You’ve seen this scene before: active woman, toned muscles, adorned in Lycra, pushing her way up a mountain on a road bike, then running in the dawn light, followed by a swim in a vast lake.
Only this woman isn’t 22 years old and selling me an enviable lifestyle; this is an 86-year-old nun selling me youth and beauty through exercise.
I’m not going to lie - I had to watch it twice, because my first thought was: 'what is an 86-year-old nun doing in a Nike ad?'
However, on reflection, the real question is: 'why the hell isn’t there more of this?'
There has been much written about our society’s obsession with youth, with advertisers widely considered one of the biggest culprits, seemingly ignoring the existence of anyone over the age of 35 - unless they’re selling incontinence pads, insurance, or motorised scooters, that is.
What I want to talk about is why ‘cool’ and/or ‘aspirational’ is still being played out in advertising as a predominantly youthful pursuit.
Ageism in marketing
As someone who is happily no longer 25, I have noticed that the kind of brands that appeal to me no longer reflect me in their messaging, seemingly uncaring of the fact it’s only my age that’s changed over the years – not my interests.
Just because I’m now 40, doesn’t mean I’m only interested in practical shoes and car insurance. And just because I’m a mum, doesn’t mean I’m only interested in educational products and lunchbox ideas for the children.
As marketers, it’s tempting to reach for the tried and tested approach, which usually starts with age first and the broadest common denominator, be it demographic or life stage. But given that we can now use data to accurately target people at a deeper, behavioural level, why is age still a defining factor?
Quartz and Asp explain in their book, Cool: How the brains hidden quest for cool drives our economy and shapes our world, the concept of ‘cool’ holds a kind of economic value that we recognise in products as helping to enhance our social image. Neuroscientific research also shows that our brain physiologically reacts to things we deem ‘cool’ or ‘uncool’.
For some reason, however, a desire to be ‘cool’ in a person over a certain age seems to be frowned upon, as if that person should just accept the inevitable slide into irrelevance and fade into obscurity gracefully. All the things that earned you ‘cool’ status a few short years ago now earn you disapproving looks, or worse, saddle you with the ‘novelty’ factor.
Still, when I look around at my friends and colleagues who are my age, or even – shock horror – older than me, it’s pretty clear that we’ve got a better budget to spend, bigger lifestyles to lead and yet-to-be-achieved goals and dreams to aspire to.
The fact is we are entering a new era, one cleverly coined by The Lifestyle Network as the ‘Flat Age Society’, where chronological age counts for nothing. We can no longer afford to make broad sweeping statements about what it means to be 40, 50, 60 – we are living longer and retiring later than ever before.
But a number
People might be starting their families at 40, or launching a new business at 65. There are no more hard and fast rules about what age means. Brands must understand that age is nothing but a number and ageing doesn’t diminish a person’s desire to pursue their interests, so it shouldn’t be the controlling factor in the way brands are talking to them.
The media is guilty of it too – imagine what mysteries exist beyond the well-trodden realms of the 25 to 54 year old demographic? Imagine if we stopped putting age filters on our media buys and relied primarily on lifestyle and interest targeting, instead of it being a third-rate consideration?
If age is no longer a numerical milestone but a state of mind, then surely we should be prioritising that in our planning first and foremost. We have access nowadays to a plethora of behavioural data that can inform the best way to target and connect, none of which is reliant on age segmentation as a precursor to differentiation.
Brands and agencies alike can only benefit by wholeheartedly embracing this approach. The appetite is already there for ageism in advertising to die a quick death.
By Carat group strategy director, Peita Pacey