From the editor: Ads should be powerful (but not too powerful

It featured a photograph of a man in his early 20s followed by a succession of doctored images of the same man at ten-year intervals. Underneath all but one of the pictures was the phrase “I must start saving for a pension soon”. The final picture showed the man – dishevelled and miserable now – as a retiree forced to live off the state pension as his only means of income. You can relax: this is not a piece about the retirement savings gap, but about the potential power of advertising, particularly in financial services. It is not clear whether the above was a provider’s advertisem...