When your campaign starts making people feel old, that’s usually a bad sign. But for Liberty Mutual Insurance, that was the whole idea.

The auto insurance company set out to start a conversation about feeling old – specifically, a conversation between baby boomers and their elderly parents about when it’s time to stop driving. As the Liberty Mutual team discovered, fewer than a quarter of U.S. boomers were having this talk with parents who still drove. That matters because, after teens, the elderly cause more accidents than any other age group, with many more fatalities. By 2020, there will be 55 million people over 65 on U.S. roads. It’s a global problem, with the world’s population of people 65 and older expected to triple to 1.5 billion by 2050.

So it’s not a conversation that can wait. We needed to make boomers feel the urgency, to experience just what it’s like to get behind the wheel when you’re 80. Absent time travel, how do you do that? Using a “senior simulator” suit that limited flexibility and restricted movement, the team suited up top media and put them behind the wheel of a car.

Making top-tier reporters feel old kicked up the conversation. In fact, it raised the senior driving conversation in the U.S. media by 160%. Likewise, traffic accelerated 158% to the Liberty Mutual Insurance senior driving site, where boomers got tips on having “the talk.” Overnight, Liberty Mutual Insurance became a conversation starter and a leader on the critical issue of senior driving.

On October 1, outside the Brooklyn Museum in New York, we created driving courses that included parallel parking, turning and other simple tasks. Invited journalists, however, didn't find these tasks simple. That’s because before they got behind the wheel, they donned the Liberty Mutual Insurance “senior simulator” suit, which created the feeling of being 80, complete with joint pain, limited flexibility and restricted movement from head to toe. Media were startled to find how difficult something as basic as checking your blind spot became.

We also gave these “suddenly senior” journalists tips on having “the talk” with senior drivers, assembling experts such as Dave Melton, Liberty Mutual Insurance’s director of global safety; Katherine Freund, founder of ITNAmerica, which arranges transportation for seniors who don’t drive; and Betty Abrams, 89, who shared what it’s like to give up your keys.

Simultaneously, we released our senior driving survey results – complete with a shareable info graphic.

Journalists couldn't wait to get out of the senior simulator, but they also couldn't wait to share their experiences. Within days, coverage appeared in broadcast outlets, including CNN. In addition, top-tier print outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, were talking “the talk.” Among national and local U.S. media, we raised the senior driving conversation by 160% from the previous month and 47% between October 2012 and October 2013. We logged more than 38 million media impressions, with nearly all delivering our messaging on “the talk” and pointing to Liberty Mutual Insurance’s site on senior driving, where traffic jumped 158%.

The topic of senior driving is no longer a road less travelled. By making people feel what it’s like to be uncomfortable behind the wheel as a senior, Liberty Mutual Insurance has jump started a universally urgent conversation – initially among Americans – that can make so many feel uncomfortable, even in middle age. Call it a new kind of driver’s education.