Advertising Age-ism

Have you noticed that virtually all prime time television advertising – except  for spots about erectile dysfunction or bladder control or some other “old age-y” pharmaceutical product – features women and men under the age of 40-45 pretty much exclusively??

I was glued to the TV last night watching American Idol and couldn’t help but notice there was NO ONE of roughly my age in any of the commercials airing during the show.   This is a surprise when you consider that media critics (and probably more than a few FOX network execs) have grumbled about the viewing audience for Idol “skewing older” in recent years.

But here’s another reason to be surprised:  Who has most of the household wealth in this country today?  Boomers, you betcha.   And most boomers are like me, I suspect, creeping up to or just past the 6-0 mark but feeling 2-2 most days. And they are just vain and self-interested ernough to want someone to market cool stuff to them, e.g., they're not dead yet. 

Boomers like pretty clothes at Macy’s “One Day Sale!” too, but you’ll never see them in that store’s TV advertising.  They also diet and like to take the “Special-K Challenge” -- but there's a 35 year-old "oo-lala" chick in the TV commercial.   They love sleek looking cars, even though it seems only glamorous 20-something models in gowns drive them.  At least in the Jaquar spots currently airing on TV, British actor  Ben Kingsley --  a man who has certainly passed the 6-0 mark, if not the 7-0 mark – has a starring role.  (But then again, everyone knows that the British are among the more highly evolved of our species, except for those who play soccer, perhaps.  Wait, I take that back, for 2 reasons:   David Beckham. And my lovely niece’s lovely husband who I believe does play soccer from time to time.)

Anyway, to get back to my larger point:  I am calling out the Big Brands and their millennial and Gen Y advertising consultants for their insensitive Ad Age-ism. It’s time we see more 50, 60 and 70-something women (and men) who are fit and attractive and fashionably dressed shilling on TV for something other than Depends or Boniva or Viagra. 

So I say to them all:  Life is full of surprises and a few serious certainties.  One of them is age.  You too will get older and perhaps resent, a least a little, the indifference of advertisers to your mature allure. 

Until then.