Barack Obama was born in 1961
Why do advertisers so often ignore the over 50s? Richard Shotton puts on his slippers and finds out.
A milestone in marketing stupidity has been reached, according to Bob Hoffman. Despite the over 50s accounting for over half of US consumer spend, and holding 80% of British wealth, they are mostly ignored by advertisers.
It’s not just the lack of targeting that enrages Hoffman but also the inappropriate imagery: “Marketers think people over 50 are decrepit old farts. Marketers cannot understand that Barack Obama, Jerry Seinfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Bruce Springsteen, Meryl Streep and tens of millions of others are all over 50.”
In his popular blog, The Ad Contrarian, he writes: “The ugly truth is that the marketing and advertising industries hate older people. We like the excitement of youth not the boredom of middle age and the frailties of old age.”
So if there’s such a strong case for targeting the over 50s why do advertisers ignore them?
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The pessimistic interpretation is that it’s an error based on the youthfulness of the industry. Agency personnel certainly tend to be younger than the population as a whole, with the IPA 2014 survey revealing that only 5.9% of agency staff are over 50. This absence could explain why negative stereotypes blossom.
However, recent work by ZenithOptimedia suggests that there may be some justification for targeting younger groups. We surveyed 500 representative consumers to ask whether they had tried new brands in three specified categories in the last year.
In order not to bias the study we then excluded anyone who wasn’t a category buyer. The results were conclusive.
In each category younger consumers were more likely to try new brands. In fact, on average, under 55s were twice as likely to have tried a new brand in the categories monitored as the over 55s.
Our findings suggest that younger consumers may be less fixed in their purchasing patterns and therefore, for brands interested in growing their market share, there’s a rationale for prioritising them.
This may not explain all of advertising’s obsession with youth but it certainly shows that there are reasons, beyond incompetence, for targeting the under 35s.
Richard Shotton is head of insight at ZenithOptimedia
Twitter: @rshotton
