People hate ads.

*The following post is about advertising to baby boomers.

A shocking research report featured in The New York Times:

The Advertising Industry Has a Problem: People Hate Ads
By Tiffany Hsu
… The advertising industry faces an “existential need for change,” according to a blunt report published on Monday by the research firm Forrester. Now the agencies must “disassemble what remains of their outmoded model” or risk “falling further into irrelevance,” the report concludes.

And there are various surveys from multiple sources to back this up:



Scary!  Except … I forgot to add the dates of these surveys:



Most of the above statistics are from The Mirror Makers by Stephen Fox:


So not much has changed. Or maybe a lot has changed.  Nowadays:

… As advertisers bombard consumers across platforms like Twitch, Facebook, television, billboards and more, consumers are trying to get away, signing up for ad blockers and subscription services …

The truth is messier. Few people admit to enjoying ads. In the olden days, advertising on radio and television was often tastelessly intertwined. Today (or maybe it was ten years ago, it’s hard to keep up) we would call this Madison & Vine or Product Placement or Native Advertising or Stealth Advertising. There were complaints, and things changed. By the late 1950s, you listened to/watched a program – then came the commercial breaks. This technique is still effective today.

Most people don’t mind and many even like advertising - if it’s positioned as such, doesn’t constantly bombard you.  I wrote about this years ago:

06 March 2012
Digital Distractions
Advertisers are getting wise to the drawbacks of marketing in the digital nest … The more people use smartphones, the less they’ll tolerate silly graphical doodads mucking up their small screens.

Back to the NYT article:

… Agencies must “disassemble what remains of their outmoded model” or risk “falling further into irrelevance,” the report concludes …

The “outmoded model” happened when the internet exploded – and the industry became greedy. With greed came all this and this and this:

Digital Ad Shenanigans
It’s been a bad week or so for online advertising foolishness and chicanery.

Black Ops Advertising by Mara Einstein
  What a wacky virtual world we live in!  Streams of prose, pictures, videos, all not what they seem.  Alice in Wonderland, by comparison, is rather prosaic.

Follow this crazy guy if you want to know more:

The Ad Contrarian

---

*The link below is to a silly piece about advertising to baby boomers:

Should older people be allowed to change their age?
by Chuck Nyren
Nov 4 · 2 min read

Jumping On The Bandwagon

Cindy Gallop hops on:

Disrupting Ageism in Advertising
By Grace Birnstengel
This outspoken 2019 Influencer in Aging has a few choice words for the ad world…

From a 2017 post about Joseph Coughlin:

…. There are lots of folks who’ve educated us and continue to educate us. Names off the top of my head: Robert N. Butler, David Wolfe, Ken Dychtwald, John Migliaccio, Kurt Medina, Matt Thornhill, Brent Green, Marti Barletta, Mary Furlong, Myrna Blyth, Carol Orsborn, Rick Moody, Mark Miller, Paul Kleyman, Scott Rains, Kevin Lavery, Dick Stroud, Reg Starkey, Laurie Orlov, Richard Adler, Todd Harff, Bill Thomas, Louis Tenenbaum, Arjan in’t Veld, Martijn de Haas, David Cravit, Moses Znaimer, Maxime de Jenlis, Florian Kohlbacher, Christopher Simpson, Gail Sheehy, Marc Middleton, Ronni Bennett, Jim Gilmartin, Gill Walker, Dave McCaughan, Kim Walker, Tony Mariani, Barry Robertson, Frédéric Serriere, Bob Hoffman, have I left any out? No doubt.

Culled from the Next Avenue interview:

“There’s a very simple way to address negative stereotype depictions of aging in advertising. When you have older people creating ads, producing, approving — problem solved.”

Sounds familiar. A 2003 article of mine courtesy of The Way Back Machine:

Advertising to Baby Boomers - Back into the Fold
The Giant Leap: there had better be a minor revolution in the creative end of the advertising industry. Talented men and women in their late forties and fifties need to be brought back into the fold if you want to reach us. This includes copywriters, graphic artists, producers, directors, and creative directors.

… Truth is, you can analyze marketing fodder all day and night, read countless books about marketing to Baby Boomers, attend advertising and marketing conventions around the world, and soak up everything all the experts have to say … But if you plan on implementing a creative strategy, and turn it over to a different generation of advertising professionals - you'll forfeit the natural sensibilities required to generate vital campaigns.

For more background, download the Intro & 1st Chapter of Advertising to Baby Boomers (selected as a Classroom Resource by The Advertising Educational Foundation)

Intro & First Chapter (PDF)

There’s also a chapter in the book titled Get Rid of The Stereotypes.

It’s great to have Ms. Gallop aboard.
__________________________________________
*** The above is an update post from last October:

AARP & NostraChuckus

Another Dumb Article

Dilemma.

For years I’ve blogged about no news news. One of too many posts:

16 NOVEMBER 2015
The Déjà Vu No New News
It’s always a treat to get up, make some coffee, open the newspaper (pixels or pulp) and read nothing new.

And recently, I promised never to link to any more dumb articles:

17 APRIL 2019
No News News & Fake News
…Someone over at one of the major business magazines recently wrote about Baby Boomers, advertising/marketing, technology. He said nothing I (and others) haven’t been saying for almost twenty years…

Here’s the dilemma: There’s a brand-new no news news article I don’t want to link to -- but the comments are fun and worth reading.

So close your left eye and just read what’s on the right:

Older People Are Ignored and Distorted in Ageist Marketing, Report Finds

That Big Concert Fifty Years Ago

I wasn’t there. If you want, you can read about why I wasn’t there:

76 Million Sociopaths Outed (HuffPo)

There are so many articles/blog posts floating around commemorating/condemning the event that I’ve OD'd. One more could do me in. This could be the one.

Advertising. I’ve written about how dumb it is to heavy-handedly invoke ‘60s stuff to reach Baby Boomers:

03 OCTOBER 2005
Invoking "The Sixties": Fidelity Financial vs. Ameriprise
Two major financial planning companies, Fidelity Investments and Ameriprise, are all agog over Baby Boomers.

There are a dozen more subsequent posts, but I’ll spare you.

Barry Robertson has a take on it all (and he’s even more fed up than yours truly):

50 Years of Woodshtick
For the next week or so, prepare to endure the 50th anniversary of Woodshtick – the endgame of five long decades of punditry and pontification over a messy 1969 mudfest in upstate New York that, supposedly, defines the Baby Boom generation.

Now I’m off to a walk-in clinic to see if they have any sort of antidote for Nostalgia Overdose.

We’ve done that already.

I keep hearing that the internet is ruining our attention spans. I’m starting to believe it. I can easily get through a book, a TV show, a movie - but web pages bore me within nanoseconds and I’m constantly clicking. (Something tells me this isn’t good for advertising.)

Or maybe it’s the content. I’ve seen it all before. I say to myself, “We’ve done that already.”

Samuel Scott does a good job dissecting and presenting the enduring power of the tube:

Which advertising channels are best when all else is equal?
… In the three years we have been considering media effectiveness, TV outperforms Facebook and YouTube in all these areas …

Sounds right to me:

21 JULY 2017
The Interminable Death of Television
Nothing I can think of is as lively and chipper as television in its final throes.

From Entrepreneur:

It's Never Too Late: Entrepreneurship Has No Age
… A study suggests that businesses are more likely to succeed as their founders’ age increase up until about age 40 …

I wrote a book years ago. Huge chunks of it had to do with entrepreneurs:

ADVERTISING TO BABY BOOMERS
Targets Clients and Entrepreneurs
Paramount Market Publishing, Ithaca, N.Y.
… Chuck Nyren's egalitarian approach to advertising and the creation of campaigns is all-inclusive. A large section of the book is dedicated to helping Baby Boomer entrepreneurs get their marketing and advertising up and running.

And there are a bunch of other recent articles not worth reading so I won’t link to them, subjects covered ad nauseam through the years, like Baby Boomers in No Rush to Retire (we’ve known this for over a decade), Creativity Is Not Just For The Young (I feel like I was young when I blogged it in 2007), The Misconception Of Baby Boomers And The Age Of Technology (My Favorite Cyber-Myth).

Or maybe I’m so technically-challenged that it’s impossible for me to find anything newsworthy on the internet – and I should just retire.