Advertising to Baby Boomers

For advertising folk, one of the most useful attributes of the internet is being exposed to online trade mags – ones you’d probably never see otherwise.  With a new client or if you’re pitching, you need to find founts of knowledge fast.

I’ve been quoted in a few trade mags:

Boomers in Candyland

Boomers Beyond: Marketing to a 50-Plus Audience

Savvy sleep that knits the ravelled sleeve of care.

While fiddling around today, I unearthed this piece in a trade mag I’d never heard of – Kitchen & Bath Design News:

Look for a Potential Boom from Baby Boomers
DPH Perspectives
By Melissa Allen
Where can boomers turn for help with customizing their homes so they can stay where they are? Big-box stores offer deep inventories and economies of scale, but don’t provide carefully chosen collections of truly outstanding products or the expertise to help boomers combine products and solutions to meet age-related needs.

According to “Fixing to Stay,” boomers want knowledgeable and trustworthy professionals they can work with in upgrading their homes, and they’re worried that they won’t be able to find them.

This spells opportunity for our industry.

First I had to figure out what DPH meant. Wikipedia was no help.  With some scrolling and deep deciphering, my incredibly big brain finally got it: Decorative Plumbing & Hardware.

More from the article:

“In our showroom, we’ve found that semantics are as important as the products themselves. References to limited mobility or handicapped products are not well received by this generation. Sales professionals need to understand the importance of nomenclature. They need to emphasize that these products add beauty, safety and enhanced functionality,” Miller says.

Aging-in-place products are becoming more attractive. For instance, grab bars were once very utilitarian looking. “Now, grab bars come in multiple finishes and styles, and different lengths and widths, and can be high end as well as basic,” Miller says. “All of a sudden, we’re able to provide people with products that don’t remind them that they’re getting older. We’re not only able to provide safety, we’re able to provide safety in beautiful products.”

That sounds like a chapter in my book:

I’ve updated the chapter and put together a PDF about Universal Design/Aging in Place and advertising to Baby Boomers.  Click here to download.

A previous post with some good links:

UD, Aging in Place, and My Dumb Noggin

Sort of an interesting survey (for two reasons) by Harris Interactive and Adweek Media:

Business Leaders Considered Most Persuasive in Ad Endorsement (PDF)
The issue of celebrity endorsements is something a number of companies grapple with as they are planning their advertising campaigns … One quarter of those aged 18-34 (23%) say television or movie stars are most persuasive while only 15% of those aged 55 and older feel the same way.

Sort of interesting survey reason #1:

I’ve talked about this for years when advising clients about reaching Baby Boomers.  In an online presentation a year ago there’s a section all about celebrity endorsements.  I used Liberty Medical as an example of a company that (at the time) needed to update its image. The section is about 19 minutes in:

Two graphics from the above presentation:

So you don’t have to sit through it, basically I say that it would be a mistake to find a ‘new’ Wilford Brimley. 

Sort of interesting survey reason #2:

CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENTS THAT ARE MOST PERSUASIVE

Odd that Harris Interactive would stop delineating demos after age 55, as if all people over that age are the same: simply old. 

Of course, this myopia is nothing new:

The Jitterbug Phone
The real issue: Marketers assuming that if you're over fifty you're automatically a member of one and only one age demographic - all with the same needs and wants.

A few years ago I met Mark Tungate:

ADLAND by Mark Tungate

Mark Tungate, I find out after our brief rendezvous at Bayard Presse in Paris, after returning home and reading his book, after jumping on the web and scurrying around, after emailing a few friends in France and England, is a heavyweight in the ad world. He's written a bunch of books, loads of articles for advertising and general interest magazines, has a TV talk show. He puts together the text for an 'everybody in the industry has to pour over it every year' annual overview of European advertising …

Since then Mark has written two more books:

Branded Male: Marketing to Men
Branded Male discusses the evolution of the male consumer and the desire of marketers to tap into the still underdeveloped male market. Crammed with facts and anecdotes, Branded Male analyses how to effectively brand products and services for the male market.

Luxury World
With wit, accuracy and insatiable curiosity, Luxury World takes us on a voyage around the luxury universe, slipping behind the façades of the world’s most sophisticated businesses to show the reader how they function.

In December, Mark be taking his road show to Istanbul:

The event is produced by IMI Conferences:

IMI Conferences organizes Guru Events, Market Specific Conferences and Up-To-Date Panels … on topics that are of interest to the world and to Turkey. Its most fundamental target is to inform the business circles in Turkey of Global developments and trends.

While probably not quite arriving in the style Oprah did recently, no doubt Mr. Tungate will leave Turkey with almost as many new fans.

From The New York Times:

DVR, Once TV’s Mortal Foe, Helps Ratings
By BILL CARTER
Published: November 1, 2009
In what may seem a media business version of the Stockholm syndrome, television network executives have fallen in love with a former tormentor: the digital video recorder … more people seem content to sit through the commercials than networks once thought.

… The most basic reason, according to Brad Adgate*, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying firm, is that the behavior that has underpinned television since its invention still persists to a larger degree than expected.

“It’s still a passive activity,” he said.

I’ve yakked and yakked about passive and active activities and advertising.  A few years ago it was about magazines (and television):

Positioning Magazines for Baby Boomers
At some point you have to climb out of your frenetic digital nest and concentrate on one thing. It might be reading a book, watching a TV show or movie, listening to music, looking out the window.

Or immersing yourself in a magazine.

This isn’t ‘down time’ (that would be sleeping), but nourishing your psyche by absorbing and not actively being involved …

_____

* It was 2005 when I first pulled a quote from Brad Adgate:

Over 50 and Out of Favor: by Meg James, LA Times

Another one:

Where’s the TV for us?

The National Association of Baby Boomer Women is sponsoring a teleseminar this month with friend and colleague Dr. Carol Orsborn, along with Amy Hoster - someone I don’t know but it sounds like we all should:

Baby Boomers: The Path from Job Loss to Re-Employment
Date: 11/17/2009
Time: 3:00 PM EST
Listen in as Boomer expert, veteran marketing executive, and author of The Year I Saved My (downsized) Soul: A Boomer Woman's Search for Meaning…and a Job, Carol Orsborn, Ph.D, discusses the top five things one should do immediately after a job loss or the looming fear of one, and as she explains why attitude has so much to do with successfully becoming employed again. Orsborn, who has appeared on Oprah and The Today Show, and in the pages of People Magazine, Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, understands firsthand what Boomer Women face when caught up in a downsizing, and is ready and willing to share all …

On the call will also be Amy Hoster … who's been involved in the recruiting industry since 1999. Amy promises to give our callers specific tools they need for re-employment; like how to make sure you've got the right kind of resume, the all-important interview; what to say and what not to say, and also how job fairs can benefit you.

Dotsie Bregel founded NABBW. 
I remember hearing from Dotsie when NABBW was simply an idea and a web page.  Now it’s all over the place.

Watch a ton of videos about The National Association of Baby Boomer Women.

Sign up for the Teleseminar.

In response to a New York Times piece in September, I tossed up a post with (much too) long excerpts from my book (first published in 2005):

Late Bloomer Boomers
The Late Bloomer Boomer Movement is going full blast, and there’s no stopping it. The magic equation: Thirty-odd years of experience plus not feeling old and being relatively healthy plus knowing you have another quarter-century of productivity in you equals . . .

Well, we’ll see. Some pundits are predicting that Late Bloomer Boomers may leave a bigger imprint on society than the “early bloomer” Boomers who were at the top of their games twenty-five to thirty-five years ago.

Now Philip Moeller of U.S. News & World Report is contemplating some of these same issues:

Can Boomers Lead an Elder Revolution?
… But what if, instead, an aging world turned out to be a good thing? Is this even possible? Well, nearly 80 million baby boomers are here to say that they've had a great run so far and they expect, no, they demand, that it will continue.

… Roszak, a college teacher and author of 15 books who is now in his late 70s, has issued another rallying cry to this generation with The Making of an Elder Culture, published earlier this year. In it, he argues that the baby boomers are hardly finished making their mark on the world. "Boomers, who will usher us into senior dominance, are the best educated, most socially conscientious, most politically savvy older generation the world has ever seen," he says. "I believe that generation will want to do good things with the power that history has unexpectedly thrust upon it in its senior years. What boomers left undone in their youth, they will return to take up in their maturity."

Requisite cliché:

Okay! Sounds like a plan.

From: Brent Green
To: Chuck Nyren
Subject: The funny part is it's eerily accurate...

The joy of book and author promotion circa 2009:

Subject: Our Marketing Plan
by Ellis Weiner
Let me introduce myself. My name is Gineen Klein, and I’ve been brought on as an intern to replace the promotion department here at Propensity Books … I’ve attached a list of celebrities we think would be great to blurb your book, so find out their numbers and call them up … We’d like to see you on morning talk shows like the “Today” show and “The View,” so please get yourself booked on them and keep us “in the loop.”

From: Chuck Nyren
To: Brent Green
Subject: RE: The funny part is it's eerily accurate...

That’s great. I’m spray-feeding it on Hoster Broaster.

Chuck

NostraChuckus nails it again.

From my book (© 2005):

A piece from The Boston Globe:

Their personalities are far from grave
Funeral directors humor themselves at convention
By David Filipov
… He has been getting requests for personalized funerals all the time, as baby boomers “come of age,’’ as he puts it. Boomers were raised to have it their way. It is an attitude they take with them to the grave. And it has required funeral directors to evolve.

And a post from last year:

Funerals Are For The Dead
As the old saying goes, “Funerals are for the living.” Not anymore. Now there’s a place where you can theme, decorate, and DJ from the grave (or wherever you happen to end up) – thanks to two Baby Boomers: Nancy Bush and Sue Kruskopf.

… Of course, when I die I want a funeral procession with an old rickety horse-drawn carriage, open coffin, priests with long beards in long robes waving incense, and hundreds of women dressed in black and wailing.

But that’s just me. My personal statement.

I was going to pass on blogging this – since Dick Stroud already did the honors:

AARP Video – Boomer + Interrogation 
The video was created as a way to overcome the objections that AARP heard at the forum. It is sad to say but these objections to the older market have been around since I began writing my book and are identical to the ones I encountered in the UK. 

It is astonishing that people are still coming out with these lame excuses.

But a gentleman from AARP Media emailed me and wanted my take on it.

So, here’s the video and the take:

I told him it would be difficult for me to gage the impact on media planners, but was happy to note that the video didn’t do anything stupid – like denigrate the target market they’re promoting. 

Way back in 2004-5, AARP was doing just that in a B2B campaign.  I wrote a chapter about it in my book, and referenced it in a post few years later:

AARP's Chicken Coop Coup?
… The advertising campaign has one ad with ashen-faced Baby Boomers in body bags ("These days, doctors don't pronounce you dead. Marketers do."). Another shows Baby Boomers acting like testosteroned teenagers ("Outta the way, punks: older racers are the hot-rod kings!").Yet another has one of a middle-aged lady dead in a powder room (probably from overdoing it on the dance floor) with police chalk outlining her body. I don't know what the copy is because I haven't seen it. It's probably something like, "Give me wrinkle cream, or give me death!"

I just couldn’t figure out how trashing your ‘product’ was going to sell any.  And even if it did … 

More from the chapter:

The problem is that the advertising agency, like most agencies, is very much caught up in the trendy concept of Branding (one of those buzzwords overused in the last few years, and often misunderstood), and consciously or subconsciously did a bit of branding with their client’s product.

They’ve done this by introducing and presenting the product as immature, daft, and half-dead. Quite  the  product  I’d  want  to  buy (meaning: quite the demographic I’d get all hot and bothered about advertising to).

Even if this campaign convinces advertisers and media planners to consider targeting Baby Boomers, these silly stereotypes have been reinforced and will be carried over into consumer campaigns.

The AARP Media Sales Interrogation video stays on message – so other than being a bit long, it’s fine with me.  I hope it works.

There’s a new news web page – for the public and IMMN members.

I had my greasy fingers in a few of these stories.  But some are new to me. The profile of Stephen Reily of Vibrant Nation is fascinating (and a bit intimidating):

Stephen graduated from Yale College, summa cum laude, and from Stanford Law School, after which he clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court.

More intimidation:

Richard (Adler) holds a BA from Harvard, an MA from the University of California at Berkeley, and an MBA from the McLaren School of Business at the University of San Francisco.

Not profiled in the newsletter, but just as intimidating:

Dr. Harry "Rick" Moody, Director of Academic Affairs for AARP in Washington, DC, received the 2007 Outstanding Scholar award from the Creative Longevity and Wisdom program at Fielding Graduate University. Since 2005, an outstanding scholar has been chosen for this prestigious award given in recognition for the recipient's work with the aging population.

Okay … it’s not the intimidation.  It’s the quality and expertise of so many IMMN members that makes it all worth checking out.

I guess you should peek at the original Me vs. We:

Last week I read a piece of marketing advice: "Baby boomers have always been considered the 'me-generation,' and that doesn't change with age."

It's this type of reckless gibberish that is useless to marketers, and ultimately harmful to their clients.

And Me vs. We Redux:

A colleague sent this email:
Good story today - This Boomer Isn't Going to Apologize
I did read something about a bunch of pundits apologizing for the recession/depression or whatever we’re going through. Apparently, they think it’s all their fault because they’re Baby Boomers. (Did any generation apologize for The Great Depression? I’ll have to check the history books.  If not, it should.  Some of those evil bastards must still be alive.  Anybody over ninety-eight had better atone.)

Now there’s more:

Me Generation Baby Boomers Find Fulfillment Through Volunteerism, Family Ties
Baby boomers may be popularly portrayed as whiners, complainers and narcissists, but a new study by University of Massachusetts Amherst psychology Professor Susan Krauss Whitbourne says the 50-somethings are getting a bad rap.

“It’s wrong to say baby boomers are selfish and only care about staying young,” said Whitbourne. “They have a feeling of connection to younger generations and a social conscience.”

Sounds familiar. From my book:

Today, Baby Boomers are two or three times removed from being a “me” generation. What constitutes self-actualization when you are twenty-five is different than when you are fifty-five. In your twenties a person thinks they are the picture. As you get older, you see yourself more and more as a picture that is part of a bigger picture.

Talk to some folks in their twenties, thirties. They are now in that ‘me’ stage. It’s healthy, smart for them to be so. I was just like them thirty years ago, get a big bang out of them, admire their boundless creativity, energy – and self-obsession. These ‘me generation’ twentysomethings today will become a ‘we generation’ in thirty years.

(page 171, Advertising to Baby Boomers)
(c) 2004, 2007 by Paramount Market Publishing

Even more from Richard O. Jones:

The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of the Baby-Boomers
The Baby-Boomer generation had its heyday and now begrudgingly passes the baton to the seemingly irresponsible Hip-hop generation – not that most Baby-Boomers were responsible in their youth because that’s not the case. However, Baby Boomers were the first generation to declare Women’s Liberation and experience the birth control pill. Baby-Boomers were first to experience breast implants, socially acceptable single motherhood, socially acceptable marijuana use, and to invite homosexuals out of the closet.

With no warning from them, my publishers just informed me that they’ve made me very, very, very kewl.  Kindle Kewl:

Advertising to Baby Boomers (Kindle Edition)
by Chuck Nyren (Author)
Kindle Price: $15.95 & includes wireless delivery via
Amazon Whispernet
Text-to-Speech: Enabled 

I hope my wireless ego will stay in check as it whispers through the ether.

A worthwhile webinar next week:

Japan: The World's Most Mature Market
Tuesday, October 27 Japan is the most severely affected country by demographic change but also the most advanced in terms of product development and innovation. However, they have only touched the tip of the iceberg of the huge potential of this market.

Join IMMN and Florian Kohlbacher, Ph.D., for a webinar on the challenges and opportunities of the silver market in Japan. Dr. Kohlbacher, who is currently conducting research on the business implications of demographic change, will share case studies of leading edge mature marketing activities.

Dr. Kohlbacher is a senior research fellow with the German Institute for Japanese Studies, an adjunct research fellow at the Institute for Technology and Innovation Management at the Hamburg University of Technology, a fellow of the World Demographic Association, and an honorary board member of IMMN.

I contributed to an international business book co-edited by Dr. Kohlbacher: The Silver Market Phenomenon.

So did Dick Stroud:

A chunk from my chapter:

Today’s advertising industry needs a minor revolution. Talented men and women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s must to be brought into the fold if you want to target the Silver Market. This includes copywriters, graphic artists, producers, video directors, and creative directors. If you plan on implementing a marketing strategy that includes Baby Boomers as a primary, secondary, or tertiary market, and you turn it over to only people in their 20s and 30s, you will forfeit the natural sensibilities required to generate vital campaigns.

A free preview (PDF).

Read the Introduction to The Silver Market Phenomenon (PDF).

And don’t miss The Webinar.

Boomer Project’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash is a Boomer marketing newsletter.  I’ve been reading it so long that they still send it to an old email address I dumped years ago – so I don’t always see the newest issues.  Through the grapevine I heard that it linked to one of my posts a couple of months ago.

Matt Thornhill and John Martin are the principals of Boomer Project.  I’ve known Matt for years, and he regularly shows up on my blog.

A few posts ago I said some not-so-wonderful things about a Barron’s cover story.  Mr. Martin was quoted in the article, but I didn’t mention it. 

Thanks to Dick Stroud, I’ve now read the latest Jumpin’ Jack Flash – and oddly enough, Matt, John (or both) agree with me about the Barron’s piece: not much new there.

They’re more honest than I am.  Whenever I’m quoted in the mainstream media, I make sure to toss up a post stating that whatever it is is one of the greatest articles ever written.

I’m not a big fan of long, convoluted, meaningless flash intros – which pretty much means I’m not a big fan of flash intros. 

Ad agencies are notorious for boring you with graphic noise.  I used to have a tongue-in-cheek piece of copy on my business site that looked like a post-it note:

Web Designer: Please insert long, gratuitous, convoluted, meaningless, waste-of-time flash intro HERE.

But I took it down because it was a waste of time.

Friend and colleague Joop Koopman and his business partner Peter VanBloem have formed a PR/Communications firm in New York City – and oddly enough, I adore their flash intro.  It’s short, witty, tells the story.  I’d call it a ‘frugal’ use of flash. Take a look:

Koopman VanBloom

I often point clients to this one as an excellent example of using flash effectively.

I’m not a Microsoft basher.  Every so often I might rip into one of their ill-advised PR ploys or marketing campaigns.  Yes, I’ve seen this and really don’t know what to make of it:

Then there’s this:

'Family Guy' creator and Microsoft team up for Win 7 promotion

Not being a fully-fledged geek (or even a flimsy-fledged one), I have no major complaints with Vista or Office 2007. 

And PowerPoint 2010 looks like it might be fun.

So yours truly has been sniffing around, researching Windows 7. 

One redesign pointed out by Michael Gartenberg made my middle-aged eyes shiver:

Opinion: The pros and cons of Windows 7 for business
Gratuitous UI changes
I love the Win 7 UI, but I have a lot of experience invested in the old Windows ways of doing things, and some of the changes just seem gratuitous and make no sense to me. Also annoying are on-screen UI targets that you have to hit with your cursor but that are so tiny they make you think that Microsoft is hiring a lot of young workers who have great eyesight and/or high-resolution monitors. And using Touch and fingers to navigate is somewhat of an exercise in frustration.

If true, if this UI can’t be fiddled with, I’m not upgrading.

What if everybody over fifty who walks into a store and plays with the Windows 7 UI finds it ‘an exercise in frustration’?  What if millions and millions of people over fifty purchase the upgrade sight unseen, and can’t quite get a mouse-grip on the ‘tiny’ targets?

Even if you can bump up the graphics/fonts on the interface, why would the ‘default’ setting completely ignore the largest consumer demo for this product?

Time for my ol’ tattered book cover again …

“It will be the Baby Boomers who will be the first to pick and choose, to ignore or be seduced by leading-edge technology marketing. There’s a simple reason for this. We have the money to buy this stuff. Experts say we’ll continue to have the money for at least the next twenty years. Write us off at your own peril.

Wouldn’t it be nice (and profitable) if software designers  helped alleviate (and not aggravate) a big issue with Baby Boomers. 

More international ether, this time from Canada:

John Farquhar: marketing to the undead
I thought I'd watch a little television this week and see how marketers see me, someone over 50. Apparently I'm dying, in constant pain, infertile, incontinent, undersexed and over-pollinated.

It’s one of NostraChuckus’ predictions:

Boomer Backlash II
If every time someone over fifty sees a commercial targeting them and it’s always for an age-related product or service, pretty soon their eyes will glaze over, they’ll get itchy and grumpy.

More from Mr. Farquhar:

But of course, as conventional wisdom goes, we're not going to spend it on your product. Boomers have made their choices. We've chosen the brands we'll stick to for life. Everyone knows that. So why spend money getting us to change when we never will?

I guess it’s conventional – although I’ve been pricking holes in the no-change brand balloon since 2003.  A quote from a review of my book (the 2005 edition) by Dr. Joyce M. Wolburg of Marquette University, published in The Journal of Consumer Marketing:

A second favorite excuse of agencies is: "Baby Boomers don't change brands" (p. 52, italics in original). Nyren dismantles this excuse nicely with examples of brand switching, and he further acknowledges that in cases where loyalty to a brand does exist, marketers who do not target Boomers give them no reason to change.

John also talks about cars.  I’ve talked plenty about cars:

Big Business is behind the curve, as usual. But better late than never.

And I yak on and on about this subject (and feature a news piece from Canada) in a recent online presentation.

One more important piece of info from marketing to the undead:

You've got a target group that's easy to reach: we still watch TV, we still read newspapers, and we listen to conventional radio. We spend a ton of time online and we're easy to find there.

That sounds familiar. A post from 2007:

How Ads Affect Our Memory
I'm often asked about media planning and Baby Boomers. My glib answer: "Who needs media planners? The 50+ Demo is the only one that soaks up all media - TV, Radio, The Web, Magazines, Newspapers, Direct Marketing, etc. Take your pick. You can't miss them."

It’s great that someone’s joining Kit in promoting advertising and marketing to Baby Boomers in Canada.

As I’ve said in a previous post:

50+ marketing is exploding worldwide.
That’s a cliché-ridden statement I’ve been wanting to use for years.  Finally I can. 

Kim Walker of Silver Group Asia is spearheading a November 2009 conference in Singapore, organized by Pacific Conferences:

Marketing to Baby Boomers Conference
This 2-day conference on “Marketing to Baby Boomers” will equip you with the marketing techniques and strategies to effectively reach out to Baby Boomers today.

Pacific Conferences has lined up an impressive array of partners and sponsors:

 
Download the PDF.

I don’t know why I’m so surprised by all this.  After all, a few years ago I contributed to a book stuffed with huge chunks about the Asian 50+ Market:

It is with great pleasure to inform you that our book The Silver Market Phenomenon: Business Opportunities in an Era of Demographic Change has finally been published by Springer this week. You will receive your author copy from Springer soon. I am attaching the book flyer (PDF) for your reference. Please feel free to use it to spread the word and promote the book.

And recently I was approached by a company interested in a day-long presentation and workshop focusing on advertising and marketing to Baby Boomers. I won’t tell you what country it’s in, but what a surprise.

A worldwide phenomenon.  Sometimes I think the U.S. needs to catch up.

I got carried away over the last few days, commenting on a post at LinkedIn.

What’s below is from a ThoseinMedia discussion thread.  You have to join LinkedIn, join the ‘group’, blah blah blah in order to read it – so I posted it here (without permission). 

ThoseinMedia was conceived by Brent Willen. The initial post in the thread is from Andrew Ballenthin: 

Posts of mine that have to do with WOMM:

Harris Poll & Advertising & Social Networking

A Smart Approach

Gene Epstein, Economics Editor at Barron’s, has a cover story (subscription required) and video all about what yours truly and others have been screaming about for years:

Boomer Consumer 
Companies that continue to ignore the over-50 set do so at their peril, as "boomer consumers" eat up a larger slice of the nation's spending pie.

Increasingly, the 77 million of them are being ignored by advertisers and marketers. They're being elbowed aside, ironically, by 18-to-49-year-olds, the very age group that they, in their younger years, put on the map as the most desirable consumer cohort. But the realities are changing, and any company that ignores them will be doing so at its peril over the next decade or two.

Here’s the pull quote from the cover of my book, first edition published in early 2005:

“It will be the Baby Boomers who will be the first to pick and choose, to ignore or be seduced by leading-edge technology marketing. There’s a simple reason for this. We have the money to buy this stuff. Experts say we’ll continue to have the money for at least the next twenty years. Write us off at your own peril.

And there’s a whole chapter about “Being elbowed aside, ironically, by 18-to-49-year-olds, the very age group that they, in their younger years, put on the map as the most desirable consumer cohort.”  Pulled from the chapter:

Partly to save their hides, ad agencies turned their creative departments over to twenty-somethings. The sheer size of Baby Boomers made them the market—composed of scores of unwieldy cohorts. By attrition, this would have occurred naturally. It just happened ten or fifteen years sooner than with previous generations coming of age.

Barely out of college, Baby Boomers were in control of marketing and advertising to themselves—and became successful at it. After all, we knew the market.

The Barron’s story and video also covers subjects discussed numerous times in my blog:

Boomer Backlash II

The Backlash: If every time someone over fifty sees a commercial targeting them and it’s always for an age-related product or service, pretty soon their eyes will glaze over, they’ll get itchy and grumpy.

The Real Issue: Marketing and advertising folks grasping the fact that Boomers will be buying billions (trillions?) of dollars worth of non-age related products for the next twenty-odd years. If you target this group for toothpaste, computers, clothes, food, nail polish, sporting equipment, toenail clippers - anything at all (almost), and you do it with respect and finesse, they will appreciate and consider your product.

Another pull from the Barron’s article:

… A disproportionately large number of advertising copywriters, account managers and art directors are young. "Ask them to do an ad targeting the 50-plus demographic, and they default to a gray-haired senior limping down a beach trailed by an aging golden retriever," he adds.

That’s my book. Read a review:

Advertising to Baby Boomers
Chuck Nyren
by Joyce M. Wolburg, Journal of Consumer Marketing
I thought it was just me, but after reading Advertising to Baby Boomers, I now put the blame squarely where it belongs – on the copywriters. Most are Gen-Xers or members of Gen Y, who understand very well how to communicate with their own cohorts, but often fail to resonate with Baby Boomers.

More reviews.

And this blog post.

So … not much new from Barron’s for me or my readers, but certainly worth passing along:

Related Post from 2007:
Barron's "Geezer Power"

Update: Smart Money is now running the complete article.

A post from May 2009:

Not About The Kindle Controversy
I don’t want to get into a brouhaha over Amazon’s Kindle and whether it’s a swindle or a savior or Beelzebub.  (Although the talking version seems to need elocution lessons.)

Multimedia Journalist Lauren E. Bohn did some research (including calling yours truly) and put together a trenchant piece:

Kindling a reading revolution among baby boomers?  Baby boomers leading the perceived revolution
Berdell, a baby boomer, said he feels “hip” for owning a digital counterpart to the better portion of his library. He doesn’t bemoan the diminishing smell of paper and glue in his office.  He’s not alone.

I don’t see books disappearing. They’re easier to read (and skim) than an electronic device.   

And as one of Lauren’s interviewees says:

People can ingest content in more than one way …

Here’s a campaign that (I guess) is age-neutral, maybe skewed a bit to Baby Boomers (two out of three celebrities, and a moldy tune for the TV spot)*:

I’m not a fan of using celebrities for ads, although there are exceptions.  I generally smile when I see Whoopi. 

Fast Company’s Chris Dannen says, “The Google Phone's Ad Campaign Bites, Here's How to Give It Teeth.”

The TV spot is aspirational, direct, fun – but it doesn’t do what it should do:

For the umpteenth time …
The Most Effective Marketing/Advertising Model For Reaching Baby Boomers: What is now called traditional advertising pushing you to an age-friendly, informative product/services web site.

It’s not a bad site.

And that hand-me-down soundtrack does everything a soundtrack shouldn’t.  I’ll admit that I’d hoped to never hear that recording again – but even if you liked it way back when, it still doesn’t work:

Purely anecdotal: I’m watching TV. I hear a tune I haven’t heard in thirty-five, forty years. My mind goes off into the ether. “Wow. What a great song. I’d forgotten all about it. I had the album. The cover was blue . . . And there were a bunch of other great songs on that album. What the hell were they? I can’t remember . . . I wonder if I can get it on Amazon. There’s probably only a compilation of his hits, or a boxed set. But I just want the CD of the album. I’ll have to remember to check the next time I’m online ..”

By then, the commercial is over. In fact, probably three other commercials are over. I have no idea what the product is, or what any of the other products are.

But the real questions are these: Do advertisers benefit from invoking the past willy-nilly? When those tunes come on, am I really paying attention? Or do they send me off into the ether, conjuring up all sorts of bizarre and moldy feelings, images, remembrances?

If someone at Google or T-Mobile or their ad agency liked this tune so much, spend some money and redo the ditty, so it sounds relevant for today. When I hear that recording while watching the commercial, I think I should be picking up this:

More: Invoking The Sixties

* Thanks to Fast Company for the graphic.

I was looking forward to less pain in the future, hoping the gradual wearing away of gray matter would take a load off my nagging neck. Now I hear otherwise:

Older Brains May Not Be So Small After All Decrease in gray matter isn't a given, researchers find
Scientists have assumed that people's brains shrink as they age, but researchers now suspect that's not the case … Scientists in the past had failed to screen out people whose brains had shrunk because of brain disease, they said.

In other words, simply growing older may not make the brain become smaller.

That’s great. That’s all I need. A fully-functioning, fat, juicy noggin and an arthritic neck that can barely hold it up.

Other bad news (especially for advertisers who continue to patronize and dismiss anybody over fifty):

Older Brain May Really Be a Wiser Brain

Baby Boomers are smarter than you think.

And generally better.

In the NYT yesterday:

The Summer of the Celebrity Deaths?
By SARAH KERSHAW
This summer could come to be known as the summer when baby boomers began to turn to the obituary pages first, to face not merely their own mortality or ponder their legacies, but to witness the passing of legends who defined them as a tribe, bequeathing through music, culture, news and politics a kind of generational badge that has begun to fray.

“This is a historical development in cultural history,” said Todd Gitlin, 66, the sociologist and author of “The Sixties,” who teaches at the Columbia University School of Journalism. “It’s the ebbing of figures who have a wide enough span of appreciation and admiration so they appeal to significant numbers of people, like incarnations of virtue. So people take a new measure of themselves when they ask, ‘Will there ever be anybody else like X’ ”?

The shinier side:

Going by actuarial tables, the boomers, now age 45 to 63, can expect to live to age 83, thanks to modern health care …

“I think this is the first time so many have simultaneously had an awareness of death and the prospect of a whole new act,” Mr. (Marc) Freedman said. “Never before have there been so many people who have so much experience and the time left to do something with it.”

I talked about this in my book (©2005, 2007).  A chunk of it:

The Late Bloomer Boomers

I don’t think that you should become a copywriter until you’ve done something else first . . . I wrote my first ad when I was 39 . . . I couldn’t have done it unless I had done a lot of other things first . . . I had experience that was enormously important when I sat down to write my first ad. 
                                                      —David Ogilvy1

One of the ways Baby Boomers are redefining middle age is by beginning new lives.This is nothing that hasn’t been done before, but for a large chunk of a generation to do it practically en masse took many prognosticators by surprise.

When Baby Boomers were in their late teens through their early thirties there was an explosion of creative productivity in all fields.

Now Boomers in their late forties and fifties, the ones who didn’t quite “make it” or took safer paths, are finding out that their creative juices never dried up. Many of these folks are writing fiction and non-fiction, becoming graphic artists and photographers, and playing and composing music. And just as many are doing astonishingly creative things in the business world, often as entrepreneurs.

This isn’t like retired people taking on hobbies. The Late Bloomer Boomer Movement is going full blast, and there’s no stopping it. The magic equation: Thirty-odd years of experience plus not feeling old and being relatively healthy plus knowing you have another quarter-century of productivity in you equals . . .

Well, we’ll see. Some pundits are predicting that Late Bloomer Boomers may leave a bigger imprint on society than the “early bloomer” Boomers who were at the top of their games twenty-five to thirty-five years ago.
____

1 Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003).

Note: I’ve plagiarized myself with this post – but thought the ideas behind the original needed updating.  The backlash predicted is happening now.
_____

A pivotal (you’d never forgive me if I used the word watershed) campaign by Kimberly-Clark for their Depend line is getting a lot of press. Culled from a piece by Bob Moos of The Dallas Morning News:

Adult underwear no longer being given the silent treatment
… The new TV commercials have ordinary boomer men and women engaged in some unscripted banter about the differences between the two sexes, such as whether men or women make better drivers and which sex actually rules the world … The TV spots are carefully crafted to appeal to boomers who, if they don't use Depends themselves, may be caregivers for parents who do …

The creative is lots of fun. No surprise, since the spots were directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris (born 1948). A Boomer directing Boomers.  Click one of the images below to watch the spots:

I guess what upsets me about this campaign is not the campaign itself.  I love it.  I see people around my age – they’re entertaining, loose, funny. I’m wondering what the payoff will be. What a letdown.  

Why couldn’t it have been a car?  Laundry soap?  Baked Beans? Gender-specific razors? Aluminum foil? A smart phone? Anything but some age-related malady.

And there’s this:

Use only as directed
By Joseph P. Kahn
Take one night last week, chosen at random, when NBC Nightly News aired 17 commercials during its 30-minute broadcast.

Of those 17 spots, 12 were for (in order): Zyrtec, an over-the-counter allergy medication; Citrucel Fiber Supplement With Calcium; Advil PM, a combination pain reliever and sleep aid; Transitions prescription eyeglass lenses ("healthy sight in every light"); Spiriva HandiHaler, for use by COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) sufferers; the cholesterol-lowering properties of Cheerios; Bayer aspirin and its heart-attack prevention benefits; Omnaris nasal spray, a prescription allergy medication; Just For Men hair coloring (let's help graying old Dad get a date!); Boniva, which helps reverse bone loss in postmenopausal women, most notably actress Sally Field; ThermaCare heat wraps, for relief of muscle and joint pain; and Pepcid Complete, a heartburn and acid reflux remedy.

The Backlash: If every time someone over fifty sees a commercial targeting them and it’s always for an age-related product or service, pretty soon their eyes will glaze over, they’ll get itchy and grumpy.

The Real Issue: Marketing and advertising folks grasping the fact that Boomers will be buying billions (trillions?) of dollars worth of non-age related products for the next twenty-odd years. If you target this group for toothpaste, computers, clothes, food, nail polish, sporting equipment, toenail clippers - anything at all (almost), and you do it with respect and finesse, they will appreciate and consider your product.   

And looking at the big picture:  Let’s hope that ad agencies will see these spots and realize they’re missing out not hiring people over fifty to create campaigns for just about any product or service.

A quote from my book (1^st Edition published in 2005):

It’s going to be up to companies to be proactive when dealing with advertising agencies. Quality control of your product doesn’t stop at the entrances of Madison Avenue’s finest, or at the doors of small local or regional advertising agencies. If companies put pressure on agencies, and demand 45-plus creatives for products aimed at the 45-plus market, then they will find out that Baby Boomers are still “the single most vibrant and exciting consumer group in the world.”

Boomer Backlash I