Prudential / The Challenge Lab

Retirement Math Is Hard. Human Behavior is Harder.

The average American had saved $38,000 for retirement. Take one look at the financial tools available and it's easy to understand why — most calculators are cold, overly complicated, and have designs only a mathematician could love. So instead of talking about diversification and market performance, we focused on something more fundamental: why people make the decisions they do.

In partnership with professors from leading universities, we created The Challenge Lab — a content platform organized around five key behavioral challenges: instant gratification, procrastination, herd mentality, misjudging risk, and the reality that we're living longer than we plan for. Through over 75 pieces of content — films, experiments, expert articles, interactive tools — the site helped people who may not know anything about finance understand something even more important: themselves. We enlisted top artists, illustrators, and type designers to turn surprising retirement facts into beautiful, shareable works of art. Then we designed the experience to break complicated topics into pieces people could actually consume without feeling overwhelmed. Campaign elements spanned live events filmed and edited into TV spots — including a Super Bowl spot — social, interactive tools, OOH, and a website featuring over 100 pieces of content.

Impact: Cannes Titanium Lion, Gold and Silver Cannes Lions, Cannes Cyber Lions, D&AD Graphite Pencil, Effie Awards for Sustained Success, Andy Awards Gold, Webby Awards, One Show recognition, and Clio shortlist. 141% increase in social mentions and 2.4M earned Twitter impressions within the first month — a 1,000% increase from pre-launch. Ad Age reported a 25% increase in overall brand impressions and 72% lift in consideration. Coverage from Ad Age, Fast Company, Adweek, WARC, MediaPost, and a segment on John Oliver's Last Week Tonight.

Role: Concept, Art Direction, Design Direction