A+E Measures Total Audience Where Every Person Counts

Ageism seems to permeate our society. This not only negatively impacts self-esteem and relationships with each other, it also can negatively impact business economics. A+E Networks has conducted extensive research to help solve for ageism, if not as of yet for society in general, at least in the business world.

According to Tara Lantieri, Senior Director, Primary Research, Ad Sales Strategic Insights at A+E Networks, “The World Health Organization has done extensive work on the issue of ageism globally, on stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination, how we act towards others or oneself based on age. A lot of the research we've been doing is on how so much of ageism is internalized and self-directed. It's a complex issue in the world and prevalent one.”

Marcella Tabares, Senior Vice President, Strategic & Cultural Insights, Ad Sales Research, A+E Networks concurred. “We start developing ageism beliefs and ideas at a very young age. Children between ages three to four already have some culturally, socially constructed ideas of what age means and they’re usually embedded. We started looking at younger age groups in addition to older to fully understand what the effects of those perceptions are,” she noted.

A+E Networks set out on a course of action, called Total Audience - Every Person Counts, to fully understand the complexities of audiences 18-74 and parsing out differences and similarities between 18-49s and 50-74s. “When we talk about every person counts, we mean every person, regardless of age,” Lantieri stated.

“There are two things happening,” Tabares noted, “Young people are cultivating these ideas of what old age looks like, receiving those messages from visual imagery and projecting those ideas onto others. That's why advertising and media are so important. We construct what the world looks like, what identity looks like. Only then do we project those onto others and start internalizing them. We see how it's impacting young people in their 30s and 40s.They actually hold more negative views and feelings about aging than people who are older, because people who are older are ‘in it.’ You've arrived and you realize that it is not as bad as it's been presented to you for decades.”

It’s notable that, according to the research, older adults feel pretty good about themselves. “The reality is, I feel good, I feel strong, I feel active, I'm curious. For me, I turned 50 this year and this is the best time of my life,” Tabares stated.

The challenge to getting this important point across and changing minds is impacted by attitudes of young  agency buyers and planners. “When you look at this industry with a median age in the agency in their 30s or maybe early 40s,” Tabares began, “How can they authentically relate to the experience of aging, and further, how are they able to authentically depict that experience in the creative narratives? It's very hard to do that. So we talked about representation in terms making strategic decisions in creative executions.”

Adequate representation of older adults is another challenge.  “What I found particularly jarring and shocking was the level of representation. Our study of national TV ads found that only one in 10 faces appear to be 50 years or older, yet 50+ year olds account for 46% of the adult population,” Tabares shared. Further, “within that was the lack of representation among older women. Only one in three of those faces appear to be female, yet women account for like 52% of the population. “

She noted that context too, reinforces ageism. “You start to see how small their world is constructed. We're much more likely to see older adults using a newspaper and a lot less likely than younger adults to be using technology. They are a lot less likely to be driving, more likely to be walking or in the house. The world that is constructed is so small and this plays into the stereotypical ideas of where older people are.”

Notably, the research paints an entirely different picture. “And yet,” Tabares, explained, “When we hear from older adults in the research, when we listen to them, we hear about their diversity of experience and all of the ways that they're living their lives. It's much more engaged. It's much more social. It's much more connected with the world. It’s very important for us as an industry to be more invested in understanding the experience.”

There is also the buying power of older adults which has been covered repeatedly in the press. “We talk about the scale of the population, their buying power and their ad receptivity as quantitative points. I don't think it's something that we need to continue to prove because that is like asking me, ‘What is the value of people?’ which is the real question we are asking,” Lantieri posited and added, “A lot of people aren't  trying to reach them and not trying to include them, so I think the first thing we should think about is purposeful inclusion in a way that is truly engaging and true to their experiences.“

It is not difficult for advertisers to get this right, she noted. “It does require balance but advertisers can absolutely get this balance right. We saw in our test that many already have. It's about balancing realism and repeatability, inspiration and respect. Depictions need to be realistic enough that people can relate to them, but they also have to be inspirational enough that there is a sense of things to look forward to.” It is possible to create advertising that resonates and appeals across all age groups.

The good news is that, according to Lantieri, “The data is showing that people are satisfied with their lives and valuing themselves well across many different dimensions that we asked about. I think it's important to acknowledge the challenges of getting older, but do so in a way that doesn't provoke fear. Showing adults and meaningful relationships is also really key because it demonstrates worthiness,” showing the physical aspects of aging in a positive light and show older adults as capable but not patronizingly so.

Finally, the old canard of older people feel younger than they are, therefore they want to see younger people in ads, is just not true. “I'm not sure where this came from. We’ve seen consistently in our work that people feel about on average 15 to 17 years younger than their age. But feeling younger doesn't translate directly to wanting to see somebody whose looks and body version is 15 years younger. We’ve tested this explicitly because we believed that it’s a myth that's perpetuated for decades and still lives on today,” Tabares revealed.

So for advertisers grappling with the careful balance of engaging both young and old consumers, Tabares has some words of advice. “Show me a real person who looks about my age, where I'm at in my life. We found that works well especially with multi-generational ads. It's not an either or solution. There is a way to appeal to all by showing both younger and older people in a social or family setting, the way we live our lives authentically. That is a key takeaway,” she concluded.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

With A+E, Every Person Counts. The Power of Age Inclusion.

We talk about diversity and inclusion but there is one group that still feels left out of the conversation. That would be older adults who, while constituting over 46% of the U.S. population are often at zero percent representation in certain advertising categories. Happily, A+E’s Marcela Tabares, Senior Vice President Strategic & Cultural Insights, Ad Sales Research, and Tara Lantieri, Senior Director, Primary Research, Ad Sales Strategic Insights, are on a mission to change that.

A+E has embarked on a series of research studies to better understand the themes and attitudes around aging and to dispel the myths about older adults. Being a woman of a certain age, I am especially curious about the takeaways and how we as a society can pivot to a more productive representation.

“I became acutely aware of my own ages beliefs about my life and others because I'm human and conditioned by this society,” confessed Tabares who added, “Believing messages that have bombarded us for decades makes it hard to not be affected,”

The Next Phase of Total Audience Research

A+E has done considerable work on the value of total audience. “Last year we talked about bringing to life the power of the adult 50 plus consumer. We talked about the scale and spending power conducting proprietary studies that were based on actual purchase behavior and receptivity,” explained Tabares.

This latest phase is in creative messaging which is still partially in the field but has already produced a wealth of attitudinal information. “It has been all about understanding the lived experience of being an older adult,” Tabares stated, “We told marketers that this is a really important consumer segment, yet they feel overlooked and undervalued. Let's have a closer look so that we can come up with some insights that will help navigate and provide insights around the creative, about how to connect with them and reach them.”

Crafting The Methodology

Ageism probably started early in our history when we moved from an agrarian to an industrial society. “We use to value our elders or older people because they were the purveyors of knowledge. With industrialization and post modernism, society started to shift toward seeing older people more as a burden on society and the economy,” Tabares said.

The way this plays out in advertising messaging today is with representation that leans on unflattering stereotypical identities of aging. “We tested ads that leaned on tropes whether it's making fun of the older person as the butt of the joke or one that's vulnerable, dependent, weak and frail,” she explained. But, “there are also positive stereotypes such as the happy, loving, doting grandmother grandfather and a person who's retiring, very active and wealthy. So there are positive and negative stereotypes. We're testing that full spectrum.”

The challenge is that the older cohort is treated as one large segment devoid of nuance. In fact there are many sub-segments. According to Tabares, “We have been taught to conceptualize older people as this homogenous group.” In order to craft a more nuanced look at the older cohort, the methodology included an ethnography of 60 participants which then went into field to form a quantitative survey.  “Then we did an ad audit with Marketcast using AI technology to evaluate about 20,000 ads to see what is the representation and who are we seeing in these ads. There is also an ad test in field using survey based data testing 28 different ads that we had identified as representative of some of the consistent themes in terms of the rules or the storylines are the attributes,” she noted.

Highlights of the Creative Study So Far

The results of the ethnography not only reveled how older adults view society’s perceptions of them but also how they themselves feel about aging.

Feeling of Unworthiness - Society, the respondents felt, viewed them as, “passive, feeble, out of touch, undesirable, unsexy and irrelevant,” Tabares shared, “What this brought up was a sense of unworthiness. In the eyes of society, we're just not as worthy. Why can't they see who I really am and that I am worthy.” One 44 year old female respondent expressed a common theme; “I feel like the older, I get the less significant my opinion is and society as a whole is starting to look through me rather than at me.”

Gender Differences on Aging - According to Lantieri, “Women are (negatively) impacted by ageless- beauty ideals. They also feel less permission to age and then they're harder about it on themselves when they do. They're more likely to say they must keep the signs of aging at bay compared to men.” Essentially, women have less permission to age than men and, “they're less likely than men to agree that wrinkles and age spots and gray and white hair are normal things accumulated over time. It's not surprising that women 50+ are less confident compared to men.”

Chronological Age Has No Meaning - “Chronological age is constantly being redefined and shifting,” noted Tabares, who added, “Most people in the qualitative research, on average, perceived themselves as 15 years younger. Chronological numbers are a very homogenized narrow view and not very helpful. We tend to feel our age psychologically, cognitively and socially.”

Ethnic Differences – Lantieri did a deep dive by ethnicity and found that, “Black adults 50+ are more positive about aging than other groups. They feel more comfortable, more confident, more optimistic, more likely to agree that their life has meaning and have a lot to look forward to. They're forward looking and not saying that their best days are behind them.” Their positivity includes a recognition of the gains they have in getting older such as, “wisdom, gratitude, increased faith and spirituality. They're also more likely to agree there's no shame in getting older, that aging is normal and it should be normalized. They don't let age related changes hold them back.”

Among the Asian population, “They're more likely to feel confident about how they're doing in terms of their health and their finances, more likely to say that they're thriving financially and they're less likely to report experiencing mental can medical conditions and needing help with mobility and things like that,” stated Lantieri. Overall they report feeling more confident about their health more so than the other groups.

However, “The white adult population 50+ is having a harder time,” she added, “They are more likely to say that aging is scary, less likely to feel that they can lean on their families for help if they need it and  least likely to say that they don't let those age related changes hold them back. They also feel more negative about their appearance versus all the other groups are most likely to say they're less attractive compared to when they were younger.”

Dispelling the Myths of Age

What can we do to dispel the myths of aging? For one thing, older adults want representations that are relatable. “It's all about creating more realistic portrayals,” Tabares recommended, “We are not a homogenous group. Don't hide us. People don't disappear with age. Include more of them in more varied roles.” According to Lantieri, “Contrary to popular opinion, people 50+ are over five times more likely to say they want to see realistic depictions than to see someone who looks younger than them in ads. That was a key finding for us because we hear over and over that everyone wants to see younger. But that's not what the data is saying.”

Advertisers should take heed. Adults 50+ consume a range of goods and services but they are not always properly represented in certain ad categories. “The advertising industry and marketers have already decided like what categories suit older adults and that is a fairly limited set of categories like financial services, health and medicine,” noted Tabares. The gaps are startling. “On average, 5% of the faces in automotive are people 50+ but, they account for like 40% of the dollar spent in the category. How do we justify this? How can anybody look at this data and say this is correct?” Cosmetics is even worse with zero percent representation of regular, non-celebrity spokespeople in cosmetics ads. According to Lantieri, “The AI driven audit classified nearly 90% of faces in national TV ads as under 50, and so it isn't surprising that only 5% of adults 50+ say they always see people like them and media.”

Conclusion

Changing ingrained perceptions can be frustrating. In regard to the ongoing conversation about diversity and inclusion, “Not a lot of people are talking about inclusion among about the biggest consumer segment out there; the population that holds the most powerful economic strength,” stated Tabares, “There's a massive opportunity here. We have to change their understanding about aging and not be afraid of it. As media companies, as purveyors of ideas, we influence culture. We help people understand and make sense of life. It is a moral and social responsibility to start articulating a different narrative, accepting, embracing and knowing that that journey is different than the one that we've been depicting for decades. That's my little soapbox. We're going to get there,” she concluded, optimistically.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

“Really Talk to Me” – A+E Networks Examines the Potential of Total Audience.

In a media world that has historically (and misguidedly) placed its valuation on the younger age demographic, it is refreshing to see a new effort to correct for that inaccuracy by showing the value of all consumers, no matter their age. A+E has embarked on an ambitious study on Total Audience 18+ that demonstrates the power of consumer spend across all age groups, particularly older adults.   

To craft such an important analysis, Marcela Tabares, Senior Vice President, Research & Strategic Insights, A+E Networks, sought data and trends from many sources and parsed the results in a way that compared behaviors across a range of ages. “We didn’t set out to do one specific study. There were a couple of different components,” she explained. “One aspect of it is that we designed it across mutually exclusive demographics like 18-44, 45-54 and 55+. The reason we did this is because we really never dug into the data and analytics to understand how the different demographic cohorts perform across the funnel.”

Total Audience Methodology

“We looked at top level awareness and receptivity down to understanding their economic power and how they’re spending across all of the consumer verticals, ad receptivity and down to the conversion. How are they actually responding to advertising, are there some differences there, what is the real magnitude and opportunity within these different age cohorts. We really wanted to understand it,” Tabares noted, “to maximize the potential of our audiences and optimizer the relationship we have with our partners.”  To that end, Tabares and her team, “Applied an integrative, multimodal research strategy to quantify how key demo cohorts within Adults 18+ behave in the marketing landscape.”

Why Total Audience?

We know that the U.S. population is aging. Older adults are the fastest growing group in the last decade and projected to be in the next decade. “Ignore this demographic group at your own peril. You need to stop being so myopic in thinking about your marketing strategy and set aside your fascination with youth culture,” Tabares warned.

To many who have grappled with how to demonstrate the value of reaching older adults to advertisers, the study revealed some fascinating surprises in addition to some fairly logical insights. Using A+E’s Precision and Performance platform for advanced targeting and data driven linear analyses as well as an attribution backend, David Ernst, Vice President, Advanced Television and Digital Analytics, noticed that, “a large portion of the people that were outside of the buying demographics tended to contribute an awful lot of the performance – as much as 50% and even more.” These older prospects, Tabares explained, were being left out of the buying equation, “because they were being narrowed down into specific demographic groups.”

Total Audience Takeaways

The results of the Total Audience study underscore the value of the return on investment when you expand the age target to include all adults. There were quite a few surprising results. For example, ad receptivity was higher among older adults than among younger ones. “Really? Their recall and attention and greater message memorability and likeability?” Tabares asked rhetorically. Notably, she added, these behaviors and responses increase with each examined age cohort and ranges of consumer categories.

Tara Lantieri, Senior Director, Primary Research, Ad Sales Strategic Insights, A+E Networks delved deeply into this subject by researching a year’s worth of data that included 20,000 different TV ads from over 1600 advertisers and more than 50 categories. “What we saw was that brand memorability actually grows as viewers age. It’s twice as high for adults 55+ versus 18-34 year olds. When we look at message memorability, we see the exact same pattern where it is twice as high. Likeability follows that same, step-wise pattern where it grows by age. It’s about 71% higher overall than it is for younger adults. And that pattern is consistent across categories – 47 out of 58 examined,” she revealed.

With advertising creative, Lantieri found that multi-generational ads did particularly well among adults across the age spectrum. In some cases these ads performed twice as high in memorability and likeability metrics among older adults because they were viewed as respectful and realistic and non-stereotypical. In addition, ensemble cast ads also did especially well, “when the ensemble cast specifically included and spoke to people who are older in a realistic and nuanced way,” she said.

Aliza Wechsler, Director, Advanced Advertising and Attribution Analytics, A+E Networks, examined actual campaigns across several categories to ascertain the impact on conversion when advertisers crafted messaging that was more inclusive across age. With CPG for example, Wechsler found that 55+ represents 53% of the spend - $200 million more than the other two demo breaks combined. Auto showed similar results. “This shows the huge spending power of 55+. When you add their scale, it magnifies their potential. And they are not even being spoken to correctly. Imagine how much more of their dollars you can get if you spoke to them correctly,” she noted.

Conversion rates were also impressive. “Strategically targeting across all demos, lifts the conversion rates up unilaterally across all of the demographics. Purchase rates in our network group were 11% higher when you targeted those particular behaviors than those who fell outside of the (demo) target,” she found.

What About Advertisers?

“Adults 55+ are driving economic growth,” Lantieri stated, “For every dollar spent in the economy, Adults 55+ account for 41 cents and they spent $3.4 trillion last year alone,” with their spending increasing and currently representing 41% of spend. This compares with 18% of spend from 18-34s. If you are ignoring older adults, “You are leaving a lot of money on the table.” One would think that targeting older adults in a way that resonates with them would be a no-brainer.

But the old canard that advertisers get 55+ viewers anyway persists. “What does it mean to, ‘get them’?  This is not a monolithic demographic. This is a very diverse demo with diverse interests, appetites, behaviors. They (advertisers) are not optimizing them as a consumer prospect, mindset, interest, behavior. You are just getting them demographically,” Tabares explained with Ernst adding, “You might be getting an impression but are you really communicating with them?  Messages that resonate with people are going to motivate them to action.”

Changing advertiser minds when faced with entrenched beliefs is no mean feat but Peter Olsen, Executive Vice President, Ad Sales, A+E Networks, sees opportunity. “Total audience buying is starting to gain traction with the agencies. They seem to come around quicker as they see market realities and there’s no way to control CPM inflation without it,” he shared. 

Have advertising partners changed their target because of the results? “This research study is just one of the building blocks of selling Total Audience, it rolls up into a larger conversation with many different tentacles,” Olsen explained and added, ”The right combination of education and our creative solutions has led to a few instances where our partners have gone back to reevaluate their target. We now have a few attention guarantee deals in the works with clients across a variety of categories.”

Next Steps

Tabares is hopeful that, “although age is still left out of the conversation,” and older audiences, “are not being spoken to correctly,” there is a real opportunity here to change the dynamic. “If we see that ad receptivity looks like this, that they have the spending power across the majority of categories and that they are responding to advertising with sales, what would happen if you actually talked to them in a more meaningful, relevant way?” she asked.

Next steps in this process will include a major ethnographic and psychological insights study that more fully dimensionalize and “get into the layers of what representation means,” to this audience. “Now is a very different time to examine values, beliefs, aspirations, attitudes, mindsets and engagement in brands and how we can tell their stories,” she concluded. 

 

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com