Discovering What Matters

Following the fun and insightful Ecologies of Risk report, The MetLife Mature Market Institute has released a new study:

Discovering What Matters: Balancing Money, Medicine and Meaning
1. Myth: The Good Life = material wealth. When asked to select from a list of 13 activities that
contribute to living a purposeful life, respondents were most likely to select spending time with friends/family (86%) and taking care of their physical self (63%).
2. Myth: Happiness = the absence of misfortune. Over the years, most people experience one or more negative “trigger events” such as serious illness, the death of a friend/family member and/or a major financial loss … Positive events, such as the birth of a grandchild or getting a new job, can serve as trigger events.
3. Myth: The Good Life = more (more friends, more money, more health, more activity). The good life comes from balance and alignment of financial security, health and meaningful activity. This usually means “lightening one’s load” by doing away with burdens that lead to unnecessary and/or unproductive activity.

Download The Discovering What Matters Study

Also check out the Workbook so you know what MetLife is up to with their marketing fodder. You’ll have to send away for the DVD, but the workbook is available for download.

Higher up in the site hierarchy you can view MetLife’s TV campaigns – some from around the world.

Television & Toothpaste

Friends keep sending me this Los Angeles Times article to blog:

Television is starting to look beyond the 18- to 49-year-old demographic Marketers targeted the group hoping to build brand loyalty in young people. Some in the TV industry now view that as short-sighted …

It’s a good piece with good quotes, but I kept putting it off because this blog has blogged the subject to death.  For years. A post from 2005:

Where's the TV for us?
Network television not only is under siege from other media - but compounds the problem by ignoring Baby Boomers … Brad Adgate of Horizon Media and Alan Wurtzel, president of research for NBC Universal, do a good job exposing the silliness of television advertisers (and advertising agencies) targeting only the 19-49 demographic …

A bunch of other posts.

Last year Les Moonves and yours truly were quoted in an article by Jennifer Mann of The Kansas City Star:

Baby boomers become the forgotten consumer

Back to the LA Times piece:

… Some network executives and media buyers think the notion that young people's brand loyalty must be won early is, in Moonves' words, "an old wives' tale." The idea was that "if you bought Crest toothpaste when you were 18 years old, when you turned 50 you would still use Crest toothpaste," Moonves said.

Indeed, Sternberg and others said they knew of no reliable studies backing that theory.

Believe it or not … I’ve even talked about toothpaste.

This sounds familiar.

I’m skimming this sort of interesting article in The Wall Street Journal:

Retirement Living TV Gets Boost
Comcast Deal Will Expand Audience as More Marketers Pursue Older Crowd
The deal, expected to be announced Friday, will initially bring RLTV to Comcast subscribers in the retiree-heavy markets of Tucson, Ariz., and Albuquerque, N.M, and spread to digital cable systems in other parts of the country in subsequent months.

Then it becomes very interesting - at least to me:

Mr. Erickson says RLTV, which initially targeted people 55 and over before drifting down to the over-50 set, doesn't plan to keep moving younger. But he is flexible about the network's name, which he acknowledges could turn off people at the bottom of his age range.

Hmmm. Sounds familiar. I search around and find a post from 2006:

Tailoring media to an older crowd
However, the word 'retirement' might scare off Baby Boomers. It smacks of 'old' and 'irrelevant.'

Already a Shade of Gray

There’s been lots of empty yack recently about the ‘end of the baby boomers’ and their waning influence now that Barack Obama (technically a Boomer) is about to take office. 

Yet it doesn’t seem as if the President-Elect is listening to such prattle:

Obama Administration: Already a shade of gray
by Paul Briand
A look at the incoming Obama Administration shows it is not quite as young as people might think … There's a distinct tinge of gray to his incoming cabinet and senior advisers ... But the wonks can't separate the Baby Boomers from the new administration as easily as they might want. The Baby Boomer influence is far from dead in the upcoming administration.

Will the business industry apply the same intuitive template?  How about the advertising industry?

Mr. Briand also reports on another useless, over-the-hill Boomer.
_

Update: I’ve ‘disallowed’ comments for this post.  Too many political ones.  I’ll take the blame for merely mentioning something that slightly smacked of politics.

More Nimble, More Creative Solutions

Stuart Elliott of the New York Times reports on an interesting ad biz tactic by Intel:

Intel Shifts Image Advertising to a Smaller Agency
Intel is shifting an important advertising assignment — to create brand and corporate image campaigns — to a smaller, independent agency from a Madison Avenue giant … The recession may accelerate the trend of large marketers looking for “more nimble, more creative solutions” to advertising problems, Mr. Venables said. “A company like ours is in a fantastic position.”

This is what I suggested in my book when targeting Baby Boomers.  A few excerpts:
  

While I’ve done a fair amount of consulting/creative strategy/copywriting for major companies, my ‘agency’ is a bit too small to really ‘pitch’ Unilever, Microsoft, Toyota, and all the others for full-service advertising/marketing/PR.  But if you’re one of the big guys or gals, consider a medium-sized agency for “more nimble, more creative solutions.”

And you can call me, of course.  I’ll help you find one.  (Along with spearheading, contributing, and shaking up things if need be.)