Music has always been important for Florica Roșca and her family. Her younger son, Luiz, has loved rock music since he was a teenager and he played in the highschool rock band. Seeing her son grab his black leather jacket, AC/DC shirt and headscarf, hop on his motorbike and go to a rock concert would always make Florica’s heart skip a beat. Was rock music a bad thing since, to her, it sometimes sounded aggressive? What made her son immerse into a music genre she could not fully understand? “It makes me feel so free, he used to say”, Florica remembers now, more than 20 years later. “And he was right”.
Since then, Florica started going to rock concerts too, together with Luiz and his elder brother, trading soft romance music for ‘80s and ‘90s Romanian rock bands like Iris, Phoenix and Sfinx. It was a pleasure for her to discover a world that her son loved and to see that it made her feel good as well. Fast forward 20 years and Florica is as active and curious as she was back then: a 73-year-old retired pharmacist, she reads, she goes to the theatre at least two times a week, she goes to church and carefully listens to the priest’s sermon and she sometimes takes the time to go to concerts – even something recently as big as this year’s edition of Electric Castle Festival, which Florica considers an adventure and a revelation at the same time.
Florica was joined at the festival by five other retired people that share the same passion for music, as part of #festivalforever, a campaign of NN Romania. The brand was looking for an innovative way to raise awareness on the importance of private pensions to a younger audience and bringing a group of elder people to Electric Castle was the perfect opportunity for that, says Cătălina Mergeani, Marketing Communication Manager of NN Romania. “Our wish was to have some real people as solid examples, real people who believe in this message and still experience passions that have stayed the same since a younger age. Our studies show that one of the reasons [younger people] do not make long term savings is that they cannot envision their older selves. This is why we decided on a group of real elder people, who can be seen in the crowd. Our message was: passions do not disappear with aging, and in order to connect with them later in life you need to start preparing ahead, obviously by saving money”, adds Mergeani. Thought by Headvertising agency together with NN Romania and implemented with the help of Skepsis, the #festivalforever campaign was selected as the most creative advertising idea of July 2016 by ADC*RO, a group of creatives from Romanian agencies.
The shows at Electric Castle did wonders for Florica, dressed in one of her son’s AC/DC T-shirts, and one of his colored headscarves. “I got to experience the freedom my son was talking about and to see the community spirit that holds young people together. It literally made me feel I was somewhere between earth and sky, like the priest sometimes says in church”, says Florica.
When her family first heard she was going to Electric Castle, they could not believe it. But she knows now that she wants to try it again next year. “Being retired doesn’t necessarily mean you only sit all day long and not do anything. I like to keep myself busy and do the things I love – painting, going to the theatre, reading, going to church and listening to good music”, says Florica.
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Photo credits: Cătălin Georgescu
