To overcome our greatest financial challenges as Americans, we must first understand their roots. Prudential believes that this understanding begins in the hard wiring of our brains, impacting the irrational decisions we make with money.

Despite our ambition, most of us aren’t programmed to plan responsibly for the future. We procrastinate, we succumb to instant gratification, we underestimate risk, and we follow the herd.

But in a low-involvement category how do you get people to engage with a financial brand in meaningful way?

Prudential created something that felt, looked and operated unlike anything you would expect from a financial brand. We launched a fully integrated, multichannel platform that appealed to today’s participatory, spreadable media’ culture by serving up behavioral insights in simple, entertaining ways to help people understand the paths to better decision-making. We called it ‘The Challenge Lab’.

We brought this participatory outlook to a mass audience through an innovative use of TV that focused on community and crowd-sourced data. We partnered with Harvard professor Dan Gilbert to document a series of real-world, people powered experiments the reframed the way we understand and engage with our financial future.

Our objectives:

1) Use advertising to increase favorability more than any other competitor. Prudential was the sole brand in the category to see gains in favorability while motivating consumers to “start thinking about their financial future”.

2) Break into financial advisors’ circle of trust. We aimed to become an attractive partner to financial advisors, specifically: reaching new highs in brand by surpassing key competitors (MetLife, Fidelity) in impression and Consideration, and driving the association of Pru as an “essential partner.”

3) Achieve category leading social engagement We aimed to use provocative content to establish a category-leading social presence with off-the-charts engagement. Specifically, we aimed to establish Pru’s social presence, drive viewership of video content and catapult earned media value (improving upon last year’s highly successful Day One campaign.)

4) Develop high-engagement content that can support individual business lines. We aimed to translate our campaign idea down the purchase funnel and in the case of Retirement Services, which fully leveraged the creative assets, we wanted to encourage Pru’s current customers to contribute more to their retirement plans. This is key because employee contributions are what Pru uses to generate returns and grow.