2019: The Year of No Predictions

Last year there was a prediction. It was a pretty good one, coming true over and over again:

02 JULY 2018
The Year Of Big Gets Bigger
NostraChuckus, famed soothsayer of the obvious, continues to amaze with his humdrum prognostications…

This year will be too crazy for predictions. (Whoops. I just made a prediction.) And I’m not even talking politics.

Troublemaker Mark Ritson has fun with end-of-year predictions:

Don’t be seduced by the pornography of change
Marketers would be far better off focusing on what definitely won’t change in 2019 and making a list of all the things they could do better than being distracted by hollow predictions…

Colleague Barry Robertson over at Boomer/neXt looks back at 2018 and offers a few predictions:

Times Square Drops The Ball Once A Year: Madison Avenue Drops It Every Day
… Among the 20/30-something advertising and brand professionals whose creativity is fenced in by Big Data and carefully crafted research that meets management’s meme of the moment, the world beyond the 18-49 demo is not only mysterious but forbidden territory…

I’ll make some predictions that will not come true. If they do, I’ll eat my Echo:

Hire older, board reports say
… While younger people are usually better equipped with hard skills, especially degrees and certifications, older workers have a leg up on soft skills many employers say are lacking…  (More on this topic.)

Ignoring Baby Boomers Leaves Revenue on the Table
…Despite the enormous spending power of this generation, they are largely neglected by advertisers. Despite controlling 70% of the nation’s disposable income, only 10 percent of marketing dollars target consumers over 50… (My prediction is that this market will continue to be ignored, leaving billions on the table.)

Now we should heed the wisdom of age
by Yvonne Roberts
… The stereotype of an elderly person is frail and weak; what is too often overlooked is the sagacity, resilience, appetite for new experiences, wisdom and strength that come from a perspective formed through decades of life unfolding and the patience that older age can bring…

I just got a great idea! This’ll be a running gag theme in my blog this year – predicting what won’t happen.

End Of Year Links

A random collection of links I didn’t use in any posts this year but were worth a bookmark or I thought so at the time. Not necessarily advertising-related:

Oldyssey
Oldyssey showcases elderly all over the world and highlights initiatives that deepen the link between generations.

Old friend Bayard Presse is a partner.

HomesRenewed™ Coalition
Our MISSION is to join forces to significantly increase the number of American homes prepared for residents to live throughout the modern lifespan by promoting consumer incentives on Wall Street, Main Street and Capitol Hill.

 Louis Tenenbaum keeps going and going.

Sans Forgetica is the Typeface You Won’t Forget
…Janneke Blijlevens of RMIT’s Behavioral Business Lab adds foreign language learners and elderly people grappling with memory loss to the list of potential beneficiaries…

Old age shouldn’t just be about survival—it should be about fun
By Joseph F. Coughlin
“Old age” as we currently know it is just a fictional story we tell ourselves.

(No, that’s not a picture of Joe.)

Happy Holidays. Last link - a cute commercial from France:

Where are old people going to live?

It used to be that old people lived wherever they lived – and that was that.

Beginning a century or so ago you could move into a retirement community for as long as you could stand it (or stand up), then would be whisked away to an old age home.

Now there are choices. So many choices you could have multiple strokes just thinking about them.

There’s staying put (aka aging in place) where you don’t go anywhere and you’re taken care of by people or robots. Or you can move to one of thousands of adult communities that are no different than old-fashioned retirement communities except they have internet and yoga mats. Or you can buy/rent a house/condo with a few friends and do a Golden Girls/Boys/Boys & Girls thing.  Or you can buy a motor home, drive it around for a few years until you get bored, then park it somewhere. Or you can purchase a ready-made tiny house and have a helicopter dump it in one of your children’s backyards.  

The possibilities are endless until the end.

Of course, there are social scientists galore wondering what old people are  gonna do, loads of business people trying to figure out what crazy products and services they can sell you, along with all sorts of thinkers and tinkerers hoping to convince you that you need to be digitally connected to something-or-other and be monitored 24/7 - or the rest of the world won’t know when you die.

You’ve heard the horror stories. You could be lying dead for fifteen minutes before anybody finds you.

If I get old enough to be really old, I’ll probably just want a bed, a chair on a porch, and a tree to look at.

Hallmark Moment Syndrome

Whoops. Chuck got sucked into a sappy Christmas commercial. Let's hope it's not some new chronic condition (known in psychology journals as Hallmark Moment Syndrome).

I'm posting it because it's for a department store in the U.K. - so you won't be seeing it on this side of the pond.

Knock The Vote

Today is voting day. I decided to wait until the whole mess was (almost) over before blogging this spot:

Many folks are upset about it. I get it. It’s ageist. It’s stupid. It’s inaccurate.

The American Society on Aging has called on Nail Communications to suspend an ageist advertising campaign that began Sept. 24 as part of ACRONYM’s “Knock the Vote” initiative.

On another level it’s (I’m guessing) effective advertising. Some tongue-in-cheek variant of negative advertising.

I hope all late-teen to twenty-somethings will laugh, realize it’s silly, and vote.

Do the ends justify the means? That’s too deep a question for shallow me to answer.

Come to your own conclusions.