The Audience Marketing Forgot to Put in the Brief
New global research on “aging well” reveals a striking disconnect between enormous consumer power—and how little attention marketers give it.
Ask more than 30 creative directors and advertising experts around the world to name memorable wellness advertising aimed at people over 60, and something unusual happens.
They struggle.
Some can’t think of an example at all.
Ask which brands in their own markets are getting wellness advertising to people in their 60s, 70s or 80s right, and the silence becomes even more revealing.
“None. Zero. Blank.”
That’s how a new Global Wellness Institute report describes the response.
Advertising & The Aging Well Category, developed by Dave McCaughan, Storyteller@BIBLIOSEXUAL and longtime advertising strategist, draws on conversations with creative leaders and industry experts across markets including the US, UK, Canada, Brazil, Germany, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia, Hong Kong and the Netherlands.
The research asks a deceptively simple question: How can advertising and communications do a better job of reaching people over 60 about aging well?
The question matters.
The over-60 population is the fastest-growing in most countries. It controls more than 50% of spending in nearly every category of products and services globally. Yet it remains underrepresented in nearly every kind of advertising.
Advertising & The Aging Well Category: A Global Advertising Industry Perspective Report
Read Dave McCaughan’s full Global Wellness Institute white paper
A Remarkable Contradiction
When Dave and I talked about the findings recently, one contradiction particularly caught my attention.
The creative leaders he interviewed weren’t necessarily resistant to thinking about people over 60.
They simply weren’t being asked to very often.
Despite the extraordinary economic power of this audience—what Dave describes as the “New Life Builders” life stage—creatives told him they receive few briefs specifically targeting them and remarkably little research or strategic guidance about how people at this stage of life actually think and act.
That changes the nature of the problem.
Perhaps marketing’s difficulty with age isn’t simply about what happens during the creative process.
Perhaps it begins before anyone starts making the advertising.
The Creatives Had Plenty to Say
Something else happened when Dave moved the conversation forward.
When creative leaders were asked what they would want to know if they were given a brief targeting older consumers, there was no shortage of questions.
They wanted to understand motivations and aspirations. Emotional drivers. Unmet needs. Media habits. Sources of influence. What wellness means at different stages of life. What language people embrace—and what they reject.
In other words, they wanted what good creative people have always wanted.
To understand people, rather than demographic caricatures.
And that may be one of the most encouraging findings in the research.
The creative appetite appears to be there.
What’s missing is the opportunity—and often the insight—to act on it.
The contradiction is that while this life stage—New Life Builders—controls over 50% of spending in nearly all categories, creatives get few briefs targeting them and very little real research and strategy guidance as to how that life stage really thinks and acts.
— Dave McCaughan
Beyond Generational Labels
There’s another aspect of Dave’s approach that is particularly interesting.
He deliberately avoids defining people through generational labels such as Boomers, Gen X, Millennials or Gen Z.
His reasoning is straightforward: those labels can be deceptive.
People who happen to share a birth cohort don’t necessarily share motivations, aspirations, behaviors or circumstances. And chronological age alone tells marketers remarkably little about how someone wants to live.
That’s why Dave prefers to think in terms of life stage.
The creative leaders in his research seemed to be asking for much the same thing.
Who is this person now?
What matters to them?
What are they trying to accomplish?
What influences their decisions?
What does aging well actually mean in their lives?
One contributor to the research, Sean Riley, expressed the larger reality succinctly:
“Aging isn’t a niche market—it’s the default future for every single one of us.”
And then comes the question marketers might find even more useful:
What’s the life stage of the target?
Stop Marketing to Age?
Perhaps one of the most provocative lines in the report comes from Marcia Goddard:
“Stop marketing to age. Start marketing to agency.”
It’s a subtle but important shift.
The research also raises the possibility that better advertising doesn’t necessarily mean creating more advertising specifically about getting older.
Some of the strongest opportunities may simply involve portraying older people naturally in campaigns for products and experiences that aren’t defined by age at all.
People over 60 don’t inhabit a separate consumer universe.
They travel. Work. Exercise. Learn. Spend. Care for parents. Help children. Influence grandchildren. Discover technology. Change careers. Form relationships. Seek experiences. Make recommendations.
And, of course, they interact constantly with people at other stages of life.
Where This Intersects with GenMORE+
That’s where Dave’s research becomes particularly interesting to our evolving work at The Internationalist’s GenMORE+ Initiative.
GenMORE+ began by examining an enormous 50+ market that marketing frequently underestimated or overlooked.
But our research has increasingly led us toward a larger question.
Not simply whether older people are represented.
But whether marketing reflects how people actually live across longer lives—and how different ages and life stages intersect.
We’ve begun calling part of that opportunity multigenerational authenticity.
It isn’t about forcing every age into every advertisement.
It’s about recognizing that people don’t live in demographic silos. They influence one another. Share experiences. Exchange recommendations. Care for one another. Learn from one another. And move through different roles and life stages themselves.
Dave approaches the issue from a different direction. His work deliberately avoids generational classifications and asks marketers to understand the individual within a life stage.
But perhaps the two ideas meet in an important place:
Age may identify an audience. It doesn’t explain a life.
Start With the Brief
Dave McCaughan’s research exposes a significant marketing gap.
But it also offers a surprisingly optimistic conclusion.
Creative people appear interested in understanding this audience more deeply. They want richer insights, better research and more nuanced ways of understanding motivation and behavior.
And they recognize that chronological age alone isn’t much of a creative strategy.
So perhaps marketers don’t need to begin by solving the entire problem of age in advertising.
They can start somewhere considerably simpler.
Put New Life Builders on the brief.
Then give creative people enough insight to see who they really are.
GenMORE+
Helping organizations thrive in a multigenerational world.
GenMORE+ is an editorial and research initiative from The Internationalist exploring how longer lives, changing life stages and multigenerational relationships are reshaping marketing, brands, experiences and business growth.
A question we’re continuing to explore:
Are marketers designing brands and experiences for people living longer, richer, more interconnected lives?
