Case Study: Making Icons' Audiences Our Own

Goal

As the social media agency for the Alliance for Lifetime Income, a non-profit that educates Americans about protected income in retirement, we were tasked with building and engaging the Alliance’s digital audiences around useful retirement planning information. For three years, we had a unique opportunity: The Alliance was the sole sponsor for The Rolling Stones’ 2019 and 2021 North American #NoFilter tours and in 2022, solely sponsored Elton John’s North American Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour.

Challenge

Our challenge was to best leverage these rare opportunities to help the Alliance engage a wider audience online with educational resources, interactive tools, and actionable research and insights to use in building their retirement plans. We knew the tours would drive interest, but we needed to make sure that interest led to lasting engagement with the organization and its mission.

Approach

Assemble took a multi-tiered approach to raising awareness of the value of protected income while leveraging the partnerships and tours to reach the Alliance’s target demographic, Americans 45 years old and up.

Each partnership included sponsored social media posts from the musicians’ accounts. While working closely with each artist’s digital teams, Assemble created engaging content that was both on message for the Alliance and met The Rolling Stones’ and Elton John’s stringent brand requirements. Similarly, we created videos to play on stage before each concert that highlighted the artists’ enthusiastic fan bases while promoting the Alliance.

We also targeted the artists’ fans by running ticket sweepstakes for each tour, supported by paid media, and leveraged the sweepstakes as an email acquisition tool.

Finally, the partnerships with The Rolling Stones and Elton John provided us with the opportunity to connect with the Alliance’s core demographic in person at onsite activations at select shows. We took advantage of the onsite activations by interviewing fans to generate unique content for social media.

RESULTS

We acquired nearly 100,000 new email subscribers from ticket sweepstakes during the tours, all while significantly lowering the Alliance’s cost-per-email acquisition with each subsequent tour. Better still, subscribers have remained highly engaged, with a less than 1% unsubscribe rate.

Elton John posted Assemble-created content about the Alliance to his 13 million+ fans 37 times throughout the tour, driving over 300,000 video views, nearly 30,000 engagements, and a gain of over 80,000 across digital audiences for 2022.

The Rolling Stones posted Assemble-produced content about the Alliance to their nearly 25 million fans more than 30 times during the tour, driving nearly 400,000 views, over 6.3M impressions, and a gain of over 43,000 email subscribers.

posts created for Elton John’s and The Rolling Stone’s social accounts.

new email subscribers for the Alliance

video interview testimonials from concertgoers

The videos Assemble produced to play on stage before each performance garnered over 2.8 million impressions for The Rolling Stones tour in 2021 and over 10 million impressions for the Elton John tour in 2022.

The interviews at the Alliance onsite activations produced over 237 testimonials from concertgoers.

Case Study

The Alliance for Lifetime Income

MAKING ICONS’ AUDIENCES OUR OWN