“Saturday, March 24th, 1984. Shermer High School. Shermer, Illinois, 60062.”
These are the opening lines to one of the most iconic movies of the 1980s, “The Breakfast Club.” The John Hughes classic has become a cultural touchstone for Generation X and, decades after the film’s release, March 24 has come to be celebrated as “Detention Day” in Gen X social media spaces.
The Goal: How do you build brand affinity and establish a connection with a generation that has often been overlooked? This challenge is central to AARP’s approach on TikTok. Leaning into what makes TikTok unique, we have established a brand voice that is witty, a little irreverent, and genuinely Gen X – steeped in ’80s and ’90s culture. Our goal? To reach and engage Gen X audiences through entertaining and relatable content that resonates with their life experiences.
The Idea: With the 40th anniversary of “Detention Day” approaching, we knew we wanted to be part of this cultural moment. To do that, we looked to the Gen X creator community to help us create something unique and memorable.
We faced a unique creative challenge: how to pay tribute to the iconic ’80s movie without using film clips or music from the soundtrack. Inspired by one Gen X creator’s recreation of Ally Sheedy's memorable sandwich scene, we set out to recreate the larger lunch scene with all five main characters. The result was a 1 minute and 42 second video, revisiting the scene with high attention to detail – and not a single word of dialogue.
How We Did It: We'd previously collaborated with the original creator, Nadine Vigil, and reached out to see if she would reprise her role as Ally Sheedy’s “Allison.” With Nadine on board, we set out to cast the remaining characters. Leonard Burns became Emilio Estevez’s “Andrew,” John Kotrides took on Judd Nelson’s “Bender,” and Mishal Underwood channeled her inner Molly Ringwald as “Claire.” AARP “TikTok guy” Craig Moorhead rounded out the cast as Anthony Michael Hall’s “Brian.”
Each creator shot their scenes in different locations across the country, working with our AARP Studios team remotely to incorporate key details, match angles, and coordinate transitions, and we edited their footage into the final finished piece – and published it on TikTok at 7:06 am on March 24, the exact time that “Detention Day” began.
🎥 WATCH: Breakfast Club Detention Day
This concept aligned perfectly with our overall approach on the platform, where our content and engagement strategies have allowed us to build a thriving community that genuinely enjoys connecting with AARP. Engaging with and collaborating with established Gen X creators is a key part of that strategy, helping us build credibility and grow our audience.
Our “Detention Day” collaboration became one of our all-time top performers on TikTok. By partnering with some of the Gen X TikTok community’s favorite creators, we were able to successfully tap into a niche cultural moment and connect with our audience in a way that was both meaningful and memorable. The post garnered more than 1M views in the first 24 hours and is our most-shared video to date.
A sampling of the comments shows that this collaboration was successful in giving viewers a reason to look at AARP in a new way, and to see themselves as part of our community:
Lastly, this initiative also gave AARP a place in the broader “Detention Day” conversation, as we saw our post mentioned in the comments section of several other creators’ videos that day – providing even more opportunity for discoverability and engagement with the Gen X audience.
