You'll Make Even More Money

Scott Rains scrawled this on my ‘wall’ at Facebook:

I just wrote to a list on disability rights something that reminds me of our conversations:

Our campaign for social inclusion is like the waves sculpting the shoreline and a ship moving forward under their power. The barriers left for us to wear down - forty years after first stirring up the waters with the modern Disability Rights Movement - are rocky, resistant, and dangerous to navigate. That is why we have enlisted the captains of industry and alerted them that the remaining threats to our passage to freedom threaten to sink their own ships as well. When they see people with disabilities as risks of lawsuits over the barriers threatening us they confuse the messenger with the message. Businesses who create, or delay in removing, those barriers will be run aground against them by the tsunami of Baby Boomers who will be the greatest business opportunity of a generation - the same generation whose impatience with injustice launched the Disability Rights Movement.

And a few other movements as well.

Scott understands that this isn’t all altruistic stuff. It’s simply good business. Even if you're in your fifties, sixties, seventies, or beyond - and with no disabilities - it's nice not to have to go through too much hell when you're out and about.

Repeating: Say to the powers-that-be, “Retrofit your restaurants, hotels, stores, and any place where people need to physically negotiate, and you’ll be prepared to do business with ‘the tsunami of Baby Boomers’ willing to spend their trillions of dollars around the world. You'll make even more money.”

You Can't Fool Mother Nature. Or Chuck.

How could my silly ego not blog this:

Guess Which Photo Was Retouched?

Read through the comments at Richard Rosenthal's [freaking marketing] Blog.

And visit Amy Dresser's site. We've all seen her work. It's great.

Fun Only

I've been hanging around the web for an eternity. At least it seems so. Since 1994.

In 1995 I was tossing up web pages. In 1996 I was asked to join a community where we all wrote blogs before they were called blogs. Click the thumbnails on the right.

At the time it was a hobby, my biz life being advertising. In 2003 I combined the two - leaving the pure Boomer stuff behind. In 2005 I switched platforms, setting up a standard business blog. And wrote a book.

Sometimes I miss simply pointing people to web sites of interest. So for a change this post is a bit of what I did in the olden days:

The Boomer Capsule is worth a click. There are a bunch of fun flash slide shows, commemorating the years we've lived. At the moment The Boomer Capsule is pure surface. My guess is that it'll go deep soon. Check back in a month or two.

The best place for music: Wolfgang's Vault.

There's been a site up ever since I can remember: HowStuffWorks. I've meandered over there hundreds of times whenever I'm curious about the innards and workings of just about anything in the universe. I chuckled when finding this topic: How Baby Boomers Work. Are we spring-loaded? Affected by the tides? Need batteries?


Mark Middleton and Bill Shafer are finally out of the gate and racing around the track like manic horses in a Tex Avery cartoon. Good for them.

You'll unearth video, radio, all sorts of nuggets at GrowingBolder.com. And some serious pieces. It's a carnival of media - like a web site should be. (And bringing it back to business for a second - you'll also find a few marketing/advertising related Growing Bolder Radio interviews with Marti Barletta and guess who.)

I'll do my best to write about "fun only" sites more often.

ING's "Your Number"

I've always liked the clever ING bench ads. Sometimes they went a bit too far, tried to be too cute – but overall a top-notch campaign.

Their new campaign gives me the heebie-jeebies. It’s pod-people ostentatiously (or obliviously) carrying around large orange numbers signifying what they might need to retire.

First of all, are Baby Boomers retiring? Some are – but most will keep on working and contributing to society. So there really isn’t a Your Number.

The web site is truly yucky. Not only a pain to use (pure flash), it’s slickly condescending. Again – a couple of pod people walk in and start talking at me without my permission (I hate that). The guy stumbles around with his hands in his pockets waiting for me as I stumble around trying to figure out what the hell he wants me to do. It turns out to be not much, really. I’m supposed to type in a few meaningless numbers, answer a few questions. Pretty silly.

And if you click around – all that tiny, wishy-washy, white copy on orange background. (And it's all centered - a huge no-no.) Is it possible to make it any more difficult to read?

The New York Times has a take on it all:

Will baby boomers feel shackled to a bright orange number, dollar sign in front, that represents the often-stressful concept of how hard they must work to maintain their lifestyle in old age? When people watch an older couple tuck themselves into bed with the orange number between them, will they view it as a ball and chain between the sheets?

So does Zac Bissonnette:

I just wonder whether the old financial planning models for baby boomer retirement will work. I can comfortably say that none of the baby boomers I know are planning to retire in the conventional way that their parents did -- golf in Florida. My mother tells me frequently that she plans to work in some capacity for her entire life, and I think many of her contemporaries will do the same, by choice. This is the generation that brought us Woodstock, and I would expect that many will "retire" from their careers to pursue part-time work with a socially-conscious edge. If ballroom dancing and big bands were nostalgic for their parents, this generation may be more inclined toward activism and community service.

NAAS Selects Advertising to Baby Boomers

The National Academy on an Aging Society has selected Advertising to Baby Boomers as a marketing and advertising resource for its organization and members.

Also on the list (scroll to bottom):

Brent Green's Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers
David Wolfe's Ageless Marketing
Dick Stroud's The 50-Plus Market
Mary Brown/Carol Orsborn's BOOM