Still Getting Hits: 2005

Whether due to malfunctions of the ever-changing, amorphous Google Algorithms or simply the slapdash nature of web search, many of my creaky posts still get hits. Some, lots.

And my site meter (that ubiquitous rainbow-ish thing) always surprises me. People search for the darndest things.

Although I’ve been ‘blogging’ since 1996, this one hatched in 2005.  From that year, some of the still popular posts (make that popular by long-tail standards):

Wrap Rage
In the last month, two clients have consulted me about packaging and Baby Boomers. It's a hot topic.

Those Humdrum Empty Nesters
Stuck in their ways. Refuse to try new things, change brands. Why target them???

Rubbing yourself and smiling.
I first saw The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty as a series of print ads (was it in the Oprah mag?) and loved it. No doubt about it — real beauties. The women exuded intelligence, confidence, sensuality.
(New link: Does Reality Sell Beauty?)

Selfless baby boomers switch careers
I guess I've just hung out with too many friends who've always had altruistic goals, altruistic lives, and didn't pile up the dough …

The Three Ages of Advertising Slavery
I saw Hugh MacCleod's cartoon posted a few days ago and it cracked me up.

No News News
Imagine if a company decided to truly target Baby Boomers, if their site was truly boomer-friendly, if Baby Boomer creatives actually designed the site, wrote the copy... imagine how this product or service would break away from the pack...

Marketing to young people is fun!
You get to talk about cool ideas and hot fads and pretend you can actually predict what the next trend will be!

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.
____

Maybe I’ll do 2006 sometime.

PureWowOwow

Peter Himler tipped me off to this – and I don’t know what to make of it:

Father of MTV launching new property
… Bob Pittman is slated to launch his new digital venture, PureWow.com, at the end of the summer. Pittman's partners on the site, which will target the crossover between Gen X and Baby Boomer females, include Whoopi Goldberg, Lesley Stahl, Candice Bergen and Lily Tomlin.

Sounds like fun – but there’s already a popular site with almost the same name and all the same celebrities:

wowOwow.com
wowOwow is a free daily Internet website created, run and written by Lesley Stahl, Peggy Noonan, Liz Smith, Joni Evans, Mary Wells, Sheila Nevins, Joan Juliet Buck, Whoopi Goldberg, Julia Reed, Joan Ganz Cooney, Judith Martin, Candice Bergen, Lily Tomlin, Jane Wagner, Cynthia McFadden and Marlo Thomas.

Wow. I don’t get it.

Not to worry.  I’m sure Liz Smith will sort it out for us sooner or later …

NostraChuckus Scoops New York Times

A blog post stamped May 21, 2010:

We’re all miserably happy, or …
While it’s usually a mistake to assume that Baby Boomers are all the same, in this case it must be true: We’re all happy and miserable.

The New York Times, June 11, 2010:

In Midlife, Boomers Are Happy — and Suicidal
In recent weeks, researchers reported that Americans in midlife are a remarkably contented lot, and that they also have the highest rate of suicide.

NostraChuckus is thrilled to be able to predict news stories weeks before the New York Times. He might kill himself because he never gets the credit he deserves.

Spending goes where the eyeballs are.

Not a big surprise:

TV, the ‘Old Medium,’ Holds Its Own in an Ad Spending Recovery
By ERIC PFANNER 
“Many big advertisers remain loyal to television,” said Vincent Letang, an analyst a Screen Digest. “At the end of the day, it’s about audience. Despite all the hype about digital growth, spending goes where the eyeballs are.”

Then factor in this: New Media technology is getting smaller, not bigger. Eyeballs are squinting:

Foretellings 
That silly retronym “traditional advertising” will remain the premiere force for introducing people to a product or service, along with sustaining its shelf life. Television, print, radio, and billboard ads will continue to have the visceral power they’ve always had – if only for their sheer size, simplicity, and cutting-edge audio/visual qualities.  Advertising on smartphones will be considered an annoyance, invasive, and rather dinky – while marketing (coupons on steroids, and more) will flourish and dominate.

Ad space? Matchbook covers are bigger.

And television outlets “still provide advertisers with the best hope of reaching a mass audience in a single swoop, at the lowest possible cost, analysts say.”

If anything, smartphones and iPads are death-knells for ‘new media’ advertising.

So what’s a Baby Boomer? Redux

I first blogged about this in 2006 (the embedded links have vanished):

So What's A Baby Boomer?
The "baby boom" actually began in 1943 when birth rates began to rise, dipping slightly in 1944 and 1945. I like to include people born a few years before that when I talk about Baby Boomers.

Obviously, I’m not anal about it.  But because marketing research is such a huge industry and detailed studies cost hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars, I wonder why so many people involved in slicing and dicing demos are so often confused:

Alpha Daughters Help Unravel the Complexity of the Ageing Baby Boomer Market
Over 12% of the US population are aged 65 or over and in the EU and US combined there are over 100 million people in this rapidly growing demographic group. Many of these consumers are the greying baby boomers …

Not yet.  Technically there aren’t any Baby Boomers over sixty-five.  The oldest ones are turning sixty-four this year – and that’s just the oldest ones born in 1946.  It’ll take another nineteen years for all Boomers to be over sixty-five.

Whatever ‘alpha daughters’ are, most are Baby Boomers.  They’re actually alpha-grandparents/daughters – meaning, they are caretaking their parents who are in their late seventies, eighties, and beyond – along with being grandparents – and (obviously) parents of adults.  A good book about it:

The Daughter Trap
Researcher Kennedy conducted 60 minute depth phone interviews across the U.S. with a nationally-representative sample of 216 working women born between 1946-1964, who reported having primary caregiving responsibility for one or more aging parents or in-laws.

Baby Boomers who will need caregiving won’t need it for another fifteen to thirty years.

Female baby boomers get online, not in line, for beauty
In the Mintel “Beauty Retailing” study, 1-in-10 of the 1,020 female respondents—all ages 18 years or older—reported using some type of online retailer to purchase cosmetics and skin care aids, and as the female population ages, the female boomer population is expected to increase by 30.9% from 2005 to 2015.

The female boomer population is expected to increase by 30.9% …

That would be quite a magic trick.  I don’t think Professor Dumbledore could even do it.