SunLife, which offers savings plans and other products to the over 50s, is changing tack in favour of a big bold brand campaign from Mother. SunLife mainly uses celeb Sir Michael Parkinson in its ads.
SunLife’s over 50s savings plan, like most such offerings, has its critics. So the insurer, now owned by Phoenix Group, is no doubt wise to steer away from specifics. Part of a £23m media spend.
The new campaign -‘Welcome to life after 50’ – follows a big piece of research among 50,000 such folk. SunLife marketing director Ian Atkinson says: “Almost three-quarters of people over 50 say they never appear in mainstream advertising, and many still face discrimination many areas of life. Which is utterly bizarre: why do we discriminate against a group we all fervently hope we’ll join?
“Some people still believe that turning 50 is something to worry about, that life slows down after that – but after conducting the UK’s biggest-ever study with 50,000 people over 50 we know that’s not the case at all: for many, life after 50 is the best time of their lives.”
So here they are putting it about a bit.
Baby boomers (people born shortly after the war when conjugal relations revived strongly for some reason), many of whom are now pensioners, are, indeed, supposed to be better off than younger people in the UK, in relative terms anyway.
So you can see what this is getting at. And agency Mother is good at tabloid stuff, as with MoneySuperMarket.
Not sure about this one though. It’s still pigeon-holing people although maybe that’s inevitable.
MAA creative scale: 6.
This is an updated version of an earlier story.
