We Didn't Start the Fire but We Tried to Fight It

Parent Cafe
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Comments regarding people according to their age: “don’t trust anyone over thirty” or “boomers are in the way of progress” or “she’s too young to run a company” are expressions of bigotry. Replace “over thirty” or “boomers” or “too young” with other designations - race, gender, etc - and this is evident. Ageism is an ism, but it is the one that remains socially and in many cases legally acceptable. Older people are “out of it”, “Non traditional” students are treated with mistrust, young people’s opinions with contempt.

These prejudices may be natural, I don’t know. What I do know is that corporate marketing has exploited age divides, focusing on the young because they are moving into their spending years and ignoring and sometimes deliberately denigrating the mature who have turned away, by choice or necessity, from large scale consumer purchases.

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“What I do know is that corporate marketing has exploited age divides, focusing on the young because they are moving into their spending years and ignoring and sometimes deliberately denigrating the mature who have turned away, by choice or necessity, from large scale consumer purchases.”

I’ve worked in marketing either at or advising large corporations for 30 years and I have to say this is pure nonsense. Marketers target whoever is the prime prospect for their particular product / service. For some products, that is young adults in household formation; for some it is parents of young children; for others it’s empty nesters with lots of disposable income, etc. It is simply incorrect that marketers “all chase youth.” Yes, there are categories (typically consumer packaged goods) that don’t target older people unless they are problem-solution (like Tylenol Arthritis) but that’s also because you’re still not “undecided” about your brand of mayonnaise when you’re 65 - you’ve already figured out if you’re a brand buyer or a price buyer by that point.

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The older I have gotten, the more liberal I have become, especially with social issues. I have more awareness of the advantages I have and have had in my life. Guess I’m backwards.

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But, this is not a new phenomenon or unique to our set of generations.

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I DO feel bad about the world my children are inheriting: climate change, political gridlock, debt, racism, income inequality…

But I do appreciate the changes my generation has ushered in: end of the draft, fantastically greater opportunities for women in comparison to what was available in the 60’s and 70s, when we were coming of age; far saner attitudes toward race, religion and homosexuality.

Few people who really know what life was like in the 50’s would call boomers, as a whole, reactionary.

And in my case, the family – all inlaws included – is far from conservative even in our old age. Heck, some of us are to the left of Bernie :wink:

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One thing has not changed in 40 years: the threat of Armageddon. When I was a kid the threat was nuclear annihilation. Remember duck and cover drills in school? As if our desks would protect us froma nuclear blast. As the threat of nuclear war has receded the new threat is global warming. Some predict coastal cities under water in 20 years along with frightening graphics.

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@katliamom:
The problem is when people assume the boomers are all the same, so if they run into people in the boomer generation who are reactionary (in their eyes) who are of that group, they assume all are. Polls do show that with social issues, older people, people in my age and older, are more conservative, but it is a relative thing. And if you polled older people (let’s say 50 and above) who were part of the campus protest movement, and asked about a hot button social issue, let’s say gay rights, abortion, and so forth, you likely would see a larger percentage with more liberal views than among thhe group as a whole…so it all depends (and yes, there are also those who were part of the protest generation, who became the neo cons of the 1980’s who helped create more than a bit of the reactionary political movement with the social issues and so forth). There were young people of the boomer generation who helped fight for the end of Jim Crow, and there were ones who were assaulting civil rights workers, beating up marchers ,firebombing black churches and so forth…

I also will say that boomers are generally a lot more liberal than their parents. It made my parents sort of out of the ordinary, they were the WWII generation, my dad was a WWII veteran, and they were both pretty liberal about many things, my dad was vocally against the Vietnam war, for example, something relatively rare in his generation, as was my mom, and both of them thought the whole religious right political agenda against gays and with sex was ridiculous (my dad loved to burst people’s bubble, when some idiot would go on about how moral people were back when they were growing up, etc, he would point out that was basically myth, he would tell them the only difference was when they were growing up, no one talked about the things they were railing against).

As far as the 50’s being mythologized, the people who do that a)didn’t grow up in them and go based on what parents and grandparents told them about it or b)were kids during it and see it through a kids eyes because they grew up then, and they didn’t see the dark side of it. It is funny, people sell the 1950’s as being a panacea of when things were all so good, and there were things about that world that are favorable compared to today (for example, that someone could have limited education and get a decent paying job). Part of the problem was the 1950’s were in some ways kind of like a neo victorian era, in the sense that people had this 'Times are good, so why complain?" and myopically ignored the problems of that era, the lack of opportunities for women, racial segregation, the conformity and fear that the McCartheys and the like took advantage of.

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@Pizzagirl, citing your experience in marketing does not invalidate my position and you are inventing a straw man when you quote me then misrepresent and misquote what I said. Where did I say marketers “all chase youth”?

As regards to what I did say, I stand by it. Corporate marketing has exploited age divides. “Marketers target whoever is their prime prospect” as you say, and catering to that demos’ assumptions and prejudices sometimes has a hand in marketing. I say this not as opinion. I know this because I have been complicit myself. In the 1990s, CBS had by far the largest market share (eyeballs) in the television industry. Their demos skewed older. They had shows about older characters or families with older characters as central positive figures. NBC decided to quit the ratings war and narrowly targeted young urban professionals whose buying tastes and spending habits was a perfect match for companies with high end products. As a result NBC’s ad rates and revenues outstripped their competitors both per minute and in some cases overall.

These shows’ content mirrored and supported these target demographics, emphasizing the power and hipness of younger characters at the expense of the few older ones. Older characters were not typically central to storylines, often ridiculed and generally marginalized. These choices were deliberate and explicit. There are studies too numerous to count going back at least to the 1960s measuring the reversal of media portrayals of older characters and the impact of negative stereotypes of older people on societal assumptions.Corporate marketing has had its hand in some of this as it has had in the coarsening of acceptable language and behavior. This seems an inescapable conclusion.

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@musicprnt But the boomer generation was the generation that “revolted” against the world of the 1950’s.

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The 50s were good for a very specific subset of the population. I don’t know a lot of folks of color or who grew up poor who remember the 50s so fondly as middle class and above whites.

The 50s were also a time of intense fear and paranoia and cost scores of people their jobs (or worse) out of suspicion of being a communist or gay.

Half of my older family members are Trump supporters and the other half (my parents included) were Bernie supporters. Heck, my parents are part of a “church” devoted to pot and atheism (it’s a long story).

There is nothing new about Gen Xers or Millenials (I truly do hate those categories but whatever) thinking that older generations are reactionary and should go away. The difference for us is that for the first time really in history, the vast majority of people are living into their elderly years. The average life expectancy was pretty low until the discovery of penicillin, vaccines, etc. (Yes, many people did live into their old age prior to the present era but there was not an expectation of this until the last several decades because most people didn’t.)

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One of the funniest experiences I’ve had was at a gathering of my prep school alums. (All girl’s school founded at the turn of the century.) There had been a bit of a contretemps about a lesbian couple being given housing on campus and someone asked the headmistress about it. One of the 80 year old ladies piped up with, “I don’t know what the big deal is. Miss ___ [founder and headmistress of the school] lived with her female companion on campus. And I’m pretty sure they were more than just friends.”

That was about ten years ago. I suspect now no one would even blink.

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Agincourt. The marketers are the people who have the products to sell - whether it’s cars or airlines or dog food or toothpaste. The fact that some media companies chose to develop properties that made them more attractive to certain marketers may be true, but irrelevant, since other media properties emerged to meet the needs of other marketers. No one who has a product for older people has no place to advertise it. Especially now with the Internet. There’s nothing magical about broadcast TV as s place to advertise. It’s simply one of many media vehicles.

I think you are using the term corporate marketers when you really mean media companies.

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@Pizzagirl, thank you for explaining what I mean and your condescending explanation of basic marketing. As I look up towards you on high, I now see the light. Of course there is no interrelation between corporate marketing and media companies and marketers are not part of the larger media field nor share any shred of responsibility for the consequences of age prejudice in contemporary society. I must have dreamt that up.

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I worked for one of the largest corporate marketers in the country for years. I assure you we didn’t GAS what NBC or ABC or CBS did. We developed targets for our own products based on our best demographic and psychographic data and then our agencies chose the media vehicles that best enabled us to reach the targets. We did nothing to “court” NBC et al. They needed to court us. If NBC chose to go all-young-all-the-time, that was their business and their prerogative.

The ageism I saw was not on the part of NBC et al; it was in the minds of young, hip agency folks for whom “mom” meant “frumpy, not too bright housewife who took every packaged good decision super seriously and because she didn’t work, had all the time in the world to think about my category” or for whom “grandmom” meant “doddering old lady in orthopedic shoes,” not “yoga class followed by coffee with friends.” I fought a lot of those stereotypes in advertising/casting decisions or even target articulations. But from the vantage point of a corporate marketer, it wasn’t the casting of broadcast TV that was of any concern to us. People watch a heck of a lot of stuff that isn’t people exactly-like-them. Seinfeld played in Omaha, not just Manhattan.

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As far as I recall from my marketing in college, they do use age ranges for products in targeting advertising, but that shouldn’t be a big surprise. If a show is something people in a certain demographic are expected to be the big watchers (let’s say the 18-39 year old market), let’s say something like 'the Big Bang Theory", then the advertisers are likely to want to put products that are generally bought by a younger audience, fashions for younger women, cars that appeal to young people (for example, you wouldn’t advertise a car like a lincoln town car (if they still make them) during that show), there are trends that are pretty well defined with merchandising. On the other hand, it would be a foolish advertiser who didn’t look at a show like 'NCIS", that tends to have an older audience, and realize the gold to be found there, many people in their peak earning years, often with money to spend…and if you watch tv during the daytime you see a lot of ads aimed at older people, which makes sense, during the day most people are working outside the home.

One of the problems might be with advertiser supported programming, it tends to make those who produce it have a narrower vision (and this is just my own thoughts), so they tailor the show to a specific demographic and sell it that way (@pizzagirl, be curious if my speculation is the way it happens). If you look at programming on things like Amazon Prime, Netflix, and even HBO series and such, you see a lot of programming that seems to get an audience across the spectrum, unless what I was reading was wrong shows like “Game of Thrones”, “Man in the High Castle”, “House of Cards” and so forth seem to attract across the spectrum, and I wonder if not bound by advertising demographics, they are free to produce content not so age specific…or so it seems to me.

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Meanwhile, back on the topic.

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@mathmom:
That doesn’t surprise me. I have heard from friends who do outreach for various things (mostly lGBT issues, especially transgender folk) and one of the common stories is finding that despite what they expected, older people can be surprisingly supportive. My friends said that when they asked, the person told them that when you get past a certain age, you start realizing how precious life is and also that the things you once thought were so important aren’t any more. Demographics show that older people tend to be more conservative, but I often find that when you ask someone something in a question in a poll or as a theoretical concept, they may react against it, but when confronted with actual people something quite different happens:). And there are a lot of young, angry people, too, take a look at the world around us, the political campaigns and so forth, lots of angry, more than a bit hateful, people who are well below the age Mason Dixon line (let’s say 50 for arguments sake).

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The Age Mason Dixon Line! Love it.

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@empower:
That is complicated. First of all,not all the boomers revolted against the 1950’s, while there were plenty of young people of that generation that revolted, tuned out, protested, etc, there were those who were as disgusted by the behavior of their fellow generation of people, who were the “america love it or leave it”, those who served in Vietnam proudly and to this day are angry at those who protested the war and think we ‘lost’ the war because of “traitors” and so forth. More importantly, a lot of the myth making today about the 1950’s is from members of the boomer generation, those now in their 60’s and 70’s,some of whom in the day were part of the protest movement (especially the so called neo cons), who claim that was a time when America was great, men were men and women were women and all the other cliches, and sell it as an idyllic time that was wrecked by the protesters, hippies, college protestors, etc. One thing about older people, what those people forget is it wasn’t just the 60’s generation that revolted against the 50’s, a revolt was brewing in the 1950’s, officially there was all this clasped hands on the desk conformity, but the beats, those creating rock and roll, those already fighting the fight for civil rights, the early feminists, the early gay rights groups , were already at work, too, they saw in the 1950’s that that time wasn’t so perfect for a lot of people.

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Not sure boomers were really as enlightened as they’d like to believe. It’s more likely the society was ready for a change with its unsurpassed economic power.