There's gold in them silver locks

Melbourne Herald Sun, Thursday February 19, 2015

There's a new chap at the video library. He looks at my DVD and my silver hair and slowly points out: "You realise this is Blue-Ray 3D, so you need special equipment to see it?" I give him a stern look and describe my 3D Sony 5.1 theatre system and say I know perfectly well what it will play.

Here's another marketer who does not realise what he sees in an over-50 customer. He's looking at someone who is probably still working, has no kids to feed and clothe, no school fees, no mortgage to pay, no lavish lifestyle to show off, who has hopefully grown out of his expensive habits. In other words, a big disposable income.

But he's not alone in this error. In Britain they estimate that only five percent of advertising money is targeted at the over 50s. No doubt if you took out the funeral plans and aged care homes there would be even less. Yet in this survey the 50-69s were 29 per cent of the population and accounted for 80 per cent of the wealth.

Marie Stafford is Research Director at the J Walter Thompson agency in London. She saw the problem up close last year, doing research on baby boomers. So many brands got it wrong. "They have no empathy with the generation," she observed. They did not distinguish between a 50 or 60 year old, fit, working and engaged with the world - and someone who's 80 or 90.

The problem is, nobody is willing to be old any more. Marie saw this. "They are of the baby boomer generation, which has been used to being very vocal, setting the pace and making change."

"It's almost like, now they've gotten to this age and they're changing the status quo yet again. They're not going to do it how their parents did it, and they're not going to do it how we expect them to do it either. It feels completely new, a new generation we haven't seen before."

Well this is a generation where the Rolling Stones are still demanding Satisfaction, and this year we have concerts by septuagenarians Neil Diamond and Paul Simon in town. They're a far cry from the white haired couples shuffling along the foreshore, in the superannuation commercials.

Of course for many of the over 50s, super is a sore point. The GFC of 2007-8 smashed their nest eggs and left behind a rotten smell. Now there is no longer the trust in banks and institutions to look after one's old age. So they pick up their shovels and go back to the mine. But they are not going to play the "old" game any more.

Marie ran focus groups. She found people of that age exhilarating. "Half of them, I thought were in the wrong room," she said. "They were very youthful in terms of what they were doing with their time and how active they were—so not like the generation we’re presented with culturally in advertising and the media."

Is it that agencies are full of young people? "It shouldn’t be the problem—it’s our job to put ourselves in other people’s shoes regardless of age differences - but I think it is. If there’s no one internally who understands what it’s like to be 50 or 60, then it is an issue."

So when that still-active rocker Paul McCartney asks "Will you still need me, will you still feed me?" You'd better answer "Yes".