Boomers Target Super Bowl For 'Ad'-vocacy Campaign, Want Advertisers To Recognize Older Consumers

In what has to be one of the most surprising attempts by an advocacy group to influence how people are depicted in mass media, a group representing what is perhaps the largest of all "minority" groups--U.S. Baby Boomers-will utilize the Super Bowl in an effort to get Madison Avenue to rethink how it creates and targets ads for older people.

In fact, the group, called The Society, doesn't represent a minority at all, but what it calls the "new adult majority"--consumers who are 40 years of age or older. But despite their numbers, the organization says they are essentially invisible to Madison Avenue. While that complaint is not new--the AARP Magazine has been running an especially visceral trade advertising campaign to make that very same point--the choice of The Society's media strategy, a public opinion campaign centered on ads appearing in the Super Bowl, is a very different tack.

To get its point across, The Society will mobilize its membership to conduct a poll of Super Bowl ads, which it plans to compile and release next week. While Super Bowl advertising polls, again, are not unusual, the criteria of this one is. The survey includes a set of questions designed to determine whether the Super Bowl spots "try to speak to the 40-plus consumer," and how that affects the feelings of older viewers toward the products and services being advertised.

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"If an advertiser is going to spend $2.5 million dollars per 30-second spot-then that advertiser wants one thing--whether the ad is communicating to viewers in a way that will make them go out and buy their product and service," says Vicki Thomas, president of Westport, CT-based agency Thomas & Partners, one of the members of The Society who is organizing the effort. "I am over 50-and all Boomers by the end of this year will have turned 40. What we want to know is if you are talking to us, or you want us as your customers. At one time, the boomer generation was the Pepsi generation that everyone wanted to reach. Now that they've turned 50, the only ones that want to reach them are the pharmaceuticals. But you know, we drink Pepsi and drive cars and buy other things too."

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