• by Larissa Faw , September 19, 2014

Last year, Prudential and its ad shop Droga5 launched a series of commercials that depict real-life visual experiments in order to motivate Americans to better understand and prepare for retirement. People explored age and retirement through "Mirrors," "Stickers," and "Ribbons."

Now, Prudential is launching Dominos, the fourth in the series that continue to showcase real people engaged in a live, crowd-sourced experiments.

In this latest spot, Prudential topples a 30-foot-tall domino stone, starting with a normal-size domino, to convey the long-term outcome of consistent retirement investing. Then, one person in the group sets the small domino against the first domino in the row and tips it over, starting a chain reaction that begins knocking down bigger and bigger dominos. The ad can be seen here.

In doing so, Prudential has set a new world record for the tallest domino stone ever toppled, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. 

The “Dominoes” ad is also available on bringyourchallenges.com, an informational Web site that gets thought-leaders in the field of behavioral psychology to explore the hard-wired behaviors that often get in the way of financial planning. 

"Like our previous commercials, we wanted to change how people view retirement in hopes of driving them to change their behavior,” said Colin McConnell, vice president of advertising for Prudential. “Many people are hard-wired to believe that small inputs will only yield small results. We wanted to convey the opposite. By using dominoes as a visual metaphor, we were able to show how the money you have in your pocket, even if it is a small amount, can affect something as big as retirement if you make regular investments through a long-term investment strategy.” 

Harvard professor and best-selling author Dan Gilbert serves as the ad's narrator. He asks a group of people how much money they have in their pockets and also to write the amount on a small domino. He then leads the group to a row of larger dominoes arranged by size that mimic a graph to demonstrate the growth of the average person’s retirement contributions over 30 years’ time.

Prudential Financial has spent $51.87 million on advertising between January to June 2014, compared to $42.75 million for the first six months in 2013, according to Kantar Media. Last year, the company's total annual advertising budget was $91.5 million.