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Who needs a pension when you have a job?

Convince businesses to hire over-65-year-olds. That was the brief we were given for The Pitch. If you’ve never heard of it, The Pitch is a segment where two agencies battle to “sell the unsellable”. It features on ABC’s long-running, always-entertaining Gruen, a show that unravels the dark arts of advertising. We looked at the brief from every angle. Did we want businesses to pity-hire older employees? Did we want to play up ‘diversity bingo’? What qualities did older people bring that would run circles around young whippersnappers?

If you’ve read anything on the internet in the last five years, the chances are you’ve read something pitting millennials and baby boomers against each other. Intergenerational warfare suggested a natural interest in putting Australia’s economic future front and centre. We searched for the numbers and found that the pensions and healthcare of an ageing population would cost half of company taxes next year. And that’s only the beginning.

But businesses could be part of the solution: they could be the central force in getting this generation to pull up their boostraps once again — and replace their pensions with a job.

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