Showing posts sorted by relevance for query afterword. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query afterword. Sort by date Show all posts

28 March 2016

Advertising In The Aging Society: The Foreword, The Interview

agingPreceding Post:

21 February 2016
Published: Advertising in the Aging Society by Prieler, Kohlbacher

While composing the Afterword for Advertising in the Aging Society, I had most of the chapter drafts and resource materials to work with.

After turning in my 1st Draft, Florian Kohlbacher sent me this:

Btw, Dave is writing the Foreword so good that you’re quoting him…

imageThat would be Dave McCaughan, Marketing Thought Leader and Storyteller based in Hong Kong.  He’d penned an excellent piece in Research World titled Aging Asia, and I’d pulled a few quotes for the Afterword – not knowing he’d written the Foreword.

Now I’ll pull a quote from Dave’s Foreword:

But the frustration remains. Perhaps best summed up by my friend Toru Shibata, ex-president of Johnson & Johnson Consumer Japan, who complains that it is so difficult to talk to his market research suppliers, his advertising agencies, his own marketing departments about targeting 70-year-olds when they are all staffed by people in their 30s and 40s. To those “young” professionals talk of advertising to a 70-year-old seems like talking about their grandmother, or great- grandmother. A beloved relative but a boring and misunderstood target audience.

imageMr. McCoughan recently interviewed Professor Kohlbacher on Zoom, a Video and Web Conferencing Service.  It’s worth a listen:

Will you still need me? Marketing to Seniors: An Interview with Professor Florian Kohlbacher

More about Advertising In The Aging Society by Michael Prieler and Florian Kohlbacher:

On Amazon USA / On Amazon UK

25 June 2015

Looking great, but we’re very ill.

Last week I wrote an Afterword for a book to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. It’s about advertising to the 50+ market in Japan.

One subject covered is consumer reaction to all those age-related illness and prescription drug commercials. Through the years I’ve blogged about this a bunch of times. So I exhumed a few posts, chopped and tossed bits and pieces together, and much of the info ended up in the Afterword.  The raw ingredients:

16 September 2009
Boomer Backlash II
…  Why couldn’t it have been a car?  Laundry soap?  A computer?  A razor?  Anything but some age-related malady:

Use only as directedbcoml
By Joseph P. Kahn
There were glossy pitches for Centrum Cardio multivitamins, AARP supplemental medicare insurance plans, Visine … Contour Meter diabetes testers (now available in five vibrant colors!), Dr. Scholl's Massaging Gel foot insoles, Flomax (for urinary and prostate problems), Wal-Mart prescription-drug services, Children's Benadryl Allergy and Sinus Liquid, Centrum Silver vitamin tablets, Boniva (Sally Field playing a nimble game of Twister with her granddaughter this time), Tena Serenity Pads bladder protection, and One-a-Day 50 Plus vitamins.

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.

I guess during the last few years of television watching I’ve been ignoring these spots because they annoy me. I’ve treated them as white noise. But because I’d just finished writing about them again, over the last week they’ve been jumping out and assaulting me.  Not pleasant experiences.

And not much has changed. We’re still portrayed as smiling, vapid pod people:

imageAt first it was refreshing to see folks over forty-five portrayed in ads and on the web—but now almost every 50+ site is centered around generic photos of smiling, vapid, mindless people in their fifties and sixties, usually in warm-up suits, always prancing around beaches, if not staring lovingly at one another, then in groups, arms draped and tucked every which way like groping octopi.

fish2Most 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.  We’re really quite ill. If not from whatever affliction we have that we’re taking drugs for, then from the beastly side effects.

Talk about cognitive dissonance.  I can’t wait to get back to the white noise.


Just for fun:

They're Grreeaat!’: The Enduring Charm of Advertising Characters
Tony the Tiger, the Jolly Green Giant, and Mr. Clean give a likable human face to their products.

mr product

More about Warren Dotz

Looking great, but we’re very ill.

Last week I wrote an Afterword for a book to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. It’s about advertising to the 50+ market in Japan.

One subject covered is consumer reaction to all those age-related illness and prescription drug commercials. Through the years I’ve blogged about this a bunch of times. So I exhumed a few posts, chopped and tossed bits and pieces together, and much of the info ended up in the Afterword.  The raw ingredients:

16 September 2009
Boomer Backlash II
…  Why couldn’t it have been a car?  Laundry soap?  A computer?  A razor?  Anything but some age-related malady:

Use only as directedbcoml
By Joseph P. Kahn
There were glossy pitches for Centrum Cardio multivitamins, AARP supplemental medicare insurance plans, Visine … Contour Meter diabetes testers (now available in five vibrant colors!), Dr. Scholl's Massaging Gel foot insoles, Flomax (for urinary and prostate problems), Wal-Mart prescription-drug services, Children's Benadryl Allergy and Sinus Liquid, Centrum Silver vitamin tablets, Boniva (Sally Field playing a nimble game of Twister with her granddaughter this time), Tena Serenity Pads bladder protection, and One-a-Day 50 Plus vitamins.

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.

I guess during the last few years of television watching I’ve been ignoring these spots because they annoy me. I’ve treated them as white noise. But because I’d just finished writing about them again, over the last week they’ve been jumping out and assaulting me.  Not pleasant experiences.

And not much has changed. We’re still portrayed as smiling, vapid pod people:

imageAt first it was refreshing to see folks over forty-five portrayed in ads and on the web—but now almost every 50+ site is centered around generic photos of smiling, vapid, mindless people in their fifties and sixties, usually in warm-up suits, always prancing around beaches, if not staring lovingly at one another, then in groups, arms draped and tucked every which way like groping octopi.

fish2Most 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.  We’re really quite ill. If not from whatever affliction we have that we’re taking drugs for, then from the beastly side effects.

Talk about cognitive dissonance.  I can’t wait to get back to the white noise.


Just for fun:

They're Grreeaat!’: The Enduring Charm of Advertising Characters
Tony the Tiger, the Jolly Green Giant, and Mr. Clean give a likable human face to their products.

mr product

More about Warren Dotz

21 February 2016

Published: Advertising in the Aging Society by Prieler, Kohlbacher

In 2007 I was recruited to pen a chapter for The Silver Market Phenomenon Edited By Florian Kohlbacher and Cornelius Herstatt:

04 September 2008
Published: The Silver Market Phenomenon

image28 June 2010
The Silver Market Phenomenon 2010: Update
… The current shift in demographics – aging and shrinking populations – in many countries around the world presents a major challenge to companies and societies alike. One particularly essential implication is the emergence and constant growth of the so-called “graying market” or “silver market”…

Last year I was again honored.  Professor Kohlbacher asked me to fashion an Afterword for his newest co-written tome:

adAgingSocietyAdvertising in the Aging Society
Understanding Representations, Practitioners, and Consumers in Japan
By Michael Prieler and Florian Kohlbacher

Population 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. Advertising in the Aging Society presents an insight into advertising practitioners and consumers in Japan.

Download The Flyer (PDF) 
I’m serious.  Download it.

The Authors:

imageMichael Prieler is Associate Professor of Communication in the School of Communication at Hallym University, South Korea. Before this, he worked and studied for several years in Japan. His research focuses on media representations of gender, race/ethnicity, and older
people,and has been published in numerous books and international journals.

imageFlorian Kohlbacher is Associate Professor of Marketing and Innovation in the International
Business School Suzhou (IBSS) at Xi'an Jiaotong
- Liverpool University (XJTLU) in Suzhou, China, and the Founding Director of the XJTLU Research Institute on Ageing and Society (RIAS). He is also an adjunct fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies (ICAS) at Temple University, Japan Campus.

imageAdvertising in the Aging Society presents a refreshing and rare combination of theory-driven, data-rich research complete with clear implications for advertising practice. After analysis of nearly 3,000 television advertisements, 185 advertising practitioners’ survey responses, and 1,834 audience surveys, the authors provide insightful advice regarding the effects, effectiveness, and ethics of portraying silver citizens in advertising.
- Michelle R. Nelson, Associate Professor of Advertising University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

imageFor a limited time, Palgrave Macmillan is offering a sample chapter for download.

A snippet of the Afterword:

… During my international consulting in Europe and elsewhere, I always begin my presentations with a quote from American Political Scientist Seymour Lipset (1922-2006) culled from his book American Exceptionalism: “Those who know only one country, know no country.” Then I say to the participants, “Whatever I tell you today will be specific to the 50+ Market in the United States … Much of what I’ll say will not be relevant to you. What I hope will happen: As you watch and listen, every so often certain concepts, ideas, and practices will ring true – and you’ll know that what I’ve just said is more than likely a universal truth about advertising to this demographic. You will then be able to fashion marketing campaigns with a finely-tuned mix of country-specific and universal values.”

From my experiences hopping from country to country, I was surprised to be learning as much about my country as I was learning about other countries…

Back to The Flyer you should’ve downloaded:

image

image

"This is a very exciting book. Japanese advertising practitioners should listen carefully to Prieler and Kohlbacher's messages. They have implications for advertising around the world as population's aging is a global megatrend."
- Setsuo Sakamoto, Executive Producer, Institute of Elder Knowledge and New Adult Culture, HAKUHODO Inc.

Congratulations to Michael Prieler and Florian Kohlbacher.  Advertising in the Aging Society is a major accomplishment.

             On Amazon USA / On Amazon UK

22 September 2015

Marketing Miscellanea

Traipsing every which way today…

Baby Boomers Not Fans of Mobile Ads
September 21, 2015
image… Baby Boomers have solid smartphone adoption, at 64.4% of mobile phone users this year … Baby boomers also had a highly negative response to mobile ads ... Fewer than 8% said they were likely to purchase a product advertised on their mobile phone … Overall, just 5.2% were interested in receiving ads on their phone at all.

TV Still Dominates
September 22nd, 2015

Hmmm.  This all sounds vaguely familiar.  A post from five years ago:

Foretellings
01 May 2010
… That silly retronym “traditional advertising” will remain the premiere force for introducing people to a product or service, along with sustaining its shelf life. Television, print, radio, and billboard ads will continue to have the visceral power they’ve always had – if only for their sheer size, simplicity, and cutting-edge audio/visual qualities.  Advertising on smartphones will be considered an annoyance, invasive, and rather dinky…

***

Millennials Boast Huge Social Networking Growth and Engagement on Smartphones, But Older Users Surprisingly Outpace Them on Tablets
By: Michael Buhl
… Older generations seem to prefer the ‘sit-back’, larger screen experience that more closely resembles the days of reading a newspaper, a book, or even using a laptop computer.

Hmmm.  Again, this sounds familiar:

Tablets & The Magic of Muggles
28 August 2013
… People will power up desktops/laptops for work and interactive pursuits, then grab their tablets for passive pleasure.

PCs, Laptops, Smartphones: Active experiences where advertising is an annoyance.

Magazines, Newspapers, Radio, TV, Outdoor, Tablets: Passive experiences where advertising is accepted and often welcomed.

Mad Men won some Emmys.  Great.  Mad Men is no more.  A link to my musings on the show - from 2008:

Mad Men
mm People are always asking me what I think of Mad Men. That’s because for the last three or four years I’ve included a section in my presentations about the history of advertising creatives, and a big chunk of it focuses on the era Mad Men inhabits…

Does my take hold up?
                                                        ***

Coming soon to an academic library maybe near you:

Advertising in the Aging Society
imageBy Michael Prieler, Florian Kohlbacher
Population 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.
(Yours Truly penned the Afterword)

13 December 2016

Recap 2016: Advertising to Baby Boomers

The year began with folks playing games with our brains:

06 January 2016
Brain Games: Hocus-Pocus Hyperbole
Looks like a not-so-bright company hawking a make-me-bright online game is in non-virtual hot water:
Lumosity fined millions for making false claims about brain health benefits…

And, as always, there was More Déjà Vu:

image19 April 2016
Big Mags Roll Out Big Guns. Again.
… The Economist found that only 31% of firms it polled did take into account increased longevity when making plans for sales and marketing … One reason for this tardiness is that young people dominate marketing departments and think that the best place for the old is out of sight and mind.

23 September 2016
Deaf Ears, Gatekeepers, and Frustration
image… We have approached all the local ******* ad agencies and (our pitches) seem to fall on deaf ears … their gatekeepers are millennials and they have no interest in marketing to a bunch of old fogies …

26 July 2016
Television Still Shining
…I like it when someone else writes a post for me – and/or I’ve written the post before (in this case, loads of times) so I don’t have to start from scratch. Copy ‘n Paste is fast becoming my mantra...

Image result for nostrachuckus14 October 2016
Tweeters & Zoomers & An Ugly ‘Ism’
… No surprise to NostraChuckus,  famed soothsayer and advertising gadfly who’s been startling the world for years with his mundane prognostications…

What blog wouldn’t be complete without Shameless Self-Promotion Posts:

aging21 February 2016
Published: Advertising in the Aging Society by Prieler, Kohlbacher
… Professor Kohlbacher asked me to fashion an Afterword for his newest co-written tome…

28 March 2016
Advertising In The Aging Society: The Foreword, The Interview

Image result for zoomer complex07 October 2016
Zoomer Media/ZoomerU Presentation in Toronto
Last week I was at  ZoomerPlex, a city square of TV production facilities, radio stations, magazine headquarters, and site of an astonishing television museum.

ZoomerU gets off to a successful launch

Take a break with a Double-Feature & Shorts:

blob26 August 2016
Entrepreneurs & Spending Power
Why Advertising To Boomers Just Got More Important
by Barry Robertson
Shocking new study defines vast Boomer (ugh!) spending power…

Digital Déjà Vu:

[image%255B5%255D.png]03 October 2016
Digital Ad Shenanigans
…It’s been a bad week or so for online advertising foolishness and chicanery. No big surprise for yours truly. I’ve been yacking about all this nonsense for a decade...

29 November 2016
Digital Ad Shenanigans: The Academic Edition
…The realization that something you thought to be “real” is actually an advertisement is an increasingly common, if unsettling, sensation. Mara Einstein calls it “content confusion,” and if her book, “Black Ops Advertising,” is right, we’re in for even more such trickery…


Like this year and last year,  no doubt more frolic beginning in January.


Just For Fun:

Image result for Huffington postThe Everlast
by Chuck Nyren
Fred Thorson had been dead for fifteen million years...

16 November 2015

The Déjà Vu No New 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.

For some reason, the last month or so has been jam-packed with no news news:

Older people have the spending power. So why are ads obsessed with youth?
CVRCompIf you want the answer nine years before this question was asked, download (for free) the Introduction and 1st Chapter of Advertising to Baby Boomers ©2005/2007:
Introduction and 1st Chapter
More from that Globe and Mail piece:
… The rationale for focusing on younger people used to be that advertisers who could win them over would gain a consumer for life. But research has shown that brand loyalty is fading, meaning this approach may not make sense any more.
Brand loyalty almost always fades, and hasn’t made sense for decades. Read a review of Advertising to Baby Boomers in The Journal of Consumer Marketing.
imageThe Average Age Of A Creative Is 28, While The Average New Car Buyer Is 56 - That's A Problem
It’s been a problem for years and years:
Hire Baby Boomer Creatives
NostraChuckus predicts the future. Again. It was 2003 when he first divined it…
Automobile ads written by … but targeting…:
Non-Diversity = Solipsism
… Someone commented on my comment:
You nailed it Chuck! My reaction (albeit with an agency skew) is that these spots are targeting BOOMERS, but written by 20-somethings? … Young creatives (are there really any other kind?) can't write to BOOMERS…so they write to please themselves. As a BOOMER many of us see right through this common occurrence.
Here’s a news story that is impossible to cherry-pick.  Every cherry has been plucked, packaged, and offered as sustenance by Yours Truly and others for over a decade:
Baby Boomers Are Noticing How You're (Not) Speaking to Them
I’ll snatch one piece of wrinkled fruit, just for fun:
…. One of the biggest reasons for this is marketers are beginning to close the book on this generation by relying on outdated stereotypes to inform decisions and craft messages that ultimately don’t hit the mark. It takes more than a Rolling Stones song on a 30 second TV commercial. Half of Baby Boomers (47%) told us in this same survey that companies are using inaccurate stereotypes in advertising about people their age.
A few moldy posts:
03 October 2005Invoking "The Sixties": Fidelity Financial vs. Ameriprise
19 February 2007
Food fights, Balloons and Dancing Gorillas
19 December 2010
Why does the media think Boomers are smiling, vapid idiots?
And if you’re desperate to hear me bloviate about it all, check out highlights from a European Tour in 2007:


Recently I penned an Afterword for an international marketing/advertising tome due out in early 2016.
A pull:
I wasn’t the first to suggest a necessary shift away from the 18-35 demographic. In 1990, two books were released, Age Wave by Ken Dychtwald  and Serving the Ageless Market: Strategies for Selling to the Fifty-Plus Market by David B. Wolfe.  Many others followed, including The Definitive Guide to Mature Advertising and Marketing by Kevin Lavery  (U.K) and Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers by Brent Green.

What bewilders me about all these brand-new news articles: the  disregard of historical perspective along with the absence of acknowledgements due the original thinkers and doers. It’s not difficult to research almost anything nowadays.  A simple googling of  ‘advertising & baby boomers’ would return over a million hits.
And as a journalist it would keep you from embarrassing yourself.

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.