Prudential breaks Guinness Book of World Records in new ad

Prudential Financial (NYSE:PRU) announced today the launch of its fourth commercial in a series about the importance of saving for retirement. The latest, “Dominoes” features a live, crowd-sourced experiment that illustrates the power small investments can have on retirement. Prudential topples a 30-foot-tall domino stone, starting with a normal-size domino, to convey the long-term outcome of consistent retirement investing. In doing so, Prudential set a new world record for the tallest domino stone ever toppled.

“Like our previous commercials, we wanted to change how people view retirement in hopes of driving them to change their behavior,” said Colin McConnell, vice president of Advertising for Prudential. “Many people are hard-wired to believe that small inputs will only yield small results. We wanted to convey the opposite. By using dominoes as a visual metaphor, we were able to show how the money you have in your pocket, even if it is a small amount, can affect something as big as retirement if you make regular investments through a long-term investment strategy.”

The experiment involves Harvard professor and best-selling author Dan Gilbert, who asks a group of people how much money they have in their pockets and to write the amount on a small domino.

He then leads the group to a row of larger dominoes arranged by size that mimic a graph to demonstrate the growth of the average person’s retirement contributions over 30 years’ time. A person in the group sets the small domino against the first domino in the row and tips it over, starting a chain reaction that begins knocking down bigger and bigger dominos.

“Dominoes” is part of a series of award-winning ads from Prudential and external agency partner Droga5 that depict real-life visual experiments designed to motivate Americans to better understand and prepare for retirement. It follows the “Mirrors” and “Stickers” spots, launched in 2013, and the “Ribbons” commercial, launched earlier this year. And like the others in this series, “Dominoes,” which will begin airing today, features real people instead of actors. The “Dominoes” ad is also available on bringyourchallenges.com, the award-winning web site that taps thought leaders in the field of behavioral psychology to explore the hard-wired behaviors that often get in the way of financial planning.

Prudential Financial, Inc. (NYSE:PRU), a financial services leader with more than $1.1 trillion of assets under management as of June 30, 2014, has operations in the United States, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Prudential’s diverse and talented employees are committed to helping individual and institutional customers grow and protect their wealth through a variety of products and services, including life insurance, annuities, retirement-related services, mutual funds and investment management. In the U.S., Prudential’s iconic Rock symbol has stood for strength, stability, expertise and innovation for more than a century. For more information, please visit www.news.prudential.com.

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