Nedbank advised South Africans to start smoking — to expose the retirement-savings gap

Retirement saving is the product category everyone skips: it asks people to dwell on old age and death, so rational pitches about compounding and annuities slide off. South Africans live longer than previous generations while saving too little, and the Nedbank campaign put a number on it — by its own copy, 94% of people will outlive their retirement savings.

With agency Joe Public, Nedbank ran a print execution that looked like a bad decision: a single cigarette and the headline "Start Smoking Today." The long copy explains the logic with a straight face — smoking is simply one option for making sure you don't survive your savings. The style is deliberately old-school: no product demo, no app screenshot, one image and a block of type that does all the work.

The reversal is the engine. Nobody can be argued into caring about retirement with charts, but tell a reader to pick up a deadly habit for financial reasons and they will refute you in a second — and the argument they just won is exactly the bank's case. The fine print completes the turn: instead of a new, dirty habit, choose a healthier one, saving, and Nedbank's savings and investment solutions let you face aging with some calm.

The craft was recognized at home first — a Loerie Award Craft Certificate for writing in October 2024 — and in June 2025 the work was shortlisted in the Print & Publishing Lions at Cannes in the Consumer Services / Business to Business category.

Recommend the habit that kills before savings do

Deliberately bad advice recruits self-persuasion: the reader refutes the ad and lands on the bank's argument as their own conclusion.

It merges the two topics people refuse to think about — death and old age — into one image, converting avoidance into attention.

Framing saving as the healthier alternative to smoking borrows the reader's self-preservation instinct for the bank's goal.

Long-copy print matches the considered, high-stakes nature of retirement products; the medium signals that this is worth reading slowly.

When your message is avoided because it frightens, don't soften it — make the fear absurd enough to approach. Deliberately wrong advice makes the audience argue themselves into your case.

The campaign earned a Loerie Craft Certificate for writing in October 2024 and was shortlisted at Cannes Lions 2025 in the Print & Publishing Lion (Consumer Services / Business to Business), giving South Africa's green bank a memorable entry in the boring-category art of making people face their own futures.