• by Matt Thornhill , August 24, 2009

With football season upon us again, many Boomers remember the first Super Bowl, good ol' Super Bowl I. We also paid attention when Apple's "1984" launched the focus on Super Bowl ads. And we've probably been responsible for creating the hype over those Super Bowl ads that now seems to exceed the hype over the football game. These days, with video streaming on the Internet, we're now experiencing more replays of the ads than of the game highlights.

Football seasons come and go, like Brett Favre, and how we experience them, and the related advertising, have changed dramatically. Nowadays, though, many in media planning think today's Boomers are stuck back in the days of Super Bowl capital letter "I." But we're not. We're clued in.

A case in point from this past year's Super Bowl was GoDaddy.com's ad featuring Danica Patrick, the female Indy race car driver, in a spoof of a Congressional hearing into a major league "enhancement" controversy. Under questioning, a series of voluptuous young women vehemently deny being "enhanced." Then the camera shifts to the comely but - ah, shall we say - slender Ms. Patrick, who announces, "Yes, I've enhanced." The crowd gasps. "It's true," she continues, "I have enhanced my image with a domain and web site from GoDaddy.com." The end of the ad invites viewers to visit the GoDaddy.com web site where they can view a "hot" Internet?only version.

The streaming video version got 1.6 million views on the Spike TV web site. How do we know it was even there? That's where a Boomer buddy of ours told us to look.

Sure, Boomers have a reputation of being less technologically savvy than the Millennial Generation, to whom such tasks as setting up Facebook pages, texting messages on their cell phones and Twittering are second nature. But that impression isn't entirely fair. Let us not forget, Boomers did invent the personal computer. (Anyone remember Bill Gates and Steve Jobs?)

We have been early adopters of technologies that enhance the television viewing experience, noted a study sponsored late last year by TV Land. Boomers have eagerly embraced digital?video recorders like Tivo that free them from the "tyranny of network programming schedules."

They've warmed to video?on?demand, and they appear eager to switch to HDTV. Furthermore, Boomers have the numbers and spending power to drive the commercialization of new consumer electronics technology in a way that the younger generations do not. Apple has sold more than 100 million iPods. There aren't 100 million teenagers. Boomers are pod people, too.

Our research data, culled from the BIGresearch Consumer Intentions and ActionsTM survey, shows that Boomers are almost as likely to use the Internet as younger generations are. They just use it for different things. Boomers view the Internet as a means of information retrieval: They are more likely than younger generations to use the Internet to check the weather, inspect stock prices or plan vacations. They are equally likely to hop online to go shopping. By contrast, younger generations are more likely to regard the Web as a vehicle for social interaction, for such purposes as instant messaging, locating friends and uploading themselves.

Where the differences between generations emerge most starkly is in advertising. For the most part, according to BIGresearch data, Boomers are more receptive than Millennials to "old media" advertising like the Super Bowl ads that play on the broadcast networks, as well as print ads in magazines and newspapers. Millennials are far more likely than Boomers to be influenced by ads in blogs, online video games and cell phone text messages.

We Boomers may have been weaned on TV, but we're growing beyond our analog roots. We dig e?mail, we read blogs and we poke around YouTube. Some of us even know what Twitter does, even if we haven't quite figured out why we should care. But I bet we learn, and quick.