Book News: Advertising to Baby Boomers selected by AEF

The Advertising Educational Foundation has selected Advertising to Baby Boomers as a Classroom Resource. Only twenty-five titles have been chosen over the last six years. They include A BIG LIFE (in advertising) by Mary Wells Lawrence (Alfred A. Knopf), How Brands Become Icons by Douglas B. Holt (Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation), and Contemporary Advertising by William F. Arens (The McGraw-Hill Companies).

View the complete list.

I would like to thank AEF for selecting my book as one of their educational resources. This is quite an honor.

The 2007 revised and updated Advertising to Baby Boomers is available directly from Paramount Books.

A Few Good Newsletters

If you're a newsletter fan (I think of them as email blogs), there are a handful of insightful ones about advertising and marketing to the 50+ demographic:

Matt Thornhill of The Boomer Project puts together a fun newsletter full of juicy, informative stories.

The Mature Market's newsletter has links to lots of original and reprinted articles from around the world. Find out how other countries are dealing with advertising and marketing to Baby Boomers.

Mary Furlong's newsletter comes out infrequently, but is always worth the wait.

One I don't subscribe to is Dick Stroud's newsletter. That's because his blog is an every day stop for me.

There are others - but they tend to be exclusively promotional newsletters touting the companies. (I call them opt-in spam.) Who needs a slightly different ad showing up in your mailbox every month?

New Baby Boomers Magazine?

In an earlier post I talked a bit about magazines targeting Baby Boomers. Here's an interesting piece from the New York Times about Harold Whittlesey McGraw III and his accomplishments at McGraw-Hill. An excerpt:

McGraw-Hill is investigating a number of growth initiatives tied to BusinessWeek, both online and in print. One idea is a magazine aimed at baby boomers, according to several people close to the discussions.

Good for Mr. McGraw. (And he's a Baby Boomer, btw.)

Maturialism....

I ran across this word in an article, rolled my eyes, and bookmarked it for some sort of comment.

But lucky for me my friend Dick Stroud beat me to it, so I don't have to waste my time blogging this one. Just read his blog.

Barbies 'n Baseball

The Louisville Slugger Museum has an odd but smart (at least marketing-wise) exhibit going, Barbies & Baseball:

Acclaimed contemporary photographer David Levinthal creates stunning portraits using two great American icons - Barbie dolls and baseball player figurines. The miniature models come alive on big photo prints, bursting with color and drama.

Baby Boomers are inveterate museum-goers. But there are so many museums. The brilliance of this particular summer exhibit is simply this:

If I were driving through Louisville with my more-significant-than-I-am Other and said, "Hey! Let's go to the Louisville Slugger Museum!" I imagine I'd get some eye-rolls, some disgusted sighing, a "...what's a louisville slugger…"

But if I added, "And guess what? They're having a Barbie exhibit! Lots of Barbie stuff and baseball! I don't quite get the connection -- maybe there's a Barbie baseball team or something -- it's hard to keep up with all these expansion teams .... but Barbie! Lots of Barbie! You remember … the doll!" I bet we'd be making a stop — and I probably wouldn't have to hear too much about it afterwards.

Barbies & Baseball