Boomer Backlash II

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

Graywashing

Good word. 

Graywashing was minted by Colin Milner, CEO of the International Council on Active Aging (ICAA).  From a recent article in The Journal on Active Aging®:

Tackling Graywashing (PDF)
by Marilynn Larkin
“Graywashing refers to the act of misleading consumers regarding any purported age-associated benefits of a product or service,” Milner explains … “Graywashing gives older-adult consumers a false sense of security by positioning a product or service as uniquely beneficial to them…”

…. On the opposite end of the stereotyping
spectrum are campaigns that suggest
all older adults should be superstars.
“Portrayed in the media and marketing
materials as healthy, wealthy and defying
aging, ‘superstar’ older adults present
an image that also distorts reality,”
comments Milner. “Such stereotypes
imply or explicitly state that ‘aging well’
requires health, independence, vitality,
economic wherewithal and social
connections. Not surprisingly, these are
qualities we equate with youthfulness,”
he states.

Way back in 2005 I wrote about similar issues:

Don’t Paint Too Rosy A Picture (Excerpts)
A recent article in USA Today asks us to “take a moment to journey forward to 2046, when 79 million baby boomers will be 82 to 100 years old.”  A paragraph later, the reporter asks, “So just what kind of America will be forged by this crowd of geriatric goliaths?”

Excuse me for being an unassuming ‘David’ (or even worse, a genocidal Grim Reaper) but I doubt very much that all 79 million Baby Boomers in the U.S. will still be alive in forty years, swaggering like giants – unless the medical establishment is holding out on me.

The good news you know: many Baby Boomers will live longer, healthier lives – more so than in any previous generations. The bad news you also know: by 2046 a huge chunk Boomers will have passed on, and another huge chunk will be dealing with acute diseases and afflictions. 

The problem is that well-meaning articles in the press like the USA Today piece, along with mountains of 50+ marketing fodder, are setting up Boomers for a psychological fall.  There will be a backlash.

And I’ve blogged about them through the years:

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.

The Era of Oversell is Over
There’s nothing wrong with being positive and aspirational – you just have to temper it with dollops of reality so your marketing won’t be dismissed as pie-in-the-sky nonsense.

Uh-oh. We’re in trouble
Rapped on the knuckles…

Marilynn Larkin interviewed me for the article.  I put up a tongue-in-cheek post about it:

The Best Anti-Aging Products, Services, and Activities: Guaranteed!
There are plenty of anti-aging products, services, and activities that are staggeringly effective.  They stop the aging process almost immediately…

So quotes from yours truly are splattered throughout Tackling Graywashing – along with trenchant comments from Lori Bitter and Dr. Bill Thomas.

Thanks, Mr. Milner, for coming up with a masterful phrase to describe it all.

Barron’s Weighs In

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.

Boomer Backlash I

Pretty soon (and for reasons I’ve been screaming about for years), advertising and the media will alienate its most vibrant demographic.

Ronni Bennett runs a blog that often reflects what’s going on in the hearts and minds of many folks over fifty:

Time Goes By
The Media's Take on Elders
In the five years I've been doing this blog, the amount of attention paid to elders from all media has exploded. That's because the baby boomers started turning 60 and our consumer society is ever-ready to exploit a market …

Most of this stuff reads like it has been repurposed from Seventeen or Cosmopolitan magazine. It's all about the pretense of youth, remaining a midlife adult forever, denying age and its differences from earlier years. There is more than a whiff of parental supervision in the attitude of these stories – that the writers know what is best for elders (not that they would go near that word), and how we should live, which is mostly just like 35-year-olds …

One of the many reader comments:

I love being in my late 50's! I'm not crazy about some of the physical stuff, but I'm relishing the enjoyment of being me. I can't imagine trading places with my 25 year old daughter; you couldn't pay me to do that again.

It won’t be long before Boomers wise up, figuring out what they’re supposed to figure out because they’re wiser than they think they are:

Older Brain May Really Be a Wiser Brain

And they’re smarter than you think.

And generally better.

There’s a Part II coming up.  I hope there won’t be a Part III.
___

Update: Boomer Backlash II

NostraChuckus Scoops The New York Times.

Famed Soothsayer and advertising gadfly NostraChuckus has been startling the world for years with his mundane prognostications.

Almost every eve, The Great Seer stares into his Crystal Ball of Common Sense and sees himself – but in other guises. These strange visages look nothing like him – yet they do. It’s as if his magikal orb doubles as a phantasmagoric funhouse mirror.

Today, he stares into the undulating image of The New York Times…

Baby Boomers to Advertisers: Don’t Forget About Us
By Janet Morrissey
“Marketers have gotten so hot for the millennial generation that they have essentially ignored boomers” … “We’re here in the millions, and we have more disposable income, time and want to spend money. Yet they don’t give us the consideration that they should.”

Sounds eerily familiar. Download the first few chapters of Advertising to Baby Boomers (2005/2007).

“I’m here today to fix something that drives me completely crazy,” before criticizing his wireless competitors for deeming boomers as “too old,” “stuck in the past” and not interested in technology or the internet.

NostraChuckus, from the 2005 book:

“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.”

14 November 2005
My Favorite Cyber-Myth
How I snicker and roll my eyes whenever I read about Baby Boomers fumbling around on computers, scratching their heads, totally flummoxed.

More from The New York Times:

He mocked some of his rivals’ senior phone plans for focusing on “big buttons”…

08 December 2007
The Jitterbug Phone
… Those numbers and buttons are big - like a toy phone … Boomers are tech-savvy, demand choices.

Right now, it’s mainly companies that make senior-related products, like life insurance, medical devices and reverse mortgages, that regularly target boomers.

16 September 2009
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.

“They want to market to the cool segment, the modern segment, the ‘in’ segment,” Mr. Light said of marketers, many of whom are millennials themselves.

The 2005 book again.  The introductory chapter, The Geritol Syndrome, is all about this.

19 August 2015
Folks Are Still Reading My 2005 Book
… 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.”

Automobiles is another category where boomers may feel underserved…

Too many posts about this.  Three:

12 March 2009
Who’s gonna buy this car?
In 2005 on The Advertising Show yours truly had a spirited discussion with hosts Brad Forsythe and Ray Schilens.  A chunky segment was about marketing autos to Boomers.

18 DECEMBER 2009
What Next From The Crystal Ball of Common Sense?

03 MAY 2012
67% Of All Sales…
… Those age 50 and older are buying more than three of every five new vehicles sold, or about 62% … For the Detroit Three, boomers now account for 67% of all sales.

NostraChuckus is getting tired now. The images are becoming jumbled, hazy.

The Great Seer knows he’s not alone. Other Great Seers have been staring into their crystal balls for decades: Kevin Lavery, Dick Stroud, Mary Furlong, John Migliaccio, Kurt Medina, Todd Harff, Brent Green, Carol Orsborn, Matt Thornhill, David Wolfe – just to name a few. 

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.

At least it's nice to have The New York Times catch up with validate what we’ve been saying all these years.

---

Just for fun:

Normal and Healthy is Scary
by Chuck Nyren
Is living forever going to suck?

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 directed
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:

At 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.

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.  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.

More about Warren Dotz

All this sounds vaguely familiar...

Nielsen: This Isn't Your Grandfather's Baby Boomer
Research Titan Claims Demographic's Retirement Upends Old Notions, Younger Consumers Are Losing Dominance
by Brian Steinberg
… Most times senior citizens are still seen in ads selling life insurance or denture cream, yet the older person in the U.S. in the next decade is likely to be anything but helpless and in the market for more than just financial help and medications.

That’s this blog, my book, my speaking and consulting around the world, my articles since 2003.

Like this one:

Boomer Backlash II
… 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 …

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.

___

Update: Good piece about all this by Eve Troeh of Marketplace: Over the hill but not in a rut

Update: Brent Green’s trenchant take on it all

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 directed
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:

At 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.

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.  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.

More about Warren Dotz

The Crystal Ball of Common Sense Returns

As you can see, NostraChuckus' Crystal Ball of Common Sense has become agitated, flashing mystical sparks every which way.

While it’s all rather hazy, the probable causes for these disturbances are some recent ‘news’ stories:

Boomers volunteer at the highest rate of any generational group
About 33 percent of all boomers those born between 1946 and 1964 volunteer on a regular basis, the highest rate of any generational group and four percentage points above the national average of 28.8 percent…

NostraChuckus has said this before … and even before that:

Me vs. We Redux
Me Generation Baby Boomers Find Fulfillment Through Volunteerism…

This as well might explain the wild antics of the Crystal Ball:

Women’s Voices For Change
Makers of adult diapers, dentures, cancer treatments (disease in general), laxatives, and other products that address bodily functions are happy to target Boomers. But others act as if we automatically stop buying stuff…

From the book (2005):

 

 

 

 

 

And here:

Boomer Backlash (2009)
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.

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.

Famed Soothsayer and advertising gadfly NostraChuckus shall continue startling the world with his mundane prognostications.

Picking On The Big Boys & Girls, Part I: AARP

From 2008:

AARP's Chicken Coop Coup?
I've picked on AARP's advertising and marketing through the years. I think they can handle it. They're big boys and girls.

For years AARP has been promoting their magazine and other outlets to media planners and advertisers.  The first time I ran across one of these efforts was in 2004-5, and wrote about it in my book:

… 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!"
© 2005 by Paramount Market Publishing

A few years later they tried again:

AARP

And again:

06 June 2011
Still Consuming
… AARP’s new marketing effort will promote the baby boom generation, as it ages, as a viable consumer target for advertisers.

Now they have a new B2B campaign:

In AARP’s View, Advertisers Need to Focus
By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
The New York Times 
A new campaign aimed at advertisers themselves features people in their 50s and early 60s, and argues that brands should be focusing on them, not people ages 18 to 34, commonly referred to by the marketers who covet them as millennials.

There’s not much new (if anything):

“The advertising industry in general puts an overemphasis on youth, and when boomers were young that was a very good advertising strategy, because when boomers were 35 in ’75 or ’85, there were 70 million of them,” Mr. Perello said.

… If there is a tendency to pitch to younger consumers, one reason might be the blush of youth among those creating the ads.

Sounds familiar.  The first chapter of my book (PDF):

Why Companies and Ad Agencies Need Baby Boomers
… 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.

… Along the way, there was a major marketing disconnect. We’re still the largest and richest demographic—but as far as advertising agen- cies are concerned, we’re off the radar.

How did this happen?

Baby Boomers who worked in the advertising industry have moved on; partly by choice, partly by design. In many cases we’ve been kicked out or kicked upstairs. Natural attrition. It was meant to be. It’s the normal course of events.

We have left a positive and important legacy in the marketing and advertising worlds: racial and ethnic inclusion, lifestyle inclusion, tons more perceived markets.

But we also left advertising agencies the Youth Culture.

… Advertising agencies are image-conscious and want to be hip (again, residue from Baby Boomers). Not only do they not want to market to Baby Boomers—they simply want to do what they do best: market to themselves. They certainly don’t want to be known as an agency that markets to older folks (The Geritol Syndrome).

More from the NYT piece:

Much of the advertising in the June/July issue of the magazine is what might be expected, prescription and over-the-counter drugs, a blood sugar monitoring device, and amplifying earphones for television viewers with hearing loss.

But there also are a few ads from brands that have nothing to do with infirmities, the type with which AARP hopes to gain more traction, like Stouffer’s Farmers’ Harvest meals and the Bose Wave music system.

Sounds about right to me.  From 2009:

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.

This new campaign portrays baby boomers as…  

Why does the media think Boomers are smiling, vapid idiots?
Actually, there are two distinct demos – something marketers need to know:

• Baby Boomers who scream and jump in the air on the beach
• Baby Boomers who scream and jump in the air on their motor scooters.

At least it’s an improvement over dead or crazed. 

Disclaimer:  The target markets for this campaign are media planners and advertisers – so what do I know.  My issue has to due with the portrayal of people 50-70 and a spillover into what might end up as B2C campaigns.

I would have used people in real situations – hire a few top-notch photographers and send them every which way (with someone trailing  with release forms, etc.).  No hokey ad copy. 

And/or something like these:

Singapore

This weekend while at Costco, I caught a grandmother (she shall remain anonymous) sending pictures of dresses to her granddaughter so the child could pick the one she wanted.  Instant virtual shopping.
 

_____

Next: Picking On The Big Boys & Girls, Part II: The Presidential Campaigns