Editorial: Nothing says workplace pensions like an oversized, multicoloured, Furby-type thing. I am, of course, talking about the mascot featured in the government’s latest advertising campaign on auto-enrolment.
Workie, as he/she/it is known, can be seen in the ad traipsing around a park trying to make friends but roundly being shunned. ‘Don’t ignore it’ is the message – and the hashtag – but many have done no such thing.
Some of the initial responses to the campaign branded it childish and patronising. Meanwhile the Department for Work and Pensions’ Iain Duncan Smith has been chided for spending around £8.5m on a cutesy monster while making swingeing cuts to disabled people’s benefits.
But some folks really do like cute things, while others like to hate both them and those that do, making this so far the best reaction to any bit of government campaigning on pensions in recent years. The fact people are having any sort of emotional response to Workie at all is its merit.
The other hard-to-achieve victory has come from the campaign’s targeting of both employer and employee.
It is a move that perhaps risks muddying the message, but presumably the idea is that, on a spectrum with the corporate employer at one end and the man on the street on the other, small and micro employers are deemed more akin to the latter and will respond to similar messaging.
Illustration by Ben Jennings
At the very least this expensive campaign has hopefully killed two birds with one stone.
The Workie ads come at a time when small businesses seem to have organisations falling over themselves to help them through auto-enrolment.
Providers have naturally led the charge, but this week the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association unveiled its £49 package that guides small business owners through the process.
It also allows users to rate and review the service they receive, which could spawn a consumer-led movement to raise standards in the AE space.
Hopefully Workie will compel employers and workers to engage appropriately. But at a dizzying time for pensions in terms of public awareness, where AE almost competes with notions of pension freedom, communicators must be mindful of the risk that the message could become confused.
Maxine Kelly is editor at Pensions Expert. You can follow her on Twitter @MaxineEK and the team @pensions_expert
