Legends And Rituals

From The New York Times about a week ago:

"According to a study... boomer households account for unexpectedly high percentages of sales of products considered mainstays of younger consumers. That includes beer, 59.7 percent; carbonated beverages, 58.9 percent; and candy, 54.2 percent..."

To the enlightened readers of The Ad Contrarian, this should not be surprising. On many occasions we pests here at TAC have commented on the stupidity of marketers who think they are required to target young people because everyone else does. In a post called "Aiming Low" we said,

"Of all the dumb things that advertisers do, one of the dumbest is aiming their message too young...

Some facts:

* People over 50 comprise 29% of the population
* They control 77% of financial assets
* They control 50% of all discretionary spending
* They watch 50% more television
* They are the target for 10% of all advertising

There are only two possible explanations for the above. Either advertisers are crazy, or they are hopelessly out of touch with, and prejudiced against, the people who economically control this country."

Apparently, some people are catching on.

In the NY Times piece quoted above (entitled, "The Older Audience Is Looking Better Than Ever") they extol the virtues of marketing to older people...

For decades, older consumers were largely shunned by marketers... young consumers ...were desired for what were deemed their free-spending ways, eagerness to sample new products and brand-switching proclivities. The idea that they were starting in life with a proverbial blank slate of marketing wants and needs was catnip to product peddlers...

“When you’re a 27-year-old media supervisor or a 32-year-old brand manager, what do you think the world looks like?” Jerry Shereshewsky, chief executive at Grandparents.com. “You think it looks like you..."

Among those aiming more at the older demographic are giants like...Kraft Foods, L’Oréal, Procter & Gamble and Target.

Is there another industry in the world that operates on legends and rituals more than the marketing industry?

Death Fatigue

Despite all the lurid headlines, pardon me if I don't get too hysterical over swine flu.

You see, I'm living on borrowed time. I'm playing with house money.

By now, I should have been long dead from SARS, or bird flu, or mad cow disease, or ebola virus, or Legionaire's disease. You remember those, don't you? They were the other "pandemics" that were going to kill us all.

They didn't actually do the trick, but they did sell a bunch of newspapers and gave CNN lots to be frantic about.

Here's the deal.

In the U.S., 36,000 people die every year from the flu. So until the death rate from this latest "cataclysm" gets above 100 people a day, there's no story here as far as I'm concerned.

I'm getting a little tired of dying.

Advertising And The Universe

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm a former science teacher.

The downside of that for you is that every now and then I have to sneak in a little science lesson.

Today we're going to talk about the universe.

You know that stuff you learned in school about how everything is made of atoms, and atoms are made of neutrons and protons and electrons, and there are four types of forces, including gravity and electromagnetism?

Well, it turns out it's all baloney.

All those particles and all that energy apparently make up only 4% of the universe.

The other 96%? No fucking clue.

Scientists don't know what it's made of, what it looks like, or what it smells like.

They call it dark matter and dark energy and have no idea idea what the hell it is. But they do know that without dark matter and dark energy, all their theories about how the universe works fall apart.

What does this have to do with advertising, you ask?

Well, it's like this. One of our ongoing themes here at TAC is that most of what you read and hear from experts about advertising and marketing is just baloney and guesswork tarted up to look like knowledge.

If Uncle Albert and The Rocket Scientists have only been able to figure out about 4% of their subject, how much do you think Sir Martin and the Brand Babblers really know about theirs?