09 July 2014

Miscellany: Sex, Travel, Tech

It’s too hot to concentrate.  I’ll be going every which way with this post, trying to stay cool by moving around.

I wrote a piece about sex for HuffPo.  Doesn’t everybody who blogs for HuffPo do that?  Your hits go way up – not like if you write about chickens.

huffington_post_logo1Going Nutty Over Older Women's Bodies
I thank my lucky stars I've lived long enough to go nutty over older women's bodies. It's not anything I ever thought I'd go nutty over…

ewald_pattiTampa Bay Times Staff Writer Patti Ewald recently wrote a funny, trenchant column about sex – and referenced my piece:

Still turned on to idea of sex
"There's this popular public perception that as women age, sex becomes unimportant and that women just stop having sex as they get older," said Holly Thomas, a University of Pittsburgh researcher. "From our study, it looks like most women continue to have sex."

At the moment, the article above says I’m seventy-four.  I asked them to change it to my correct age (sixty-three).  However, you’re only as old as you feel – so maybe they got it right…

imageAARP talks travel:

  • AARP Online Travel Study
    Eight out of 10 persons age 50 or older use websites to plan as well as book their non-business travel.
  • Currently those 50 and older use, on average, 4 websites to plan and 3 websites to book their non-business related travel.  Almost a quarter would prefer to use fewer websites to plan or book non-business travel.

Golly gee, did we need to do a fancy-shmancy research study for this info?  I could’ve told you the same things.  In fact, I did.  Over a decade ago:

image

From my book Advertising to Baby Boomers ©2005, 2007:

Pouncing Mouses

      Many sociologists and futurists are predicting a few more radical social and political upheavals triggered by Baby Boomers  before we’re packed off in coffins and urns, sprinkled over mystical mountains and mundane golf courses, or blasted into outer space so we can eternally commune with the cosmos.

advbbcoverOn the other end of the spectrum, we’ll also be revolutionizing the tourist industry for the next thirty years, taking hundreds of millions more vacations before the ultimate holiday. Travel companies are having big problems trying to figure out what to offer—and how to reach us. We’re not lining up on docks for meaningless cruises on silly ships, nor are we allowing ourselves to be bundled into cookie- cutter cavalcades so we can gawk at decaying castles from the lumpy seats of double-decker buses. Nobody is going to tell us what a vacation is. We’ll tell you.

There’s a cottage industry out there preying on the blubbery and frightened tourist industry, making wild guesses as to what Baby Boomers will want to do with all our free time. I won’t list them all here. They range from ecologically correct junkets to health-nut boot camps to intellectually and culturally themed excursions to the beating down of well-publicized, well-traveled “unbeaten paths.”

This book deals with advertising to Baby Boomers, but I’ll over- step my bounds and propose a business model: Boomers are internet- savvy. Boomers are not passive. We do not want to simply slap one key and have our vacation pop up on a screen. We want to rattle lots of keys, have our mouses pounce and bite off appetizing chunks of graphic and description from all sorts of sources––and build unique, variegated vacations.

Some smart dot-com entrepreneur will partner with thousands of travel companies, resorts, hotels, museums, airlines, car rental companies, and build a modular travel and reservation website. Myriad tempting experiences will be offered. The website will calculate the price of each activity, cataloguing and coordinating everything. It will be a package you fill with goodies.

Planning it will be half the fun, and immediately entice and involve the site visitor. For a few days you’ll be lying on a beach. The next day you’ll travel to a large city and take in whatever sights you wish, perhaps joining a guided tour. In the morning you’ll be driving to a tennis resort for a day or two. After that will come a scenic road trip to a local winery for a prearranged private tour. Keep driving, and you’ll check into a secluded lodge, and hike in the mountains for a few days. Then you’re off visiting another city in another country, mostly to just goof around. Finally, check in your car, hop on a train, and before long you’re naked and slumping into a vat of hot mud at a famous health spa, followed by a shower and reservations at a five- star restaurant.

You could even spend an afternoon in lumpy seats on a double- decker bus if you want.

4 November 2005
My Favorite Cyber-Myth
Hitwise found that visitors to the top travel search engines were by far likely to be over 55 years of age. Hitwise attributed this to baby boomers …

Enough about travel.  I got carried away. 

Last up is tech.  Just for fun, here’s a link to my latest HuffPo piece:

I Am a Digital Dinosaur
2014-07-02-dino.gifFor years, I've been hearing about how old I am based on what I remember. Phonographs, rotary phones, white-out, carbon paper, air-raid drills, fizzies -- the items are endless.

Now there's a new way to categorize absolute oldness: Being a Digital Dinosaur…

27 June 2014

Good To See The Young’uns Catching Up

Marissa Mayer, 2011 InterviewYahoo Wants You to Linger (on the Ads, Too)
By Vindu Goel, New York Times
… Marissa Mayer, the chief executive, has decided that one way to reverse that decline (in advertising) is to turn the company into a media empire with a constellation of what it calls digital magazines…

Ms. Mayer says that she wants to make Yahoo a “daily habit” for its 800 million users. But she doesn’t want people to come to Yahoo just to read email, post photographs on Flickr or get the latest sports scores. She also wants Yahoo to be a place where they curl up and spend some time …. And curling up right beside them would be the advertisers.

wrongSounds familiar.  Should you read all my posts on this subject?  Nah. You’d be here for hours.  One or two’ll be enough.  Click and pick:

Social Media - WOMM - Web Advertising Posts

Actually, Ms. Mayer is talking about Tablets as magazines. A few more musty posts:

15 April 2007
Positioning Magazines for Baby Boomers
There are active and passive parts of our day. Without getting into too much psychobabble, as you get older the passive side needs more nourishment. It’s not really passive. It’s focused absorption. At some point you have to climb out of your frenetic digital nest and concentrate on one thing. It might be reading a book, watching a TV show or movie, listening to music, looking out the window.

Or immersing yourself in a magazine.

28 August 2013
Tablets & The Magic of Muggles
…Tablets could become a major vehicle for advertising.  They’ll get bigger, lighter, much thinner, flexible or semi-flexible if that’s what you’d prefer, easy to handle while sitting, lying down. Finger scrolls won’t be much different than turning pages…

04 November 2013
Smartphones & Tablets, Apples & Oranges
… If I tuck a magazine under my arm and take it with me, is that mobile advertising?  If I’m home on my couch flipping through Flipboard on my tablet that I don’t take anywhere anymore because the thrill of brandishing it is gone, I just use it at home - would those big, almost full screen ads be traditional advertising?

It’s good to see the young’uns catching up.  They may need a bit of help, however:



Human Resources/Brain Power


Related:

 

huffington_post_logo1

Ageism Raises Its Techie Head

03 June 2014

A Few New Tech Products

imageOn The Huffington Post (where I also blog), writer Pamela Poole has a savvy take on a handful of new tech products featured and/or inspired by the annual Boomers Business Summit

I’ve been to a few of those…

24 March 2006
At My Table at The Summit
"So can you tell if someone is having sex?"
"…We think so."
"... Good sex?"

Ms. Poole’s HuffPost Piece:

Leave It To Boomers: Transforming Aging With Tech
image… We all know that the physical and cognitive abilities of older people can deteriorate, leaving them unable to manage ordinary tasks and vulnerable to exploitation. It sucks.

Fortunately, thanks to today's tech, we've come a very long way from the "I've fallen and I can't get up" necklace!

The products range from very interesting to old hat to slightly convoluted.  You can sort them out yourself.

The thin, portable reading glasses make sense to me – and/or similarly constructed magnifying glasses. 

imageThe super-duper walker has me wincing. My first thought was of a bag lady pushing a shopping cart - not a good image.

Some hybrid of this and a product I blogged about a few years ago might work:

14 October 2011
Entrepreneurs & Baby Boomers II
SC… Awhile back I received a phone call from a gentleman who’d designed a clever piece of exercise/sporting equipment for rollicking and rolling on trails. It was an adaptation of another clever, successful product, making a certain popular activity much safer – and more fun.

I’m just not convinced that people would want to mosey around with a shopping cart.

More about technology, baby boomers, entrepreneurs, advertising:

10 April 2013
Entrepreneurs, VCs & Health Tech
… I’ve always been a big fan and supporter of tech and health tech.  Fabulous stuff is on the way.

But there will be backlash.

29 May 2014

Nine Years Later: NostraChuckus Prophesy Come True


NostraChuckus
, famed Soothsayer and advertising gadfly who’s been startling the world for years with his mundane prognostications, has again predicted the future.

Excerpt from Advertising to Baby Boomers © 2005:

  image

Nine years later:

Older, Richer, Wiser? Don't underestimate the over-50s
imageAnother misconception that was blown out of the water at this year’s event was that retirement and old age is a time for winding down …. The session gave the audience a real-world view into the hearts and minds of mature customers and the fact that they no longer see retirement as a chance to wind-down but more as a chance to rediscover and reinvent themselves.


Just for fun:
Going Nutty Over Older
Women's Bodies

(HuffPost)

16 May 2014

The Age Premium

Are companies finally catching on?  The New York Times seems to think so:

The Age Premium: Retaining Older Workers
imageBy Steven Greenhouse
… They (employers) go the extra mile to assure experienced employees that they are valued and that management is eager for them to stay. Some employers promote innovative programs to show that they appreciate their older employees and don’t want to lose their experience, their rapport with customers or their ability to mentor younger workers.

Through the years I’ve written quite a lot about this. A sampling (some go back years, so many links within the posts have expired):

05 November 2006
Ignore the Research and Trust Your Gut

17 July 2006
What Kind of Genius Are You?

01 April 2007
Calcified Advertising Agencies

01 May 2007
Rance Crain Makes Perfect Sense Yet Again

10 November 2007
Old Masters and Young Geniuses

10 January 2008
Diversity = Productivity

21 May 2008
Baby boomers are smarter than you think

30 November 2008
Brains More Distracted, Not Slower with Age

13 January 2009
My Brain, Your Brain, iBrain

03 February 2009
People generally get better.

12 May 2009
Oprah & Dan … & Chuck

11 June 2009
Older Employees' Better Coping Skills Mean Better Engagement

31 August 2009
The Trouble with HR

21 September 2009
Advertisers: Be Prepared For Big Boomer Brains

03 January 2010
2010: The Year of The Baby Boomer Brain

03 March 2010
Aging Brain Less Quick, More Shrewd

15 March 2010
Hire Baby Boomer Creatives

16 April 2010
The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain

06 May 2010
The Year Of The Baby Boomer Brain

07 May 2010
Memo to H.R: Older Brains = Smarter Brains

10 May 2010
HR/Brain Roll

24 May 2010
Diversity as a Strategic Advantage

07 June 2010
The world might become a better place.

07 August 2010
Digital Advertising Natives and Immigrants

24 January 2011
The Creative Art Of Growing Old

29 February 2012
Memo to H.R: Boeing Gets A Bargain

"No, I don't think a 68-year-old copywriter can write with the kids. That he's as creative. That he's as fresh. But he may be a better surgeon. His ad may not be quite as fresh and glowing as the Madison Ave. fraternity would like to see it be, and yet he might write an ad that will produce five times the sales. And that's the name of the game, isn't it?" - Rosser Reeves

18 September 2012
Those Baffling Boomer Brains

29 May 2013
Intergenerational Teams A Strength
________________________________

More from the NYT article:

… Some experts on aging say the baby boom generation has changed the definition of retirement.

I may have mentioned this almost a decade ago…

CVRCompFrom my book © 2005, 2007:
Contrary to popular myth, Baby Boomers do not believe that they are still teenagers or young adults. (Some probably do, but they need therapy.) Boomers are slyly redefining what it means to be the ages they are. Included in this new definition are some youthful attitudes - but the real change is that instead of winding down, many are winding up. We're not 'looking forward to retirement,' we're looking forward to new lives, new challenges. Only a small percentage will opt for pure retirement. (I predict that in twenty years the word 'retirement' will still be in dictionaries, but followed by the modifier archaic.)