Should you feel old at 48?

In Ian Sohn's words "But 48 in advertising makes me a dinosaur" and some interesting data:

• 62% of advertising workers are under 45
  
• The median age is 40.2 and has remained so during almost a decade
  
• In the UK people over 50 represent just 6% of the ad industry work-force
  

His four points:

1. Shift how I talk about innovation -- stop fetishizing innovation
   
2. Stop conflating creativity with youth
   
3. Recognize the value of older consumers
   
4. Celebrate my age
   

To read a PDF of the article, click the illustration

Age discrimination is as illegal and corrosive as all other discriminations. A person doesn't have to justify their age pretty much the way we don't have to justify our gender, religion, sexual orientation or skin color. All mindless discrimination is bad. Age happens to be illegal too. Fight back, make your voice heard!

In their latest article in Business Monday, the Miami Herald and McClatchy editorial boards totally forgot that age discrimination is both illegal and immoral. With phrases like:

• These diehards have varying motivations for extending their careers.
• They may feel they still have much to offer.
• You may also need to work with senior-level people to alter their positions

Columnist James Cassel in a "Special to the Miami Herald" basically brushes aside any idea that older workers actually contribute to creating and maintaining value for the companies they work for.

Not once did the Miami Herald or McClatchy mention that older workers might want to remain because they are physically and psychologically active, engaged, creating value.

Along the way, they seem to have forgotten that most of their audience is NOT the younger workers they so idolize, but the older ones that they want to push out.

I urge you to write both, to the Miami Herald and to McClatchy to voice your disagreement with their position that older workers are just obstacles.

Read the article here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/biz-columns-blogs/article239596508.html

But I've had people tell me in a meeting that "OMG, that was before I was born" or seriously doubting my understanding and expertise in digital media because I'm 65.

If the same test were given on age discrimination... how would you rate?

To read the full article from the NYT, click below:

Normally, we would link directly to the article, but the WSJ has a very inconsistent paywall. In spite of the WSJ making this important article open to the public, and just in case it again decides to close the paywall, we are bringing it to you as a PDF.

What will you be doing when you're 70?

For most people, the answer probably isn't fighting fires. But for 71-year-old John Foster, retirement was just the start of a brave new venture. John Foster and a team of volunteers from the Woodgate Rural Fire Brigade are battling a bushfire in Queensland. Foster and the rest of his six-member team from Woodgate Rural Fire Brigade are battling a fierce bushfire in Australia — and they're all over the age of 70.

"Some call us Dad's Army. We don't mind," Foster said in a Facebook post Thursday. "Let's say we are all between 70 and 74. We do this because we believe, I guess, in supporting the community," Foster told CNN on Friday.

Real heroes. Age is just a number.

In 1960, those older than 65 made up just 4.9% of the global population, but by 2050, they’ll account for a staggering 17%.

According to a recent study by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2026, more than one in 10 workers will be older than 75, double the rate in 1996. Roughly 3 in 10 workers will be between 65 and 74

Studies show that the majority of elderly people have faced age discrimination, either on the job or in job applications. A 2018 report by AARP, a US-based not-for-profit for retirees, found that 61% of the older workers it surveyed had seen or experienced age discrimination.

In 2016, Nicole Maestas, an expert in healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School, conducted a major research with colleagues from the RAND Corporation

It’s tempting to attribute economic and productivity slow-downs to the fact that older people are past their best, but “it doesn’t necessarily follow that older workers are less productive than younger workers”, says Maestas. In fact, she thinks the reasons underlying this trend are the opposite of what the stereotypes would suggest; the problem might not be that baby boomer workers are older and therefore less competent now, but that the ones who are leaving the workforce are still impressively productive.

And, contrary to popular belief, there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that older workers are inherently less productive. One 2018 study didn’t find any significant links between the overall performance of private sector organizations in the UK and the proportion of older workers that they employed.

Maestas suggests some alternative explanations:

• The first is that, as skilled older workers leave the economy, younger ones inevitably replace them – and the youngest workers in society aren’t necessarily the most productive. As a report for the Centre for European Economic Research suggests, this is likely to have more of an impact on the sectors that require more acquired knowledge, such as manufacturing.
• The second is even more intriguing: the most productive members of society tend to be wealthier, and better at planning for their retirement. As more of these older workers are able to leave, the least productive workers are left behind.
• Finally, older and younger workers are thought to have skillsets that complement each other. It’s well-established that mixed-age teams can be more productive than those which are less age-diverse. It’s possible that as the most experienced workers retire, the loss of this collaborative dynamic is reducing productivity.

According to a 2015 report for the UK government by the pensions expert and political campaigner Ros Altmann, holding on to workers for just three years beyond when they would usually retire could add £55 billion to the British economy.

As if that weren’t reason enough, the evidence suggests that retaining older workers would also have the benefit of boosting the wages and employment prospects of younger generations, too. The idea is that if more older people stay in work, they’ll have more money to spend, and this benefits the economy, which is good for everyone.

Written by By Zaria Gorvett for BBC, published on 14th November 2019, click on the picture for the full article

Pay for everything using your credit card. If you fall for a scam, remember that you can dispute the charge with your credit card company and that they can reverse the charges. So, pay with credit card, keep all your correspondence in writing and, if needed, dispute the charges with your credit card company.

Do you have a similar story to tell? A worse one? A better one perhaps? Share it with us at info@yourgreymatters.org

Age discrimination is the hardest discrimination to prove and we definitely applaud and support Duncan Milner in his lawsuit against TBWA. End age discrimination now.

The shadow of age bias in hiring, is long.

Tens of thousands of workers say that even with the right qualifications for a job, they are repeatedly turned away because they are over 50, or even 40, and considered too old.

But as cases make their way to court, the legal road for proving age discrimination, always difficult, has only roughened. Recent decisions by federal appeals courts in Chicago and Atlanta have limited the reach of anti-discrimination protections and made it even harder for job applicants to win.

Workers over 50 — about 54 million Americans — are now facing much more precarious financial circumstances, a legacy of the recession.

In one of the most comprehensive studies, résumés were sent out on behalf of more than 40,000 fictitious applicants of different ages for thousands of low-skill jobs like janitors, administrative assistants and retail sales clerks in 12 cities. In general, the older they were, the fewer callbacks they got.

Those in their 60s “never do better, and often do worse,” than those a decade or two younger, said David Neumark, an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine, who oversaw the research.

It is toughest for women, who suffer more age discrimination than men starting in their 40s, the researchers found. “The evidence of age discrimination against women kind of pops out in every study,” Mr. Neumark said.

Click on the picture to read the full article

There are roughly 50 million women 55+ in the U.S. While it is totally laudable that 4 are "cool" and many more are still active and vibrant, the reality for women 55+ is even harsher than the reality for men 55+. Ageism is the silent, last bias that we must fight.

Wages for workers between 55 and 64 years old grew by 0.8% between 2007 and 2019, according to a report from the New School for Social Research. 35-54 year olds saw a 4.7% jump during that same period.

The disparity comes down to bargaining power, CNBC reports. Older Americans with limited retirement savings have less of a financial cushion to fall back on, and employers know it. Also, many senior workers are less willing or able to move cities for work, further limiting their options.

The CNBC Report

Older workers haven’t seen a raise. Here’s why

Published Thu, May 2 2019 2:40 PM EDT Annie Nova@AnnieReporter
 
Key Points

• Weekly earnings for workers aged 55 to 64 were only 0.8% higher in the first quarter of 2019 than they were in the first quarter of 2007, after accounting for inflation, according to a new analysis. 
• For comparison, earnings rose 4.7% during that same time for workers between the ages of 35 and 54.
• Researchers say many older workers have little bargaining power in today’s economy. 
• Older workers have seen their wages come to a halt.

That’s the takeaway from a new report by researchers at the Retirement Equity Lab at the New School for Social Research.

Weekly earnings for workers aged 55 to 64 were only 0.8% higher in the first quarter of 2019 than they were in the first quarter of 2007, after accounting for inflation, they found. For comparison, earnings rose 4.7% during that same period for workers between the ages of 35 and 54.

As the wages of older workers peter out, the number of them in the workforce are only growing. Some 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day. More than half of the 11.4 million jobs expected to be added to the U.S. economy over the next seven years will be filled by workers over 55.

Why are these workers getting the short end of the stick?

“The main reason people working at older ages don’t have higher wages is because they don’t have bargaining power, and the reason they don’t have bargaining power is they don’t have a good fallback pension,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor at the New School for Social Research.

“If everyone has a really secure pension plan, they can go to the labor market and bargain with employers,” she said.

However, today less than half of older employees have access to a retirement plan though their job.
Employers also exploit the fact that many older people can’t pack up and move across the country for different job opportunities, Ghilarducci said.

As a result, employers “can basically offer them just enough money to get them above the poverty line and they have to take it or leave it.”

Another problem? The growth of the gig economy, where wages are low and uncertain, and retirement plans basically are non-existent, Ghilarducci said.

In 2015, nearly 25% of older workers said they were in an “alternative work arrangement,” defined as on-call, contract or gig work, up from 15% in 2005, the researchers at the New School found.
What’s more, workers over the age of 55 are three times more likely than workers under 35 to be in alternative work arrangements.

Harry Campbell, the founder of TheRideshareGuy.com, surveyed more than 1,000 Uber and Lyft drivers last year. He found that 66 percent of them were over 50.
Older drivers find it hard to plan for the future, he said.

“It’s a good job to help pay the bills but very difficult to save for big purchases like the house or retirement,” Campbell said.

A vicious cycle develops, in which older workers lack the retirement savings to negotiate better wages, and then the lower wages they pick up make it all that much harder for them to walk away from the workforce.

“More people will die in their boots,” Ghilarducci said. “They’ll never be able to retire.”
 
Original article: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/02/older-workers-wages-arent-growing-heres-why.html

We looked at AdAge's 2019 Top Agencies and found that, while 55+ represented 19% of the total staff, 3 agencies had a grand total of 0 including, funny enough, Cashmere, AdAge's top multicultural agency of the year. Which only serves to remind us: Age is the last frontier, the forgotten minority.

If you'd like to see the rest (and they have even less, way less, people 55+) click here.

If I didn't recognize any 55+ as being 55+, my apologies. If I said someone was (shudder!) 55+ and he/she wasn't... my apologies too, of course.

Of 17 people visibly over 55 from the 89 shown, McCann (my old Alma Mater along with FCB) accounted fully for 30%.

Discrimination against experienced older employees in ad land leads to missed opportunities and lost revenue. It’s high time the industry adopts a more mature approach.

By Ryan Wallman 15 Apr 2019 7:00 am

Alex Murrell, head of planning at Epoch Design, recently wrote an excellent article in which he compared the proportion of people aged over 50 in various industries. In fields such as science and law, he noted, the figure is more than 30%. In advertising? Just 6%, according to an IPA paper.

If you work in advertising and you’re over the age of 35, you can expect to be called ‘old’. Oh, OK, I’m exaggerating – it’s actually more like 30.

The demographic make-up of the advertising industry sends a pretty clear message to people who have the gall to a) stay alive and b) keep working past the age of 30. And that message is: “Fuck you and the mobility scooter you rode in on.”

Consider, for example, that consumers over 50 account for around 60% of all car sales. And yet when did you last see a car ad that didn’t feature attractive 20-somethings zipping around to an electropop soundtrack?

For some (if not most) brands, this is commercial insanity.

According to Gallop, ageist attitudes in the advertising industry – and in business more broadly – are particularly egregious towards women. This wouldn’t come as a shock to most people, given the low representation of women in senior roles and the apparently endemic culture of sexism at some agencies.

(To read more, click the picture)

Brands are ignoring or irritating a vast swathe of the UK population by failing to target over-50s effectively, which is a massive missed opportunity given they have far greater spending power than younger consumers.

Type ‘50-year-old’ into a search engine and you’ll be inundated with images of people with greying hair and wrinkles looking pensive or smiling inanely, many of whom are actually far older than half a century.

Madonna, Mary Berry, George Clooney and Gary Lineker are all over the age of 50, and apart from the fact there is no beige cardigan or walking stick in sight, they couldn’t be more different from one another.

Yet when advertisers target over-50s, not only do they treat them as one homogeneous greying group, they also portray them as Werther’s Originals-wielding grandads or someone in dire need a funeral plan, not someone with their own life, hobbies and interests. Or worse still they ignore them all together, as is the case at some fashion brands contacted for this feature, who do so on the assumption that by targeting over-50s (who, by the way, are already their customers), they will somehow devalue the brand and make it less appealing to their target audience of 35 to 45s.

But these brands are missing out on a wealth of opportunity. There are more than 23 million people aged over 50 in the UK, according to the most recent data from the Office for National Statistics. That’s more than a third of the population. And it’s the third with the highest level of disposable income.

People aged over 75 buy five times as many cars as those aged 18 to 24, as Ad Contrarian blogger and former ad man Bob Hoffman has pointed out, yet do you ever see a 75-year-old featured in a car ad?

“We’ve got an ageing population in this country where most of the economic power resides, and most people are healthier, more active, more alive in their skins than people our age might have been in generations gone by,” says RBS CMO David Wheldon. “That strikes me as a majorly untapped market who aren’t being communicated to as effectively as they should be.”

Wheldon himself feels increasingly angry that advertisers focus entirely on his age when targeting him. He says he uses Instagram often, which should be a clear indication of what he is personally interested in. “Yet as I scan down the advertising that’s currently being served up, there’s not a single thing that’s relevant to me,” he explains. “I may be of an age type but most of the targeting I actually see is to do with that and nothing else.”

As well as being a waste of money for the advertiser, bombarding consumers with irrelevant marketing could have long-term implications for brands and destroy any chance of a future relationship. Wheldon says: “They have no idea their [poor targeting] is actually causing me to dislike their brand, because I don’t yet need a walk-in bath. If I’d had a major hip operation and they could see my medical data and served me an ad then maybe, but there’s nothing I have done digitally, other than be the age I am, that made them decide to serve that.”

Wheldon’s thoughts are reflected in a study by Gransnet and Mumsnet, which shows 78% of those aged 50 or over feel under-represented or misrepresented by advertising, with 49% saying they actively avoid brands who ignore them. Plus 69% suggest they would be more receptive to brands if their advertising represented over-50s more accurately.

To better understand the market, insurance firm Sunlife undertook a study of 50,000 people over 50, which revealed that far from winding down and resigning themselves to a life of daytime TV watching, this group are picking up new hobbies, setting up cottage industries, travelling and seeking out new experiences.

This was brought to life in Sunlife’s 2017 campaign ‘Welcome to Life After 50’, which challenged stereotypes by showcasing the different behaviour, attitudes and activities enjoyed by those past the half century mark. The campaign, which won Marketing Week’s Masters Award for financial services in 2017, helped increase brand consideration by 8%.

“We want everyone in the UK to look forward to being over 50 because actually people who are in their 50s, 60s, 70s are very often enjoying the best years of their life. But people under 50 are told they should dread it because it’s a decline,” says Ian Atkinson, marketing director at Sunlife.

While Sunlife describes itself as an over-50s financial services company, Atkinson is clear this is just shorthand for letting people know what it offers rather than being a one-size-fits-all brand for the over-50s. That means it will target someone in there 50s in a different way to someone in their 80s.
“We do psychographic and behavioural segmentation, something that’s absolutely vital if you want to understand your customer,” he explains. “We have customers who are taking out equity release, customers who are taking out an ISA and customers who are taking out a funeral plan – they are all completely different products, so we have segments for each of those propositions.”

Given over-50s have far greater spending power than younger consumers – they hold 75% of the UK’s housing wealth, for example – the rewards for brands that get it right are huge.

Atkinson says: “If people find a brand that isn’t patronising and has made an effort to understand them and be authentic, they will respond very positively to that, which is very good for brands commercially as well.”

He adds: “[Over 50] is a massive group, but they have historically been neglected. Our research shows that in all sectors they feel under-represented and ignored by brands, so they’d be very happy to see any brand that does make an effort to understand them and represent them more effectively.”

Age is a blunt instrument for targeting

While some brands are drilling down further into the over-50s market and better defining different consumer types within this sector, others are choosing to move away from age altogether.

Microsoft, for example, chooses to target by use and adoption of technology instead, from technology natives and early adopters all the way through to tech avoiders and those who struggle to see how technology could benefit their lives.

“We don’t target by age because we feel it’s a very blunt instrument for targeting,” explains Paul Davies, Microsoft’s consumer marketing director. “We also believe that age doesn’t define us as much as it perhaps did in the past. That’s partly driven by technology because tech doesn’t discriminate by age, tech platforms are open to all.

“We see some very tech-savvy 50- and 60-somethings being more active on Facebook than perhaps a busy millennial who is juggling the demands of a busy career and an expanding family life. And because of that we think age as a targeting tool has become a bit outdated.”

Davies says moving beyond age will enable brands to understand consumers on a deeper level, which will deliver better ROI. “Brand owners can maximise their efficiency by interrogating their audience much more deeply, beyond just age alone, by understanding attitudes towards their brand, their usage of the brand, and how familiar they are with the category in question.”

By not doing so, brands risk becoming homogeneous and less relevant to anybody. “A brand might be known and appreciated by many, but it will be truly loved by very few,” he warns.

Likewise, BT looks beyond age alone when targeting older consumers. Nearly half (44%) of its core audience is aged above 55, so David Stratton, general manager of marketing for BT’s consumer division, says it’s important this group is “strongly reflected” in its advertising, particularly as older, more affluent consumers tend to have the disposal income to spend on a premium provider like BT.

“With an ageing audience and the new gradient of how wealth, and property in particular, is allocated in the UK, these groups have more time and spending power than older equivalent generations did. And that manifests as behaviour,” he says.

“We’ve got more specific activities and behaviours to be able to target on for this group than we did in the past and [the data available is] growing fast. So rather than targeting purely on age ranges there’s far more opportunity to target on how [these consumers] act.”
BT has used this approach for its Complete Wifi product, targeting and serving creative based on the type of online activity it identifies in audiences.

“We’re targeting those more interested in entertainment, music, movies or games while remaining age-agnostic,” he says. “Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne would be grouped together looking at traditional socio-demographics – both males born in England in 1948, have children, remarried and wealthy. Yet lifestyle, beliefs and behaviours clearly differentiate them and provide a more nuanced and accurate view of both as individuals.”

According to Forbes, Americans over 50 account for $7.6 trillion in direct spending and related economic activity annually and control more than 80% of household wealth. 

Bank of America Merrill Lynch notes that the global spending power of those over 60 will reach $15 trillion annually by 2020.  That’s a lot of green in that grey market.  Boomer spending spans many product categories.  Health is an obvious area but, in addition to pharmaceuticals, it also includes biotechnology, devices and services.

Forbes notes that “when it comes to housing, transportation, entertainment, food and alcohol, older people already have their checkbooks out.  Americans 60-plus are expected to account for at least 40% of consumption growth in those areas between 2015 and 2030.”  

And let’s not forget finance and automotive, where older Americans have the money and the interest to spend heavily.  

Boomers are hardly technophobes, having lived through a period of great technological advancements from the advent of mobile phones (the size of shoeboxes) to viewers’ choice (with remotes, cable TV and VCRs).  The embracing of new technology continues.  Today, “the greatest consumer group for Apple products is men over the age of 65,” noted David Harry Stewart, Founder, AGEIST.

To read more click the picture

While this has been argued before, it bears repeating.  According to economic trends, today’s older consumers command much greater buying power compared to current and previous generations.  

Boomers alone represent 70% of the total net worth in America and account for 40% of total consumer demand.  It is time for the media metrics to keep pace with economic realities.
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For the article, click here