It’s Time to Welcome the 55+ Demo into the Media Mainstream

Some topics of conversation in media never get old and that includes the ongoing discussion of the value of older consumers. For years, many of us in programming, marketing and advertising have been engaged in one long conversation regarding the accuracy of age-based demographic breaks that effectively exclude Adults 55+ from the sales value equation. “Oh we don’t need to specifically target Adults 55+,’ they will say, “because we can reach them anyway – they are heavy TV viewers.” Well not so fast, sonny. Today’s 55+ are not like 55+s of yesteryear.

While this has been argued before, it bears repeating. According to economic trends, today’s older consumers command much greater buying power compared to current and previous generations. Boomers alone represent 70% of the total net worth in America and account for 40% of total consumer demand.  It is time for the media metrics to keep pace with economic realities.

Media Ecologist Jack Myers believes that it is vital for the industry to come together and change the traditional age-demo breaks. “We need to recognize the economic and societal evolutions that have occurred since the 1960s and embrace a new set of demo standards,” he stated. He proposes the following breaks:

Ø  Teens/Tweens (11-17)

Ø  Gen-Z (18-24)

Ø  Millennials (25-45)

Ø  Gen X/Y (45-62)

Ø  Boomers (63-75)

Ø  A new combination for sales targeting purposes (45-72)

The History

Let me share some history that will help explain why this makes sense. It all started out innocently enough. In the early 1960s when advertisers divided the media pie into simply households and men or women, upstart network ABC, which trailed in overall household performance, had a great idea; why not further divide the population into age breaks? After all, the younger-skewing ABC argued, younger people were less fixed in their brand loyalties and were more open to change and experimentation. At the time, they were referring to the rebellious Baby Boomers who were very different psychologically from previous (and future) generations. Unfortunately, the idea of youth worship based on age alone resonated with advertisers and programmers. Today it has stultified into dogma.

A sales positioning idea that was initially conceived to more easily categorize audiences into future, peak and declining brand building and spending years has, in my opinion, led the industry astray. In fact, one could argue that 18-34, 18-49, 25-54 and 55+ breaks never really made much sense. Did an 18 year old ever really spend like a 49 year old? Does one fall off the face of the economic earth on their 55^th birthday? Of course not!

If there was ever a cohort that should be actively sought by advertisers and programmers, it would have to be psychologically based, not necessarily age-based. Who came of age when consumerism was at its peak, when advertising was the epicenter of choice consideration and when media technology was young and experimental? Baby Boomers. Today they are still active in the workforce, are in their peak earning years and are as changeable and rebellious as ever. Maybe it’s time to finally reevaluate the age-break demographic to better reflect the behavioral dynamics of the generations it purportedly represents.

Changing Business as Usual

Older consumers in 2018 are very different from older consumers in 1960. In 1960, if you were 55+ you could have experienced a Depression and two World Wars in your formative spending years. There were also much fewer brands and the major forms of communication were newspaper and radio. Today’s older audiences grew up in a time of relative luxury and peace, the grand expansion of media communication and advancements in healthcare that has extended not only longevity but also quality of life. How today’s older adults live and spend are worlds apart from their grandparents and parents.

Getting to Consensus

In this highly competitive media world where reaching the “right” audience is pivotal to success, how do we get all of the players to agree on a modification of the standard age-break ranges? Megan Clarken, President Watch, Nielsen, understands the dynamics of the marketplace. “Reaching industry consensus is always a journey, especially when it comes to determining changes to the currency,”  ​she said. “For example, if an older-skewing network pushes for an age-break re-definition, there will be a younger skewing network that would push back. Our role is to encourage the conversation and provide the data and insights - whether its age-gender or advanced demographics beyond the standard demos - that the industry needs to transact with confidence.”

But there is some movement in reaching a new consensus. “While the vast majority of industry deals remain a demo currency, revisiting demographic breaks is an important piece,” advised Radha Subramanyam, Executive Vice President, Chief Research and Analytics Officer, CBS Television Network. “Going forward, moving away from age/gender as the foundation of planning and buying seems to make the most sense. The framework needs to be audiences and audience cohorts, though defined more broadly than some of the segments currently popular in the programmatic ecosystem,” she added.

In a world quickly moving to more addressable consumer segments, some believe that a change in the standard age breaks are unnecessary at this time. “Given the industry’s continued push to implement purchase-based targeting, I am not sure there is a strong rationale for what looks to be subtle changes,” stated Ed Gaffney, Head of Implementation Research and Marketplace Analysis U.S., GroupM. “Targeting begins with planning. The buying teams simply refit the planning target to a demo to facilitate media deals.”

Further, as we head more towards cross platform measurements, Gaffney believes that it will inevitably lead to a new targeting consensus. “The linear networks will most likely not be interested in moving to different demos when they could move to targets that better align with those used in digital buys (signal based), and digital is not very interested in using age based targets for anything but comparative purposes,” he added.

Others believe in going further by dropping age-break metrics entirely, even for comparison purposes. John Rosso, President Market Development, Triton Digital, a leading online audio measurement service, explains, “The real question in my mind is this: why care about age at all? The digital world has moved on to audience targeting and, through initiatives like Open AP, the traditional media world seems to be embracing more advanced audience segmentation as well. Do we still need to use demographics as a proxy for behaviors and intents when we can target those things directly?”

Nielsen remains the unbiased arbiter of age-break demographics preferring the industry to decide for itself what metrics work best for the buy/sell paradigm. Because of this, Nielsen must remain neutral. “We don’t set the rules for the industry. We rely on the industry to negotiate the rules amongst themselves. And there isn’t any general industry committee that I know of that actually says ‘this is the rule’ which makes it tough to reach a consensus. Nielsen is a third-party, independent organization so it's difficult for us to do it on behalf of the industry,” Clarken concluded.

In my next article on this topic, I will explore how outdated and irrelevant media buying and planning tactics are costing the media industry billions of dollars.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Cross Platform Addressablity? Q&A with Benjamin Masse

Benjamin Masse’s background is in anthropology which is not as far afield from digital media as one might think. He is an entrepreneur whose canny assessment of consumer behavior has helped him in the music recommendation system sector, then at Google, and now at Triton Digital, a local radio advertising and branding platform.  He says that his Masters degree in anthropology “opens our minds up to track anything that interacts with the consumer including software. When you build software you should not think of only building software for a specific culture. You need to broaden your scope.”

                                 

In this fascinating interview, Masse talks about his company, the concept of addressable radio and its application to television, the use of GPS, segments and the metrics that result and the future of sales in the changing marketplace. He also looks ahead and offers some predictions on the media landscape for the next five years.  

There are five videos in the interview:

Subject                                                 Length (in minutes)

Background and Triton                              (4:47)

Addressable Radio                                      (6:44)

GPS, Metrics, Segments                             (9:42)

Predictions                                                  (6:17)

Future Sales and International                    (7:21)

CW: Tell me about Triton Digital.

BM: Triton Digital was created about eight years ago. It is a company that focuses on digital audio. We have four lines of business. One is streaming. So when you listen to radio on digital signals on the web player or mobile player, the streaming of that FM station is actually done by Triton. The second line of service is measurement. When you want to measure the time spent listening to digital audio it can be from a radio broadcaster, an online music service like Pandora, you don’t measure by page views like a lot of measurement systems are doing out there. You need to take the time spent listening and make sure that there is not a robot listening but a real human. The third line of business is advertising, which I head up. I am responsible for how we inject the ad to make it relevant to the listener and so that includes everything around ad serving and digital audio advertising. The fourth line of business is all of the loyalty and engagement programs such as the radio fan club – making sure that the mailing list is curated and even the website of the radio station.

CW: Can this type of audio addressability be used to help target ads in local television? If so how?

BM: We’re obsessively focused on all things audio. That said, similar technologies can be used for local targeting of streaming TV ads. The local market opportunity is huge, and there are a number of companies working to capitalize on it across all types of media.

CW: Is there a cross platform opportunity here for an advertising who wants to buy both local radio and television?

BM: There is certainly an opportunity here for advertisers looking to augment the power of their existing media buys – a number of recent studies have shown that audio has the power to boost the effectiveness of advertising on other channels. In fact, many advertisers currently use streaming audio to complement online and offline buys across channels. Audio – and particularly local audio – has grown dramatically in the last couple of years and has become a very attractive platform. We’ve seen a ton of interest from advertisers who would like to buy audio spots in the same way they buy other media spots in order to enhance their overall mix.

Charlene Weisler interviews Benjamin Masse about his background and his company Triton Digital in this 4:47 minute video:

CW: It sounds to me that one of your businesses is addressable advertising for radio. How do you do that?

BM: Yes. For traditional radio we take the FM signal and we are replacing in real time the advertising that was broadcasted. So if you tune into a real FM receiver from like a CBS or Cumulus owned station and you open a web player or a mobile player, you have the same live signal when the music is playing or the voice is speaking but at the ad break we are replacing in real time all of the ads. So you could be listening to an LA based station or Montreal based station in New York City and you will get New York City based advertising. That is one way that we make it addressable. And then because of all of the technology behind programmatic advertising like cookies and device IDs from mobile phones, we can also personalize that advertisement. So if you have just booked a ticket to fly from New York to Europe, we can broadcast ads for travel insurance, for example. We are aware of this purchase because of a cookie that was dropped by the airline. So it is based on the one to one broadcast.

Is Addressable Radio possible? Benjamin Masse explains how it works to Charlene Weisler in this 6:44 minute video:

Charlene Weisler interviews Benjamin Masse about all aspects of his business scuh as GPS usage, metrics and segmentation in this 9:42 minute video.

Benjamin Massee shares some of his predictions of the media landscape with Charlene Weisler in this 6:17 minute video:

CW: What do you see as the benefit of programmatic in radio?

BM: Programmatic means a lot of things. The main thing it means is automation. We see that there are more and more requests for automation because it saves costs on both the agency and publishers side. By automation I mean that there is a brand that wants to advertise. They will hire an agency and they will ask that agency to figure out the best way to spend their advertising dollars to have brand exposure. In the old days of the Mad Men era they were having lunch and talking to publishers, signing paper agreements, sending creative to the publisher and hoping that the publisher would traffic that ad the right way. We see that many things involved in automation are to simplify that process and save costs. You don’t need a lot of hires on either side to be sure that the buy is tracked correctly.

CW: So it sounds to me that you are saying that media sales may not be the best career track for someone starting out today.

BM: Doing sales today is different but you are still need to have sales people. Like when you trade stock you can log into your bank account and start trading but you still need to have advisers. Investing in stocks used to require a trade to be done by a trader. Nowadays it is all automated and the prices are fully transparent. But you still need to talk to advisers. So I think that the sales people both on the publishers side and the buyers on the agency or brand side will still need to exist but they won’t be exchanging paper or even electronic agreements. They will be there to advise their clients.

Charlene Weisler interviews Benjamin Masse about the future of sales in a world of programmatic in this provocative 7:21 minute video: