Winning the Over-50s with your Media Strategy
Continuing from our recent post on the Silver Pound and how it’s important to rethink the approach to the over-50s, we’re going to delve into how you can do this through strategic media planning and activation. At its core, as with all successful campaigns, understanding the audience is crucial. Did you know that the average person of 55 today has 15% more life to live than those born in 1950? Those born in 2025 are expected to have almost 50% more time to live by the time they’ve hit 55 than those born in 1950. Understanding how improvements in medical science, living conditions and more impact potential buyers is key to unlocking success. We’ve come a long way in that time; gone are the Don Draper days of cigarettes and whisky being good for you; being healthy is now mainstream cool, and the older generation is reaping the rewards of that change.
In a world where advertisers are chasing the lowest possible CPA, they tend towards quick to market, cheap and trackable channels without understanding how that might be impacting the overall. It’s easy to grab the low hanging fruit this way, but growth comes from a more strategic approach.
In our previous post we highlighted how it’s often the case that brands lump together anyone over 50 to their detriment, so here we’ll show how different they are and how that should impact on your media strategy.
Some facts and figures:
- 29.3% of 50–59-year-olds agree that advertising helps them choose what they buy, compared with only 15% of 70–79-year-olds.
- 50–59-year-olds have less spare time across the week than the national average, with 15% of males & 19% of females saying they have more than 6 hours of spare time during the week vs Nat rep of 23.4%. 11% more of 60-69 years olds report having more than 8 hours free time at the weekend vs 50–59-year-olds.
- Below shows the types of media different ages consume and you can see the variance across the ages. Green shows an over-index vs Nat rep and red shows under-index.
- TV usage increases with age vs Nat rep, Radio is more heavily used in the 50-70 age brackets, Live sports is still heavily consumed by all ages but has a male skew.
- Magazines is a consistent winner throughout, and news is also ever present and above the Nat rep.
- Lastly, because how could we ignore social media, but our analysis shows that 84% of 66–70-year-olds accessed social media in the last 24 hours, and that only drops to 80% for 71–75-year-olds, so this notion that social media is for the young is questionable at best!
This is a very topline snapshot of a few key data points that hopefully goes someway to demonstrate how unique this audience is, not only to the Nat rep, but within itself too. 50–59-year-olds are much closer to a Nat rep in terms of work and life balance, they behave the same, consume the traditional and new media, but more importantly, as they are likely moving into empty nesting phase with longer term careers, they have more time and disposable income. This should be music to advertisers’ ears!
Whilst the cornerstone of any campaign is audience understanding, we can’t neglect the media itself, channel + creative is key, showing the right ad to the right person at the right time is how you succeed.
It’s symptomatic of the issue at hand that it’s hard to find great examples of ad campaigns featuring 50+ actors or models, unless it’s for a river cruise or funeral arrangements, which just feels wrong.
An example of this is a brand like JD sports, their advertising perennially features late teens / early twenty actors, they don’t want to lose the “being down with the kids” reputation which is understandable. However, anyone who happened to be at one of the recent Oasis gigs would have seen an army of over 50’s head to toe in brand new adidas tracksuits.
Let me ask you, who is more likely to be able to afford an £80 tracksuit top – a 55-year-old with a full-time job, or a 17-year-old working 8 hours a week? It certainly feels like JD is missing a trick by excluding the older demos. Remember, Liam Gallagher is 52…
Some brands are getting it right though and making sure there is good representation of the older demo, we’ve spotted a couple of recent campaigns that we think do this well.
Barclays recent campaign featuring kids does a great job of showing people of all walks of life and demographics, there is even a scene specifically featuring a person retiring.
So, by not including any adults, Barclays has done a great job of making sure it speaks to all adults:
A brand that more overtly is using Over 50s in its campaigns is Old Navy. They ran a campaign recently featuring Lindsay Lohan and a range of age and gender demographics, this is a great example of a brand getting it right. They’re not trying to focus on any one-person type, but just making sure everyone is included, young and old.
So where are advertisers going wrong?
The problem is we’ve become addicted to data; it’s made us lazy and stops us from taking risks. Before we had pixels and attribution models there was discount codes attached to press ads, before that, well, there was sales numbers and gut feeling, you ran a well thought through & creatively lead ad campaign and if the sales increased you knew you’d succeeded, if not, you went back to the drawing board. So, we create ads that we think talks to our audience in the right way, but we’re actually just falling into a trap. For example, the idea that social media is only used by the young. I was 18 when I signed-up to Facebook in 2006, I’m now much closer to 50 than I am to 18, but social ads still typically showcase young actors and themes.
As mentioned earlier, it’s easy to chase low CPA paid social retargeting, that should work 10 times out of 10. You don’t need to think too hard about it, but driving upper funnel growth requires you to step out of your comfort zone, really think about who you’re targeting, what motivates them and how you can hit them and ensure you can measure the results as accurately as possible without relying solely on direct, trackable sales.
One way that works well is using test and control markets, minimise potential variables and see how the media impacts sales in the test region.
We’ve covered how unique and varied the over 50s audience is, and how media has evolved and what brands are doing well and what they aren’t. But one thing we’ve not looked at, which is where we at CreativeRace, a Buyer first agency, specialise, is how do over 50s buy? What is their research journey? Understanding this is crucial to driving sales growth.
Some key facts and figures:
- 85% of 50–59-year-old females and 82% of males browse online to see what’s available, but that only drops to 70% of people when you look at 80+ males and females. This demographic is online there is no two ways about it.
- One of the biggest differences however, which actually makes actively targeting the 70+ demo online is that they have reduced mobility, and so they are less likely to see things in-store or on the high street, as such they are influenced more by what they see online. Only 8% of 80+ see something in store and order online, compared to 38% of 50–59-year-olds.
Understanding the buyer is how you unlock performance.
So, to summarise, how do you get the most out of the over 50s:
- Audience first, always do your research, understand who can and who is buying your product.
- Creative, make sure you’re talking to them in a way they’ll resonate with, imagery & copy tailored to your audience, it sounds simple, but you’d be surprised how few brands actually do it.
- Try to break free of channels that you can directly track sales from, if you do that, you’ll be focusing a lot on lower funnel and neglecting potential growth.
- Understand how your audience shops and remove as many points of friction as possible, do they research online and buy in store? Only in store or purely online? Knowing this will unlock sales!
