a powerful approach that appeals to both the left and right sides of the brain. For hearts AND minds,” says Heyman.
Thirty years later, their predictions were not THOROUGHLY true. of the average cost of a new car it's $48,000, for example – not $65,000. But the advertised prices are certainly realistic. Everyone today has probably bought a $16 burger, or at least seen one on a menu.
For Heyman and Bonomo, who are both independent creative directors today, the staying power of TIAA-CREF advertising has been valuable. If they had played it safe in 1996, they would have created something instantly forgettable. But instead, says Heyman, “thirty years later, the ad is not only still going, it's gone viral. How many ads can say that?”