NEWS | Mallett’s Mallet rebooted to give UK a pensions wake up call

📢 80s favourite, @TimmyMallett, is the next celeb to pick up the pensions megaphone as he calls on UK to take an Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny look at their pension with ‘#ThePensionsPlayback’https://t.co/6ri5EEq1h1 pic.twitter.com/UwzGhiMAXf

— Pay Your Pension Some Attention! (@PensionAttn) September 20, 2023

As flagged in a previous blog, (Pay your) Pension (some) Attention has booted out big Zuu and replaced him with Timmy Mallett – pitching for the attention of a different demographic, one for whom the pension is a little closer to payment.

I thought Timmy Mallett a nonsense first time around but this nostalgic 3.21 minutes of good natured fun is harmless and kept me watching. I paid enough attention to get 5/10 on the nostalgia quiz that followed and hung around long enough to find some interesting stuff on the site – that I’d likely use.

There’s just about enough sense coming from Timmy Mallett to suggest he could become pensions aware but the agenda is still more about what is malleted in than what comes out as retirement income.

What comes out of Mallett is pure nonsense, what goes in is 3 minutes of my life that won’t come back.

And the “pension” is all about what’s happening between you, your payroll and the sponsors of Pension Attention. It’s about your money with them. It’s not – for the most part about your pension.

The Pension Attention campaign is a co-ordinated industry campaign led by the Association of British Insurers (ABI) and the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA) to boost pension awareness and engagement.

Ten million well spent? Well – rather better spent than last year!

Broadening the agenda past savings

I came at all this with a fair degree of scepticism having been a little disappointed by pension awareness week.

I left the site- 20 minutes later , feeling a little better. Actually quite a lot better. If Pension Attention can get people to use the three steps to pension heaven

Step one – Look back to yesterday – find your lost pensions

Step two- Lean in to what you have today – See what you might have in retirement in minutes

Step three -Move forward to your future Take the first steps towards a simple retirement plan

I used all three links and all three worked. They are all code from other sites but that’s better than spending time and money repeating what others’ have achieved.

It would be good if the code for these three services could be shared with organisations supporting Pension Attention.

Taken together , the user journey through the three steps is a good one. I found myself getting more and more interested in my retirement as I moved from step to step.

Getting the message out.

I’m assuming that the aim of all this pension awareness stuff is to get the public up to speed with their pension rights , whether from their pot, works or state pension.

For the good stuff on the site to be visited, there is going to have to be a lot of signposting.

Why wasn’t this Pension Attention stuff available last week to be promoted by the Geeks and friends (especially as Pension Attention was one of the sponsors)?

We really need to have a better purpose behind what we are promoting. Most of what we are doing is simply reinforcing the need to save lots of money. This however is only the case with a proportion of the population.

The move to target Generation X and possibly the boomers with Timmy Mallet is probably a step in the right direction. Big Zuu had  the impact of Workie and was gesturing to Generation Rent at a time when they had other things on their mind.

Last year Pension Attention and Big Zuu managed to attract 10 followers on Tic-Toc. The viewing figures on the Tic Toc videos suggest it was mostly visited by those inside our bubble. These numbers suggest hardly any engagement wider.

As at 20/09/23

The numbers for twitter , facebook and instagram are also pretty awful.

But worst of all, a site that trades on its videos has no youtube stream.

With  nothing on YouTube and derivatives to get this campaign going viral , I wonder if – like Pension Awareness Day – this campaign is too much the industry speaking to itself.