23 December 2014

2014

Time to wrap it up. And what better gift can I give than saving you hundreds of millions of dollars?

What’s the real value of social media marketing?
The news around social media is not good.  Facebook’s organic reach has tanked, people share news on Twitter and the jury is still out whether Pinterest actually offers an ROI…

The Great Unwatched
By David Segal
imageBy many estimates, more than half of online video ads are not seen, either because they are buried low on web pages or run in tiny, easily ignored video players on those pages, or run simultaneously with other ads. Vindico, an ad management platform company, deemed 57 percent of two billion video ads surveyed over two months to be “unviewable.”

Of course, NostraChuckus has been saying these same things for years:

Social Media - WOMM - Web Advertising

Most popular social media post this year:

30 September 2014
Social Media: A Sliver Of The Bigger Picture
… The mobile/social media soothsayers will have you believe that there is this unknown, magical mode of persuasion that has never been thought of before – and will reveal itself any day now.

If you believe that, I have a Blackberry in Brooklyn I want to sell you.

So I guess you can consider my gift as re-gifting.

05 December 2014

Inventing The Tablet

My previous scribbling about Tablets:

11 September 2014
A Simpler Tablet?

AARP_TABLET_FRONT_SCREEN copy…  Tablets are getting cheaper.  One major manufacturer will soon be offering a full-fledged Windows tablet for $120.00…

Since that post, I’ve been thinking about Tablets every so often, along with having a long skype with a management/entrepreneur/tech gent in The U.K.  He’s developing an easier-to-use Tablet launcher.

However, I’m convinced that someone or some team of innovators should finally tackle the Tablet.

imageSteve Jobs and  Steve Wozniak invented the people’s personal computer (there were clunky, cryptic ones around before Apple).  The evolution of the Smartphone was messier. They were miniature computers with new operating systems tucked into mobile phones. Not much has changed.  

But Tablets ended up as merely a poor relation.  They’re simply hand-held flat laptops with touchscreens.  Or smartphones made bigger – but without the phone.  

The Tablet has yet to be invented.

It won’t be yours truly concocting said doohickey, but let me pretend.

Assuming this…

23 October 2012
The Future Of Consumer Doodad Technology

CrystalBallsepiaYou should stop thinking about the next big thingamabob and whose will be best.  In five or ten years there will be all sorts of thingamabobs for just about everything.  You’ll have two or three or ten thingamabobs.  Tablets/Smartphones will be big, small, thin, simple, complex, active, passive, out the door in your purse or pocket, lost in your couch cushions. 

And this:

05 September 2011
The Obligatory Follow-Up iPad (and Smartphone and QR Codes) Post
… The perfect tablet (someday) for Baby Boomers will be big, thin, light, unbreakable – and while you’ll be able to use it for search, email, Facebooky things, etc. – it will mostly be for curling up on a couch and reading your favorite magazines, newspapers, books, watching short videos, etc.

The Tablet invented:

Forget about computers and smartphones.
You’re creating a magic window built from scratch.

It will not look like a laptop or smartphoneflexibleWhen you fire it up you will see no icons or computery stuff.  It will be sections with rounded corners and they will all be … I don’t know what … widgets (but please don’t think widgets).  It’s informational, entertaining, passive. 

Touch the section and it will open up.
It’ll be easy to slide back to the home screen (but please don’t think home screen).  Think a combination Google/Yahoo starting page you’ve put together, along with a few video services, magazines, books, personal pictures, games, whatever you like.

The Point:
To plunge into work or play, crank up the desktop/laptop. To quickly grab info about this or that, snap up the smartphone.

To ease out of the day and get away from the frenetic digital nest, have more passive and relaxing experiences – slide onto a chair, couch, bed…

And curl up with your Tablet.

18 November 2014

The No New News News

It’s always a treat to get up, make some coffee, open the newspaper (pixels or pulp) and read nothing new.

Even that shticky opening sentence is nothing new.

Ignore Boomers at your peril
image… The 50+ market is tremendous, controlling roughly 70 percent of the nation’s disposable income. We account for 80 percent of luxury travel marketing, buy five times as many new cars as 18-to-34-year-olds, and represent 40 percent of the population.

Pull quote from my book ©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.”

That’s a long time to be periled.

Baby Boomers say they aren't moving out of their homes
By Les Christie  @CNNMoney
… In a survey of 4,000 Baby Boomer households conducted by the non-profit Demand Institute, 63% of Boomers plan to stay in their current home once they retire.

Sounds vaguely familiar:

Selling Universal Design/Aging In Place ©2005/2007 (PDF):
… My NAHB presentation had a large section dedicated to the problem‘ of aging in place. It‘s a problem, of course, for AACs. How do you convince Baby Boomers to consider your offerings – whether your community is across the country or across town?

hshThe first slide in the aging in place section was titled Let‘s talk about your competition.  I tossed up logos from Del Webb, Robson, Meritage, and a few others – along with one of a real estate salesman outside a house with a for sale sign. I shook my head. “These are not your competitors,” I said, “This is.”

A new slide popped up that read Home Sweet Home. Many in the audience nodded.

They’re still nodding.

Universities Cater to a New Demographic: Boomers
hbr… As millions of Boomers move into a stage that has no name, no clear role in society, yet vast possibilities, there is an urgent need for democratized versions of such programs—offered at a cost within reach of the bulk of the population and widely available through continuing education programs or even community colleges around the country.

From 2005:

Baby Boomers, Adult Communities, and Education
Campus Continuum focuses solely on developing, marketing, and operating university-branded 55+ Active Adult Communities that are tightly integrated with their academic hosts.

AARP has produced a supplement for HR Magazine all about hiring experienced workers (or not letting them go):

HR and the Aging Workforce

aarphr

Good stuff, but yours truly and others have been screaming about this for over a decade.  Take a look at one or two of these:

Human Resources/Brain Power

"No, I don't think a 68-year-old copywriter can write with the kids. That he's as creative. That he's as fresh. But he may be a better surgeon. His ad may not be quite as fresh and glowing as the Madison Ave. fraternity would like to see it be, and yet he might write an ad that will produce five times the sales. And that's the name of the game, isn't it?" - Rosser Reeves


Just for fun:

Never Leave The Hospital! Health Tech Wearables, Implanted Chips
huffington_post_logo1I'm having issues. I'm worried that the medical industry might want me to worry too much about my health. A little worry is good. But constant worry? It seems as if they want me to think of nothing else but my vital signs for the rest of my life.

Finally Live The Life You've Always Wanted With Wearables!
Along with Google Glasses, you'll also be wearing Google Nose and Google Mouth.

17 October 2014

JC Penney: The Store For Everyone

Brick & Mortar and catalogue of yore now online retailer JC Penney is grooming a new CEO:

J.C. Penney Seeks Home Depot Treatment Under Ellison
imageMarvin Ellison helped turn around Home Depot Inc. (HD) in the last decade. Now he’ll try to repeat that feat at J.C. Penney Co. (JCP)

The department-store chain, struggling to emerge from $3 billion in losses in the past 3 1/2 years, yesterday named Ellison its next president and chief executive officer.

The simplest of through lines, with much missing:

jcp1965The history of J.C. Penney goes back over 100 years.  In the 1960s Penney began to position itself as a middle America alternative to department stores (Macy’s, scores of others).  On the other end, it was more fashion-conscious than stodgy, dependable Sears. 

Then Target (also with a long though disjointed history) positioned itself as a hipper version of J.C. Penney. Other retailers followed. Now, Penney is perceived as almost as stodgy and behind-the-times as Sears was.

Time for a shakeup.

Mr. Ellison is given credit for helping to turn around Home Depot.  One of the reasons I like HD: age diversity.  I don’t go looking for some old person to help me, but they’re there.  And I know they have some idea of what I might have to go through utilizing a product, installing whatever– so they steer me in the right direction and give good advice.  If you’re a young’un, and you want to talk to a young’un – they’re there, too.

Somewhere in the above paragraph might be a clue for turning around J.C. Penney.

What about advertising?  Penney might study the age-neutral campaigns of Marks & Spencer:

05 October 2007
London & Marks & Spencer
…What fascinated me was walking into the store with my more-significant-than-I-am other and watching her riffle through the racks. She turned this way and that, being drawn to items for herself, her teenage daughter, and her twenty-something daughter. It was obvious that all three could shop together practically in the same spot.







There are plenty more – all the way up to today.  Search YouTube. 

And there’s this:

Marks & Spencer named as best retail brand at representing baby boomers, poll shows

JC Penney could (and should) be the store for everyone.

30 September 2014

Social Media: A Sliver Of The Bigger Picture

Jonathan Salem Baskin for Forbes reports from Social Media Week:

Jonathan Salem BaskinYou Attended Social Media Week And Didn't Even Know It

Or maybe he wasn’t there. I’m not sure. Actually, it would be better if he hadn’t attended – because that’s Mr. Baskin’s point:

Though you may not have participated in an official event during Social Media Week (which ends today), you attended it…every day, in fact, which is the problem with the gig in particular, and our understanding of social media generally.

So being there isn’t being there. 

All of this makes perfect sense of you’re a social media guru.  Here’s one who ‘gets’ it:

Where people already aren’t.

mhMore from Jonathan Baskin:

…. the event’s slogan, “Reimagining Human Connectivity,” is kinda like announcing you’re going to reimagine gravity.

My take:

25 September 2012
Twitter & Advertising
… The mobile/social media soothsayers will have you believe that there is this unknown, magical mode of persuasion that has never been thought of before – and will reveal itself any day now.

If you believe that, I have a Blackberry in Brooklyn I want to sell you.

Even more from Jonathan Salem Baskin:

… Social media are a subset of media overall, which are a subset of the mediated experiences that are a subset of experiences generally. They’re a sliver of the bigger picture.

See you at the next Social Media Week event!  (I won’t be there.)


Just for fun:

Want To Check Out Fast? Get Behind Me.
huffington_post_logo1Old chum Dick Stroud is annoyed by old people in cashier queues: "Why do young people swap checkout lines when they see an older person in front of them? Well I have to be honest, so do I…”

11 September 2014

A Simpler Tablet?

AARP is touting a simple-to-use tablet:

AARP ANNOUNCES REALPAD
AARP_TABLET_FRONT_SCREEN copy… the nation’s largest advocate for 76 million baby boomers, today announced RealPad, a first of its kind tablet device built to address the specific needs of 70 million Americans 50+ who are yet to fully embrace tablet technology to help them stay connected.

I’m not sure there are 70 million people over fifty who are tech-shy – but there are a lot.

A moldy post:

23 October 2012
The Future Of Consumer Doodad Technology
… You should stop thinking about the next big thingamabob and whose will be best.  In five or ten years there will be all sorts of thingamabobs for just about everything.  You’ll have two or three or ten thingamabobs.  Tablets/Smartphones will be big, small, thin, simple, complex, active, passive, out the door in your purse or pocket, lost in your couch cushions.

So there may be a bit of room for AARP’s offering. 

The problem for me is the idea of a simplified tablet.  Tablets are already simple compared to smartphones, laptops, desktops.  

I use Windows, have a Windows phone. I’ve fiddled with Android and iPhones.  It took me awhile to grasp the software, hierarchies. 

But I’ve also fiddled with iPads and Android-based tablets. They’re a cinch to use.  Just pick one up and start poking and swiping.  No real learning curve.

We have an Android tablet. I can’t imagine anything simpler. I have a tougher time figuring out the garage door opener.

Check out the accessories page. All simple procedures for implementing extras/apps are pretty much the same as on standard tablets. Nothing special here. And if you know what memory, microUSB 2.0 ports, microSD drives and Bluetooth are – then you can’t be a complete tech idiot.  If you were a complete tech idiot, then this page would be gobbledygook, and probably scare the hell out of you.

No doubt RealPad is a good product. The specs look fine. The price is fine. I worry about what it doesn’t have that apparently makes it a simpler tablet.  I honestly can’t figure it out. If there are things missing, they’d better tell me.

Tablets are getting cheaper.  One major manufacturer will soon be offering a full-fledged Windows tablet for $120.00 – with almost the same specs as RealPad. 

Which would you buy?  Which would you recommend to someone who is tech-shy?

Perhaps RealPad should reposition as a very good inexpensive tablet with an easy-on-the-eyes interface (implied: for older eyes).  Not as a dumbed-down product for grizzled tech neophytes.


Dick Stroud’s musings on the subject (not much different than mine, in fact he may have a solid case for plagiarism):

Tablets for oldies - Breezie and now RealPad - all doomed to failure?



huffington_post_logo1Just for fun:
An Idle Mind Is the Devil's Playground
Here's a novel concept: Doing nothing is as productive, maybe more productive, as doing something.

18 August 2014

Those Advertising Surveys

In my ethereal quest for the best info on advertising and baby boomers (outside of this blog, of course), I often stumble upon surveys.

Everybody loves surveys.  People answer questions (they’re usually  honored by a request for their judgments) – then experts analyze, dissect, collate, comment. Lots of fun.

There are two brand-new ones about the effectiveness of advertising.  One is all about people a bit older than baby boomers, the other a generalized Q&A.

imageGolly gee. According to these surveys, advertising is in its death throes.

For almost ten years, I’ve been speaking/presenting about advertising and baby boomers. Two slides used since the beginning:

image

Then, with the magic of PP custom animation, I reveal a bit of possibly relevant info – the dates of these answers to surveys:

[image[42].png]

Most of the above statistics are from The Mirror Makers by Stephen Fox:

image

It’s official. The last sixty-seven years of advertising has been ‘ineffectual’.

11 August 2014

How America is Watching TV

Koeppel Direct has put up a juicy infographic about our TV watching habits.  It’s too big for this tiny blog, so here’s a link:

How America is Watching TV

I’ll grab a chunk of it:

image

Sounds like what I’ve been saying for years.  So have others:

01 November 2006
The steady glow of the Boom tube

15 February 2009
Television Still Shines

15 June 2010
Spending goes where the eyeballs are.

18 April 2011
The Flat-Screen Rectangle of Common Sense

23 July 2014

Leaked: P&G Reconsiders Incontinence

imageProcter & Gamble Co. plotting expansion of its Always brand that would include adult diapers
By Dan Monk
“Procter & Gamble is very serious about this category and they’re going to spend whatever it takes to be successful..”

It wasn’t long before major media outfits soaked it up:

imageP&G Poised to Re-Enter the Unsexiest of Boom Markets -- Adult Incontinence
More Than a Decade After Leaving Category, P&G Lured Back by Aging Boomers
By Jack Neff

P&G Turns to Adult Diapers
By Serena Ng
… While most infants and toddlers wear diapers for two to three years, incontinence suffers typically have to buy products for much longer, as the problem seldom goes away.

So Kimberly-Clark will have some soggy competition.

… The new P&G products may be rolled out under its Always feminine-care brand, suggesting the company will target mainly women, who make up the majority of incontinence sufferers.

Men. I wouldn’t ignore this market.

Through the years I’ve sprinkled posts about incontinence campaigns:

16 September 2009
Boomer Backlash II

08 August 2012
The Ones That Got Away: Underwear

Along with a short presentation:

Or click here for the bigger but fuzzier screen version.

I wonder if P&G will do better.

09 July 2014

Miscellany: Sex, Travel, Tech

It’s too hot to concentrate.  I’ll be going every which way with this post, trying to stay cool by moving around.

I wrote a piece about sex for HuffPo.  Doesn’t everybody who blogs for HuffPo do that?  Your hits go way up – not like if you write about chickens.

huffington_post_logo1Going Nutty Over Older Women's Bodies
I thank my lucky stars I've lived long enough to go nutty over older women's bodies. It's not anything I ever thought I'd go nutty over…

ewald_pattiTampa Bay Times Staff Writer Patti Ewald recently wrote a funny, trenchant column about sex – and referenced my piece:

Still turned on to idea of sex
"There's this popular public perception that as women age, sex becomes unimportant and that women just stop having sex as they get older," said Holly Thomas, a University of Pittsburgh researcher. "From our study, it looks like most women continue to have sex."

At the moment, the article above says I’m seventy-four.  I asked them to change it to my correct age (sixty-three).  However, you’re only as old as you feel – so maybe they got it right…

imageAARP talks travel:

  • AARP Online Travel Study
    Eight out of 10 persons age 50 or older use websites to plan as well as book their non-business travel.
  • Currently those 50 and older use, on average, 4 websites to plan and 3 websites to book their non-business related travel.  Almost a quarter would prefer to use fewer websites to plan or book non-business travel.

Golly gee, did we need to do a fancy-shmancy research study for this info?  I could’ve told you the same things.  In fact, I did.  Over a decade ago:

image

From my book Advertising to Baby Boomers ©2005, 2007:

Pouncing Mouses

      Many sociologists and futurists are predicting a few more radical social and political upheavals triggered by Baby Boomers  before we’re packed off in coffins and urns, sprinkled over mystical mountains and mundane golf courses, or blasted into outer space so we can eternally commune with the cosmos.

advbbcoverOn the other end of the spectrum, we’ll also be revolutionizing the tourist industry for the next thirty years, taking hundreds of millions more vacations before the ultimate holiday. Travel companies are having big problems trying to figure out what to offer—and how to reach us. We’re not lining up on docks for meaningless cruises on silly ships, nor are we allowing ourselves to be bundled into cookie- cutter cavalcades so we can gawk at decaying castles from the lumpy seats of double-decker buses. Nobody is going to tell us what a vacation is. We’ll tell you.

There’s a cottage industry out there preying on the blubbery and frightened tourist industry, making wild guesses as to what Baby Boomers will want to do with all our free time. I won’t list them all here. They range from ecologically correct junkets to health-nut boot camps to intellectually and culturally themed excursions to the beating down of well-publicized, well-traveled “unbeaten paths.”

This book deals with advertising to Baby Boomers, but I’ll over- step my bounds and propose a business model: Boomers are internet- savvy. Boomers are not passive. We do not want to simply slap one key and have our vacation pop up on a screen. We want to rattle lots of keys, have our mouses pounce and bite off appetizing chunks of graphic and description from all sorts of sources––and build unique, variegated vacations.

Some smart dot-com entrepreneur will partner with thousands of travel companies, resorts, hotels, museums, airlines, car rental companies, and build a modular travel and reservation website. Myriad tempting experiences will be offered. The website will calculate the price of each activity, cataloguing and coordinating everything. It will be a package you fill with goodies.

Planning it will be half the fun, and immediately entice and involve the site visitor. For a few days you’ll be lying on a beach. The next day you’ll travel to a large city and take in whatever sights you wish, perhaps joining a guided tour. In the morning you’ll be driving to a tennis resort for a day or two. After that will come a scenic road trip to a local winery for a prearranged private tour. Keep driving, and you’ll check into a secluded lodge, and hike in the mountains for a few days. Then you’re off visiting another city in another country, mostly to just goof around. Finally, check in your car, hop on a train, and before long you’re naked and slumping into a vat of hot mud at a famous health spa, followed by a shower and reservations at a five- star restaurant.

You could even spend an afternoon in lumpy seats on a double- decker bus if you want.

4 November 2005
My Favorite Cyber-Myth
Hitwise found that visitors to the top travel search engines were by far likely to be over 55 years of age. Hitwise attributed this to baby boomers …

Enough about travel.  I got carried away. 

Last up is tech.  Just for fun, here’s a link to my latest HuffPo piece:

I Am a Digital Dinosaur
2014-07-02-dino.gifFor years, I've been hearing about how old I am based on what I remember. Phonographs, rotary phones, white-out, carbon paper, air-raid drills, fizzies -- the items are endless.

Now there's a new way to categorize absolute oldness: Being a Digital Dinosaur…

27 June 2014

Good To See The Young’uns Catching Up

Marissa Mayer, 2011 InterviewYahoo Wants You to Linger (on the Ads, Too)
By Vindu Goel, New York Times
… Marissa Mayer, the chief executive, has decided that one way to reverse that decline (in advertising) is to turn the company into a media empire with a constellation of what it calls digital magazines…

Ms. Mayer says that she wants to make Yahoo a “daily habit” for its 800 million users. But she doesn’t want people to come to Yahoo just to read email, post photographs on Flickr or get the latest sports scores. She also wants Yahoo to be a place where they curl up and spend some time …. And curling up right beside them would be the advertisers.

wrongSounds familiar.  Should you read all my posts on this subject?  Nah. You’d be here for hours.  One or two’ll be enough.  Click and pick:

Social Media - WOMM - Web Advertising Posts

Actually, Ms. Mayer is talking about Tablets as magazines. A few more musty posts:

15 April 2007
Positioning Magazines for Baby Boomers
There are active and passive parts of our day. Without getting into too much psychobabble, as you get older the passive side needs more nourishment. It’s not really passive. It’s focused absorption. 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.

28 August 2013
Tablets & The Magic of Muggles
…Tablets could become a major vehicle for advertising.  They’ll get bigger, lighter, much thinner, flexible or semi-flexible if that’s what you’d prefer, easy to handle while sitting, lying down. Finger scrolls won’t be much different than turning pages…

04 November 2013
Smartphones & Tablets, Apples & Oranges
… If I tuck a magazine under my arm and take it with me, is that mobile advertising?  If I’m home on my couch flipping through Flipboard on my tablet that I don’t take anywhere anymore because the thrill of brandishing it is gone, I just use it at home - would those big, almost full screen ads be traditional advertising?

It’s good to see the young’uns catching up.  They may need a bit of help, however:



Human Resources/Brain Power


Related:

 

huffington_post_logo1

Ageism Raises Its Techie Head

03 June 2014

A Few New Tech Products

imageOn The Huffington Post (where I also blog), writer Pamela Poole has a savvy take on a handful of new tech products featured and/or inspired by the annual Boomers Business Summit

I’ve been to a few of those…

24 March 2006
At My Table at The Summit
"So can you tell if someone is having sex?"
"…We think so."
"... Good sex?"

Ms. Poole’s HuffPost Piece:

Leave It To Boomers: Transforming Aging With Tech
image… We all know that the physical and cognitive abilities of older people can deteriorate, leaving them unable to manage ordinary tasks and vulnerable to exploitation. It sucks.

Fortunately, thanks to today's tech, we've come a very long way from the "I've fallen and I can't get up" necklace!

The products range from very interesting to old hat to slightly convoluted.  You can sort them out yourself.

The thin, portable reading glasses make sense to me – and/or similarly constructed magnifying glasses. 

imageThe super-duper walker has me wincing. My first thought was of a bag lady pushing a shopping cart - not a good image.

Some hybrid of this and a product I blogged about a few years ago might work:

14 October 2011
Entrepreneurs & Baby Boomers II
SC… Awhile back I received a phone call from a gentleman who’d designed a clever piece of exercise/sporting equipment for rollicking and rolling on trails. It was an adaptation of another clever, successful product, making a certain popular activity much safer – and more fun.

I’m just not convinced that people would want to mosey around with a shopping cart.

More about technology, baby boomers, entrepreneurs, advertising:

10 April 2013
Entrepreneurs, VCs & Health Tech
… I’ve always been a big fan and supporter of tech and health tech.  Fabulous stuff is on the way.

But there will be backlash.