Posted in on January 4, 2016

Mature Marketing Links of the Week – Ageism (in Advertising) Alive and Well

Happy New Year! Like many, our office went into stealth mode during the last weeks of 2015, as our team enjoyed the holidays with family and friends. Yet the Internet doesn’t sleep …

Here are a few items that caught the attention of 50+ marketing pros during recent weeks:

1. MOST CLICKED: The Silver Group calls this “a stunning video shows ageism is alive and well,” and we agree. Australia’s Apia Insurance staged a stunt — really a social experiment — with a group of dynamic 50+ers and a separate group of young advertisers.

As Kim Walker wrote, the results were “in some ways shocking and in other ways unsurprising.” If you can’t see the embedded video above, please click here to play: http://bit.ly/1JSQVOi.

RELATED: At Creating Results, more of our team members mirror the ages of those we market to — 50+. But we we do happily have a few folks in their early 20s as well! To counter unconscious ageism, we encourage their perspectives and conduct extensive training to help all ages better understand the perspectives of our marketing targets. Read the “3  Surprising Things [Allison Lloyd] Learned About Marketing to Seniors in 2015.”

2. MOST SHARED: Longevity + Connectivity + Creativity = the future of marketing health.

So writes Graham Mills, the CCO of Digitas, in MediaPost. Mills’ suggests that “longevity” is really about “Long Ideas” — those that will last more than a few weeks after a health product/service launch.

“It is also a challenge in health, where we are often limited to a finite number of things we can talk about.

So how do we break through the three-month barrier? Well we should start by looking beyond the product attributes and consider the difference a brand can make in the world. What is the human need beyond the treatment? There are a couple of interesting examples in the Multiple Sclerosis space, where marketers have understood that people want community more than advertising, and some have provided it. And being bold enough to allow comments, means there is an authenticity that is impossible to fake.

This Longevity, in turn, creates the Connectivity that we need to put front and center as we evolve.”

Read the post: http://bit.ly/1O086Bx

3. Also of note: 82% of Baby Boomer Internet users have at least one social media account, per GlobalWebIndex.

COTD-Charts-18-Dec-2015-82-Percent-of-baby-boomers-Have-a-Social-Media-Account

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