Goings On About Town

For years I’ve been championing the marketing and advertising of normal everyday products to Baby Boomers:

Boomer Backlash II
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 I scream about easy-to-open packaging, easy-on-older-eyes print, usability, etc.

But sometimes what I find out there is just silly. Read it and wipe:

Ranking The Best Five Toilet Papers For Seniors   

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Feeling old? Down in the dumps? Want a pep talk? A little kick-in-the-pants inspiration so you can carry on?

Of course, if you feel okay about yourself you don’t need to read about how incredible you could be. Possible negative side effect: Getting depressed finding out how wonderful other people are.

Immerse yourself in or ignore the latest feel-good (or bad) site:

WELCOME TO AGEIST       
We are a global movement living longer and better than ever before. Join us for culture, style, travels, health sciences and things that inspire.

Of course, if you’re really old, say thirty or so, you’ll really need help. A motivational weekend might do the trick:

A New Luxury Retreat Caters to Elderly Workers in Tech (Ages 30 and Up)  
… The group would place stickers with ageist slurs all over their chests, arms and faces, and then hurl the stickers into a fire. Later, there would be healing sessions focused on intergenerational collaboration and accepting mortality.

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There’s a famous quote attributed to … well, lots of people:

“If You Remember the ’60s, you really weren’t there.”

There are always exceptions to rules. Brent Green has rounded up a few folks who swear they remember, and their credentials convince me they’re (probably) not lying.

Check out Are You Still Listening?: 1969 Stories & Essays on Amazon.com.  

I don’t remember the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, ‘00s, or the ‘10s (except for maybe up to an hour or so ago), so I’m no help.

Reefer Madness Redux

First post:

22 June 2018
Reefer Madness
… If I listed all of marijuana’s claims – valid, maybe valid, yet-to-be-determined, complete poppycock – you’d go mad …

Since then, even before then, we’ve been using:

The mature stoner: why are so many seniors smoking weed?
Older people are the fastest-growing group of cannabis users, as stigma fades and some seek an alternative to prescription drugs.

Women Bought Twice As Much Cannabis in 2018 As They Did The Year Before
… For all marijuana-related purchases, Baby Boomers became the fastest growing segment in 2018, increasing by 25 percent …

And we’re still a bit confused. Before and after:

Cannabis-Infused Intimacy Oils For Seniors: Medical Or Recreational?

Adding Cannabis To The Mix: Risks And Benefits For Seniors

Those two Forbes articles were written by …

Abbie Rosner
I am a freelance writer specializing in the emerging cannabis space, with a special interest in the ways that baby boomers and older adults are experiencing cannabis at the personal, institutional and policy levels. I also follow developments in the scientific investigation of medicinal cannabis.

Scroll Ms. Rosner’s bio and check out all her pieces.

Anecdotal: Along with my more-significant-than-I-am other, I finally made it into one of these new-fangled headshops. Quite a culture shock. No day-glo posters of Dylan, The Doors, or Hendrix. Some hookahs in the corner, although they looked more like test tubes. Most other items for sale were packaged in gaudy, multi-colored boxes and wrappers. Like fancy candy. Then I realized they were fancy candy.

We were hayseeds right off the bus.

Don’t ask me what we bought. A grab bag of goodies. We asked questions, I don’t think the sales person really understood what we were asking, we didn’t really understand the answers – so we ended up simply pointing at whatever caught our eyes.

At home, we tore one open. It was a gooey piece of candy (I was right), an amorphous gummy-bear. I split it with a knife, gave her half, we sucked on it – and in an hour we were stoned. 

That’s about it.

OK. It was more fun than that.

But I still don’t know what it was. THC. CBD. Great. I’m an educated consumer.

When the cannabis market finally finds its bearings, I hope someone will offer some simple explanations. The advertising should be educating us. 

It’s just good business.

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For fun:

Banished by Amazon.com
I’m someone who, up until recently, lived with extreme Amazon guilt.

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.