AAG Public Relations — Edward Herda

AMERICAN ADVISORS GROUP PR STRATEGY

HIGH-LEVEL RESULTS

10x Increase in Earned Media Value Over 2 Years

$15.2M Earned Media Ad Value

440% Increase in Earned Media Impressions

75% Increase in Positive Sentiment

< 0% Negative Sentiment

Prominent Article in The Wall Street Journal

Title Vice President, Creative Director and Brand Strategy

Role Communications and Public Relations Strategy

Years 2017 – 2022

OVERVIEW

When I took over the PR department in 2020, AAG had little to zero coverage outside of the mortgage echo chamber. There was no way the brand would shift the category without the financial press, and they weren’t returning our calls. Worse, whenever journalists covered the product, they got it wrong. Even they were convinced that a reverse mortgage was a trick to take grandma’s home. Nothing could be further from the truth.

AAG and the industry needed financial validators (e.g., financial advisors). To get financial validators, AAG needed the financial media to get on board. And to get the financial media, AAG needed newsworthy stories beyond new TV spots.

THE IDEA

Create a narrative using audience data and let journalists do the heavy lifting for AAG and the industry. The more compelling the data, the better.

Leading my PR team, we developed a series of surveys with enough respondents that would do a couple things:

Validate AAG’s messaging
Give the press something to write about

The survey idea was born out of the need to understand how the Covid pandemic affected our customers. We knew that seniors were struggling more than younger generations, but we didn’t know how badly. Over the course of two years, my team developed five surveys, tracking audience, adult children, and past customers.

THE RESULTS

In the first year of surveys, earned media impressions increased 360% and earned ad value increased 540%. In addition, category sentiment increased by 75%.

Positive Sentiment: 20% 2020 - 32% 2021 - 35% 2022 (and < 0% negative sentiment by Q4 2022)
Earned Media Impressions: 1.6B 2020 - 5.2B 2021 - 8.7B 2022
Total Ad Value: $1.5M 2020 - $9.8M 2021 - $15.2M 2022

But the cherry on top was The Wall Street Journal, a publication that never returned our emails penned a positive article that my team led point on scripting the narrative.