(Photo credit: Arturo Olmos for AARP)
AARP, which is dedicated to helping people live their best lives as they age, likes to pop up in unexpected places, from New Orleans Jazz Fest to Sturgis Motorcycle Rally to pickleball championships. So when the Rolling Stones approached AARP to sponsor the ’24 Hackney Diamonds North American Tour, which hit 16 cities from April through July, the brand saw an opportunity to satisfy its multigenerational strategy and supersize on surprise and delight.
And surprise it did. While music is always a focus area for AARP, the high-profile tour opened up opportunities for the brand team to experiment, ride waves of buzz and position members as heroes within their families and circles. Among “cheeky” headlines on the sponsorship: “Mick Jagger Hints He May be Ready to Embrace Old Age by Letting America’s Biggest Organization for the Elderly Sponsor the Rolling Stones’ Upcoming Tour” (The Daily Mail) and “The Rolling Stones’ Boomer Superfans Crashed AARP’s Website.” (The Philadelphia Inquirer). More on that in a moment.
“We like to surprise and delight people in where we show up, how we show up and the value that we deliver. We have really good parameters and understand what our objectives are,” Barbara Shipley, svp-brand integration at AARP, told EM. “We did some things with the Rolling Stones that we’ve never done before, which was really exciting.”
Sweepstakes & Member Presale
One of those never-been-done-before activities was to offer an AARP members-only ticket presale for 48 hours before it opened to the general public. Shipley says the brand underestimated the sheer force surrounding the fandom and even experienced a “Taylor Swift Eras Tour moment” when traffic became so intense that the AARP site went down for an hour. Impressively, the team worked quickly to reinstate it before the next time zone unlock.
AARP also collaborated with the Rolling Stones tour team on a sweepstakes promoted across social media that focused on the Las Vegas tour stop and included travel, hotel and backstage passes as part of the winning package.
“We built in things that we knew would give us that ROI, and when you think about the metrics and all of that great engagement in digital, social and even traditional, it was the member presale that changed the game for us, because we made it easy,” Shipley says. “When you went to the landing page, you could join AARP right there. The sheer number of people who joined in a 48-hour period was pretty phenomenal.”
On-site Activations
Knowing they would have a captive audience of superfans on-site at each show, the AARP team brought the sponsorship to life with branded photo ops and engagements at the concerts. Attendees could pose in front of the iconic Rolling Stones “Hot Lips” logo, or strap on guitars and pose in front of a stage backdrop, and then take home images of the experiences. At another activation, attendees could grab drumsticks and drum to the beat on the video screens, matching the rhythms to one of 15 classic rock songs. After they finished, they were introduced to a quick fact about the connection between music and brain health.
“There is a lot that is out of your control when you’re sponsoring, whether that’s ticket prices or how other aspects unfold, but one great data point that we heard from tour management was that they added shows earlier in the process than they had before, which meant we were overdelivering on their expectations,” Shipley says. “For a brand like ours, that’s a great show of what we’re capable of.”
(Photo Credit: Arturo Olmos for AARP)
Surprise and Delight
Ahead of each show, ticket holders who were AARP members could drop their name and contact information into a digital fishbowl for the opportunity to win upgraded seats at the concert. Shipley recalls personally escorting a father-daughter duo into VIP seats closer to the stage and the once-in-a-lifetime excitement in the moment. It was one of many rich stories and fodder that emerged throughout the tour, on top of media coverage that played into the unexpected, yet well-gelled, partnership between the brand and the band. Shipley and her team call it a “lightning in a bottle” moment for the organization.
“One of the things that we try to avoid is, we don’t want to just be the sponsors of the nostalgia tours. There’s a lot of logic to that strategy, but part of our message in being an advocate for this audience is to make sure that people understand this audience is still discovering new music. This audience is still a tastemaker. This audience is still exploring new things,” she says. “And so, the fact that they had the ‘Hackney Diamonds’ album made it an unbeatable proposition for us, because where they are in their career and still making music, and great music at that, and loving doing it, is such an important message for our brand.”
Partners: DMI Music (strategic music agency partner); REACH (experiential, talent and tour negotiations); AEG Presents’ Concerts West (tour promoter).
