We work with both brands and their agencies, to help them really connect
with the large, affluent, and fast-growing market of mature consumers.
re: Brands
- Work with brands that sell only or primarily to mature consumers, as well as mainstream brands that recognize the significance of mature consumers as a secondary target
- Work with your data, parse information in the public domain, and conduct original research to help you understand mature consumers' significance for your brand, and opportunities to grow your share of this market
- Help to frame your message in terms that will resonate with a mature audience in all media
- Provide insight and direction to your agencies and suppliers
- Ensure that the work you're approving will earn your share of the $3 trillion spent annually by mature consumers
- Help brands plan for demographic change
re: Agencies
- Proactively and strategically ensure that brand messages in all media take into account the interests, concerns, and motivations of mature consumers
- Give planners, media specialists, and creative departments a nuanced understanding of the many psychographic groups that make up the mature consumer demographic
- Work with your planners (or as an adjunct planner) to ensure that creative briefs accurately describe mature consumers whether as primary or secondary targets; acknowledge the real motivators for mature consumers' purchase decisions
- Work with your creative department (or as an adjunct creative director) to ensure that your messages will resonate with mature consumers
What we aren't
One mature-consumer niche that the ad industry has already identified is the selling of assisted living. There are very profitable agencies whose business model we admire, like Glynn-Devins here in our home town of Kansas City, that operate only in this niche. That's not our thing. We're for brands.
A note for ad agencies
We are, of course, happy to work with agencies on accounts where mature consumers are the primary target. However, the place we can add the most value is in helping to ensure that mainstream campaigns focused primarily on adults 18-44 still work effectively on consumers who are 55+. We can help you to improve your market share among older consumers without compromising the effectiveness of your message to younger consumers.
A cautionary tale: We got into the ad business at the time when the first Hispanic specialty agencies were getting serious attention. Big, established full-service agencies—the kind of firms that had AOR assignments from major brands—were dismissive of the rising Hispanic firms.
Today, every major brand has a Hispanic agency on its roster. The money clients spend in that market comes out of the budget they used to spend with those old-guard agencies-of-record.
The mature market is too big to ignore, and given the age structure of conventional agencies, mature consumers might as well speak a different language. It will inevitably result in the creation of specialized agencies. If the ad industry wasn't such a youth cult, it would already have happened. Here's your choice: get out ahead of the trend by working with us—let us be your interpreters in this market—or wait a few years and see a portion of the money your clients are currently spending with you be sent off to a mature consumer specialty agency.
