NABBW Teleseminar: The Path from Job Loss to Re-Employment

The National Association of Baby Boomer Women is sponsoring a teleseminar this month with friend and colleague Dr. Carol Orsborn, along with Amy Hoster - someone I don’t know but it sounds like we all should:

Baby Boomers: The Path from Job Loss to Re-Employment
Date: 11/17/2009
Time: 3:00 PM EST
Listen in as Boomer expert, veteran marketing executive, and author of The Year I Saved My (downsized) Soul: A Boomer Woman's Search for Meaning…and a Job, Carol Orsborn, Ph.D, discusses the top five things one should do immediately after a job loss or the looming fear of one, and as she explains why attitude has so much to do with successfully becoming employed again. Orsborn, who has appeared on Oprah and The Today Show, and in the pages of People Magazine, Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, understands firsthand what Boomer Women face when caught up in a downsizing, and is ready and willing to share all …

On the call will also be Amy Hoster … who's been involved in the recruiting industry since 1999. Amy promises to give our callers specific tools they need for re-employment; like how to make sure you've got the right kind of resume, the all-important interview; what to say and what not to say, and also how job fairs can benefit you.

Dotsie Bregel founded NABBW. 
I remember hearing from Dotsie when NABBW was simply an idea and a web page.  Now it’s all over the place.

Watch a ton of videos about The National Association of Baby Boomer Women.

Sign up for the Teleseminar.

Can Boomers Lead an Elder Revolution?

In response to a New York Times piece in September, I tossed up a post with (much too) long excerpts from my book (first published in 2005):

Late Bloomer Boomers
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.

Now Philip Moeller of U.S. News & World Report is contemplating some of these same issues:

Can Boomers Lead an Elder Revolution?
… But what if, instead, an aging world turned out to be a good thing? Is this even possible? Well, nearly 80 million baby boomers are here to say that they've had a great run so far and they expect, no, they demand, that it will continue.

… Roszak, a college teacher and author of 15 books who is now in his late 70s, has issued another rallying cry to this generation with The Making of an Elder Culture, published earlier this year. In it, he argues that the baby boomers are hardly finished making their mark on the world. "Boomers, who will usher us into senior dominance, are the best educated, most socially conscientious, most politically savvy older generation the world has ever seen," he says. "I believe that generation will want to do good things with the power that history has unexpectedly thrust upon it in its senior years. What boomers left undone in their youth, they will return to take up in their maturity."

Requisite cliché:

Okay! Sounds like a plan.

The Joy of Book and Author Promotion Circa 2009

From: Brent Green
To: Chuck Nyren
Subject: The funny part is it's eerily accurate...

The joy of book and author promotion circa 2009:

Subject: Our Marketing Plan
by Ellis Weiner
Let me introduce myself. My name is Gineen Klein, and I’ve been brought on as an intern to replace the promotion department here at Propensity Books … I’ve attached a list of celebrities we think would be great to blurb your book, so find out their numbers and call them up … We’d like to see you on morning talk shows like the “Today” show and “The View,” so please get yourself booked on them and keep us “in the loop.”

From: Chuck Nyren
To: Brent Green
Subject: RE: The funny part is it's eerily accurate...

That’s great. I’m spray-feeding it on Hoster Broaster.

Chuck

Their personalities are far from grave.

 

NostraChuckus nails it again.

 

From my book (© 2005):

A piece from The Boston Globe:

Their personalities are far from grave
Funeral directors humor themselves at convention
By David Filipov
… He has been getting requests for personalized funerals all the time, as baby boomers “come of age,’’ as he puts it. Boomers were raised to have it their way. It is an attitude they take with them to the grave. And it has required funeral directors to evolve.

And a post from last year:

Funerals Are For The Dead
As the old saying goes, “Funerals are for the living.” Not anymore. Now there’s a place where you can theme, decorate, and DJ from the grave (or wherever you happen to end up) – thanks to two Baby Boomers: Nancy Bush and Sue Kruskopf.

… Of course, when I die I want a funeral procession with an old rickety horse-drawn carriage, open coffin, priests with long beards in long robes waving incense, and hundreds of women dressed in black and wailing.

But that’s just me. My personal statement.

AARP Targets Media Planners

I was going to pass on blogging this – since Dick Stroud already did the honors:

AARP Video – Boomer + Interrogation 
The video was created as a way to overcome the objections that AARP heard at the forum. It is sad to say but these objections to the older market have been around since I began writing my book and are identical to the ones I encountered in the UK. 

It is astonishing that people are still coming out with these lame excuses.

But a gentleman from AARP Media emailed me and wanted my take on it.

So, here’s the video and the take:

I told him it would be difficult for me to gage the impact on media planners, but was happy to note that the video didn’t do anything stupid – like denigrate the target market they’re promoting. 

Way back in 2004-5, AARP was doing just that in a B2B campaign.  I wrote a chapter about it in my book, and referenced it in a post few years later:

AARP's Chicken Coop Coup?
… 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!"

I just couldn’t figure out how trashing your ‘product’ was going to sell any.  And even if it did … 

More from the chapter:

The problem is that the advertising agency, like most agencies, is very much caught up in the trendy concept of Branding (one of those buzzwords overused in the last few years, and often misunderstood), and consciously or subconsciously did a bit of branding with their client’s product.

They’ve done this by introducing and presenting the product as immature, daft, and half-dead. Quite  the  product  I’d  want  to  buy (meaning: quite the demographic I’d get all hot and bothered about advertising to).

Even if this campaign convinces advertisers and media planners to consider targeting Baby Boomers, these silly stereotypes have been reinforced and will be carried over into consumer campaigns.

The AARP Media Sales Interrogation video stays on message – so other than being a bit long, it’s fine with me.  I hope it works.