In 1996, a retirement ad told of a terrible future:
“They say in thirty years a burger & fries could cost $16, a vacation $12,500, and a basic car $65,000.”
Now we’re living in the world that ad predicted — and as a result, it has gone repeatedly viral on Reddit and LinkedIn, and scored a lot of media attention. But until now, nobody explained exactly how that ad saw the future — or the brilliant marketing strategy behind it.
The answer is: This ad began the way all campaigns should.
“We started with our target audience. What were they thinking? And why?” says Todd Heyman, an advertising creative director who created the ad alongside art director Bill Bonomo.
At the time, Heyman and Bonomo worked for the ad agency Ogilvy, and were given a brief by a new client. It was TIAA-CREF (now known simply as TIAA), a financial firm that provides investment and insurance products. The firm was seeking new customers and wanted to push 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 being asked to churn out the same message that pretty much every financial provider pours into advertising’s sea of sameness. For us, that was the equivalent of advertising malpractice.”
So Heyman and Bonomo started 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,” Heyman says. “They give in to procrastination, often for decades — until it’s too late.”
The advertisers realized: If they simply promoted TIAA-CREF’s 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 given that mindset, what was the logical next step? How could we prove to our audience that investing now was imperative?
We decided to focus on the result of inaction — of failing to invest and letting inflation decimate your dream of a comfortable retirement.
It was easy to do the math. We took the average rate of inflation and extrapolated out thirty years. Then we wrote the ad.
It was attention-getting. It was informative. It spurred people to act. And it was as close to a product demonstration as a headline can get.
The ad described those wild prices in 30 years — a $16 burger, $12,500 vacation, and $65,000 basic car. Then it said: “No problem. You’ll eat in. You won’t drive. And you won’t go anywhere.”
From there, the ad explained TIAA-CREF’s retirement planning services — which could help people afford those $16 burgers in the future.
Heyman and Bonomo thought some consumers might accuse them of fearmongering, but they weren’t worried about it. “We prefer to believe we leveraged what you can call ’emotional hard sell’ — a powerful approach that appeals to the left and right side of the brain. To hearts and minds,” Heyman says.
Thirty years later, their predictions weren’t entirely true. The average cost of a new car is $48,000, for example — not $65,000. But the prices in the ad are all certainly realistic. Everyone today has probably purchased a $16 burger, or at least seen one on a menu.
To Heyman and Bonomo, who are both freelance creative directors today, the TIAA-CREF ad’s staying power has been validating. If they played it safe back in 1996, they’d have created something instantly forgettable. But instead, Heyman says, “thirty years later, the ad is not only still holding up, it’s become viral. How many pieces of advertising can say that?”
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