29 December 2015

Recap 2015: Advertising to Baby Boomers

We began the year with Yours Truly apologizing for my myopic take on Facebook, followed by much crowing about my prescient take on Facebook:

What I didn’t foresee is Facebook becoming the generic virtual space for keeping up with friends from high school, college, work through the decades, etc.  These aren’t friends you necessarily hang out with now – and Facebook was originally a ‘here and now’ place for college kids.  How it’s transformed.

Then we whitewashed a few fences:

I wonder what’s next. Old hippies painting psychedelic dollar signs on a picket fence? Aunt Polly as the new spokesperson? One of those snazzy computerized commercials where they futz with old footage, maybe Tommy Lee Jones as Tom Sawyer and Dennis Hopper as Huckleberry Finn jawing about financial planning?

From April:

Chasing the grey yen
Japanese firms have wisdom to hand down about selling to the elderly

Coming in 2016:

Advertising in the Aging Society
imagePopulation aging is a powerful megatrend affecting many countries around the world. This demographic shift has vast effects on societies, economies and businesses, and thus also for the advertising industry.
By Michael Prieler and Florian Kohlbacher
Forward By Dave McCaughan
Afterword by Chuck Nyren
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Download the Contents and First Chapter

Summer reading:

The Ugly, The Bad and The Good
Twitter, Smartphones & Tablets, and Silver Super Models


imageChuck bleats on MarketPlace: A new older generation may attract more ad dollars. Listen.
 
Traipsing every which way:

Mobile Ads, Smartphones, Mad Men, and Muggles

The most popular post of the year:

Baby Boomers Not Wearing Wearables
Along with Google Glass, you'll also be wearing Google Nose and Google Mouth.

____

I also blog at Huffington Post. Not about advertising,  mostly goofy slices-of-life. The most popular piece this year:

In a Hospital for No Good Reason
image… I keep seeing the word unremarkable. I figure out it's med-speak for normal. At age 64, after abusing my mind and body in every way imaginable throughout my life, I'd say that anything normal is remarkable…

No doubt more fun and frolic in the New Year.

10 December 2015

The AMA, Those Pharma Ads, and My Thinking Cap

Only a handful of posts ago I had fun poking fun at all those DTC ads:

25 June 2015
Looking great, but we’re very ill.
http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-om_VzOrj3bE/VYxZtfjgMOI/AAAAAAAAIHQ/ptrtQLaVWdQ/fish2_thumb%25255B5%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800… Most of the time we’re in slow motion.  We float around the screen, dreamlike, as if drifting in a digitized aquarium.

But we look pretty good, usually. Although during all this surreal sashaying, the voice overs warn us not all is well.

Now the AMA wants to ban them:

Turn the Volume Down on Drug Ads
image… The American Medical Association’s House of Delegates voted this month in favor of a ban on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs and medical devices. Its officers argued that such advertising “inflates demand for new and more expensive drugs, even when these drugs may not be appropriate…

Not everybody agrees:

Banning TV Drug Ads: Could the Cure Cause More Harm Than Good?
image… In a response to the AMA call for a ban, it said the ads increase consumer awareness of available treatments for diseases, including undiagnosed conditions, according to a Reuters report.

imageI’m not qualified to take a position on all this.  However, if I hadn’t read these news items, and someone said to me, “So, Chuck … the AMA wants to ban DTC ads.  Can you guess why?” -- I’d probably put on my thinking cap and say:

Grampy2“Hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmm.  Well, the AMA usually wants to ban things because it thinks whatever is unhealthy for you. So my guess is that it thinks pharma ads are unhealthy for you! Maybe they got the idea from some of my  posts about how DTC ads make people ill – like this post from 2009…

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….

So did I influence the AMA?  Or am I hallucinating – like the lady in this DTC ad?

You decide.