Encore: Work that matters in the second half of life.

Print Ad:

A big swing and a … Miss!

This ad is a good indicator of the widespread confusion about the new stage of life. As Marc Freedman writes about this ad in Encore:

“The advertisement starts with a clever line that is true enough: ‘The generation that wouldn’t trust anyone over 30…never planned on a 30-year retirement.

“Then Allstate reverts to convention. The ad posits boomers’ greatest fear: ‘living to see the well run dry.’ The point: Dramatic extension of life expectancy in the United States requires an equally dramatic investment in one’s own retirement savings. After all, how else can you sustain thirty years, half of one’s adulthood, outside the working life? the ad drives to its punch line: Let’s save retirement by saving for retirement. That’s Allstate’s stand.’

“But who looks forward to endless retirement, thirty years of R&R? More to the point, who can afford it — even with the most diligent savings plan? Allstate’s vision, like the Golden Years version of retirement that reigned over the past half century, is already obsolete. Stretched from a sensible and justified period of leisure and relaxation into a phase as long as midlife in duration, retirement…has been distorted into something that no longer works for most individuals — or for the nation.”