We are bombarded with visual stereotypes of aging and ageist attitudes. Images in media portray aging either as decline and frailty, or as something that should be erased. This daily infusion of negative images has a powerful effect on our collective vision of aging. The Disrupt Aging Rapid Response "Aging in the News" effort aims to provoke, inspire, and educate our audience to recognize ageism and champion a new narrative of aging. By creating weekly social-first video content related to what's happening in the news cycle, we want to drive a social conversation around these key objectives:
Disrupt Aging's target audience is not necessarily familiar with AARP beyond the stereotype (see the SNL Alexa skit), or they are throwing AARP membership materials in the trash. We are using the rapid response effort to change this mindset and introduce target audiences to AARP's passionate commitment to its social mission and vision: A society in which all people live with dignity and purpose – and fulfill their goals and dreams.
Team members are constantly monitoring the news cycle to identify opportunities for Disrupt Aging to respond to or frame a current news event. When a story is identified, the decision to move forward is based on answering these three questions:
The production team takes an insight gleaned from the chosen news event and turns it into a strong visual story within 24-48 hours. We then maximize the impact of the video by sharing it with our internal partners. We'll create versions in Spanish to share on AARP's en Español platforms, and the social team makes each video available for cross-posting by other AARP Facebook pages.
We have a bold but flexible graphics template, that allows us to gracefully showcase a wide range of stories—including those that take place on increasingly important social platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Similarly, we have an easily-replicable but also adaptable scripting template that encourages rapid ideation and makes it easy for different writers to keep tone and messaging consistent.
Since May, AARP has created 36 Rapid Response videos that drove 1.4MM+ views (with a 25% or higher completion rate), 15K+ comments, and 21K shares across Disrupt Aging social channels (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter), including fully-Spanish versions for relevant stories.
