However times I may have tried, I can safely say I would never have come up with a workplace advertising campaign along the lines of ‘Workie’. That said, I’m no advertising expert and would also never have come up with a bunch of friendly meerkats to advertise insurance or a gorilla playing the drums to advertise chocolate – and look at the lasting impact of those adverts!
At the moment it is the pensions industry who are criticising the campaign – those people who are well aware of auto-enrolment and therefore not the intended audience. Only time will tell whether Workie does actually raise awareness of workplace pensions and indeed make consumers and business owners ‘stop ignoring it’.
The long tail of auto-enrolment was always going to be where the main challenges lie and I fear it will be the system of fines for non-compliance that will drive more action, media coverage and hence consumer awareness.
With an £8.5m spend at this time of austerity and benefit cuts, this campaign will undoubtedly be lambasted by a large number and one wonders how much we will have to spend to make workplace pensions work. Would it be simpler to implement pension compulsion for all tax payers and be done with it?
