YOUR QUESTIONS ABOUT ADVERTISING WELLNESS AND OVER 60S ANSWERED
Dave McCaughan, Storyteller @ BIBLIOSEXUAL and Vice – Chair the Aging Well Initiative
The sign of a good report is people asking questions.
Recently we published our latest white paper from the Aging Well Initiative where we asked advertising creative directors their opinions on what makes good advertising targeting people over 60 for wellness related products and services (download the report here) and last week we held a live webinar involving myself as author of the report and two of the creative directors we interviewed, Marcia Goddard and Jeremy Perrott (you can watch the webinar here: The Healthspan Opportunity: What Businesses Need to Know About Advertising Wellness to 60+ People – Global Wellness Institute.
We had a lot of feedback. A lot of thoughts and questions. A lot of people asking for more.
I thought I would highlight some of the thoughts people had and add a few comments/answers based on the report and our discussions ( Note we will not quote who raised the questions or ideas but thank everyone who has contributed ) :
Excellent insights on representation vs casting and concepts … but are not the underlying ableist perspectives talked about in the study the real issue and challenge for marketing wellness?
The report highlighted one of the key, and maybe for this audience obvious, challenges in making better advertising and marketing messaging for people over 60, 70, 80 and beyond of aging well : too much stereotyping and not enough exposure to real people and their hope , fears and desires. Too often messaging supposedly targeting older people portrays them as either in “chronic need of help” or “bicycling toward a renewed sunset”. As Marcia pointed out what we don’t see enough of is wellness products helping them lead the lives they want. As varied as those will be.
Which links to the reality that in our 20s, 30s, 40s, how many of us really understood the 60+ mind?
And as we discussed and contributors have pointed out part of the solution would be advertising agencies hiring some older creatives instead of hiring solely younger candidates. Of course they do so partly because “younger is cheaper”, Partly because they don’t think employees over 60 could understand modern social and digital and AI driven media … as many pointed out it is just ignorance and ageism. And when I interviewed the creative directors many acknowledged they themselves were ageist or at least did not know any different. Which often came down to a single, but huge issue.
The clients, the marketers, the businesses hiring advertising or social media or digital agencies often don’t know about the reality of older audiences themselves and rely on old images, old stereotypes and old research. Indeed the one great consensus among the creative directors was “give us better briefs with better information and more accurate descriptions of what people are like, what they are interested in and what matters to them.
For example one webinar viewer asked : here I am thinking more in the wellness seniors real estate/ properties built for seniors sector, do advertising companies want to partner and engage with the client in terms of real representation? Is education needed or is this a known issue for operators?
And the simple answer is that good advertising professionals always want co-operation, better briefs with better information. Like the old saying goes “rubbish in/rubbish out”. Too often clients talk about what they see others doing, the stereotypes of their own category and repeat them. Not enough real research with real people leading to new ideas and expressions of what they want. One possible learning from this research would be that every initiative under the GWI banner do some original research with people over 60 and how the subjects they are interested are reflected in real people’s lives and dreams.
I’ll suggest good Healthcare advertising doesn’t talk to an age group, it speaks to a generation. Our formative years create different lifestyles and expectations. One bright spot in advertising speaking to older people was something I heard like, “did you go to a Queen concert?”. It didn’t say you are old, it said you are one of these cool people.
Spot on. part of the problem for marketers and advertising agencies is the stereotypes of people over 60 as “retirees” and 70s as “past it”. The most valuable lesson I learned in 40 years of working in advertising came early when a creative director explained to me that no matter who you are targeting go back to when they were 18 find the song the loved then and use that as the backing track. Think about who people see themselves as not as the stereotype of an age group defines them. The curse of the last decade has been the rise of the term “boomer” not as a representation of who people in their late 60s-70s are but as someone incapable of change, learning, using tech etc. My own work found the same true of terms like “silvers”. What probably began as an attempt to replace “old” with something softer has led to tagging people as past their prime in every sense. Work I started doing in the mid 90s with people in their 60-70s across many countries has shown me a better label for that lifestage would be “new life builders”. Interviewing people from Seattle to Sydney to Singapore and many other places I have found people in the 60-70-80 lifestage are all about asking “what is next and what can I do ?”. we need to be telling marketers and their agencies more about that attitude.
The poor communication of traditional brands for the 60+ in beauty/wellbeing has created a huge potential for independent creators on social platforms. 60+ YouTube beauty creators are drawing huge audiences with high engagement and driving real business by giving mature people authentic devices/representations
Very true. Across all social platforms people over 60 are very active. Older influencers are the shock troops for changing perceptions and also reaching others their own age in new ways. Whether that is beauty creator seniors on YouTube or seniors exercise coaches on TikTok or over 60 gamers on Discord.
During our webinar Marcia Goddard made the simple observation that messaging needs to be more about “uplifting” than “fixing”. A great way to summarise what we found is needed
by advertising creative directors and the briefs clients give them. The need to educate brands and their agencies has a lot of work to be done. Hopefully our reports will help contribute. It helps when we get examples like the following from one of the webinar viewers …
for women 65+ most of them still like doing the same things as we did in our 30s as our minds are all still switched on and we just need the products in more stylish alternative designs to help us keep on trying and expanding.
Got more thoughts or ideas to help marketers and advertising agencies understand the aging well market ? We will continue to build reports and talk about them. So contact me at [email protected]
