The Google Phone

Here’s a campaign that (I guess) is age-neutral, maybe skewed a bit to Baby Boomers (two out of three celebrities, and a moldy tune for the TV spot)*:

I’m not a fan of using celebrities for ads, although there are exceptions.  I generally smile when I see Whoopi. 

Fast Company’s Chris Dannen says, “The Google Phone's Ad Campaign Bites, Here's How to Give It Teeth.”

The TV spot is aspirational, direct, fun – but it doesn’t do what it should do:

For the umpteenth time …
The Most Effective Marketing/Advertising Model For Reaching Baby Boomers: What is now called traditional advertising pushing you to an age-friendly, informative product/services web site.

It’s not a bad site.

And that hand-me-down soundtrack does everything a soundtrack shouldn’t.  I’ll admit that I’d hoped to never hear that recording again – but even if you liked it way back when, it still doesn’t work:

Purely anecdotal: I’m watching TV. I hear a tune I haven’t heard in thirty-five, forty years. My mind goes off into the ether. “Wow. What a great song. I’d forgotten all about it. I had the album. The cover was blue . . . And there were a bunch of other great songs on that album. What the hell were they? I can’t remember . . . I wonder if I can get it on Amazon. There’s probably only a compilation of his hits, or a boxed set. But I just want the CD of the album. I’ll have to remember to check the next time I’m online ..”

By then, the commercial is over. In fact, probably three other commercials are over. I have no idea what the product is, or what any of the other products are.

But the real questions are these: Do advertisers benefit from invoking the past willy-nilly? When those tunes come on, am I really paying attention? Or do they send me off into the ether, conjuring up all sorts of bizarre and moldy feelings, images, remembrances?

If someone at Google or T-Mobile or their ad agency liked this tune so much, spend some money and redo the ditty, so it sounds relevant for today. When I hear that recording while watching the commercial, I think I should be picking up this:

More: Invoking The Sixties

* Thanks to Fast Company for the graphic.

Advertisers: Be Prepared For Big Boomer Brains

I was looking forward to less pain in the future, hoping the gradual wearing away of gray matter would take a load off my nagging neck. Now I hear otherwise:

Older Brains May Not Be So Small After All Decrease in gray matter isn't a given, researchers find
Scientists have assumed that people's brains shrink as they age, but researchers now suspect that's not the case … Scientists in the past had failed to screen out people whose brains had shrunk because of brain disease, they said.

In other words, simply growing older may not make the brain become smaller.

That’s great. That’s all I need. A fully-functioning, fat, juicy noggin and an arthritic neck that can barely hold it up.

Other bad news (especially for advertisers who continue to patronize and dismiss anybody over fifty):

Older Brain May Really Be a Wiser Brain

Baby Boomers are smarter than you think.

And generally better.

Late Bloomer Boomers

In the NYT yesterday:

The Summer of the Celebrity Deaths?
By SARAH KERSHAW
This summer could come to be known as the summer when baby boomers began to turn to the obituary pages first, to face not merely their own mortality or ponder their legacies, but to witness the passing of legends who defined them as a tribe, bequeathing through music, culture, news and politics a kind of generational badge that has begun to fray.

“This is a historical development in cultural history,” said Todd Gitlin, 66, the sociologist and author of “The Sixties,” who teaches at the Columbia University School of Journalism. “It’s the ebbing of figures who have a wide enough span of appreciation and admiration so they appeal to significant numbers of people, like incarnations of virtue. So people take a new measure of themselves when they ask, ‘Will there ever be anybody else like X’ ”?

The shinier side:

Going by actuarial tables, the boomers, now age 45 to 63, can expect to live to age 83, thanks to modern health care …

“I think this is the first time so many have simultaneously had an awareness of death and the prospect of a whole new act,” Mr. (Marc) Freedman said. “Never before have there been so many people who have so much experience and the time left to do something with it.”

I talked about this in my book (©2005, 2007).  A chunk of it:

The Late Bloomer Boomers

I don’t think that you should become a copywriter until you’ve done something else first . . . I wrote my first ad when I was 39 . . . I couldn’t have done it unless I had done a lot of other things first . . . I had experience that was enormously important when I sat down to write my first ad. 
                                                      —David Ogilvy1

One of the ways Baby Boomers are redefining middle age is by beginning new lives.This is nothing that hasn’t been done before, but for a large chunk of a generation to do it practically en masse took many prognosticators by surprise.

When Baby Boomers were in their late teens through their early thirties there was an explosion of creative productivity in all fields.

Now Boomers in their late forties and fifties, the ones who didn’t quite “make it” or took safer paths, are finding out that their creative juices never dried up. Many of these folks are writing fiction and non-fiction, becoming graphic artists and photographers, and playing and composing music. And just as many are doing astonishingly creative things in the business world, often as entrepreneurs.

This isn’t like retired people taking on hobbies. The Late Bloomer Boomer Movement is going full blast, and there’s no stopping it. The magic equation: Thirty-odd years of experience plus not feeling old and being relatively healthy plus knowing you have another quarter-century of productivity in you equals . . .

Well, we’ll see. Some pundits are predicting that Late Bloomer Boomers may leave a bigger imprint on society than the “early bloomer” Boomers who were at the top of their games twenty-five to thirty-five years ago.
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1 Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003).

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.
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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

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.
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Update: Boomer Backlash II