Monday, June 27, 2011

Irrelevance.

I'm 53 years old.
My wife is a jot older.
Together, we make more than 99.7% of the world's population.
We have two kids.
One's a Doctoral student in Psychology.
The other is entering her Sophomore year at an elite private college.
We live in 10028, one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country.
We have in our household seven computers.
We have high-speed connectivity.
We are all on Facebook.
We Skype each other.
We IM.
We even toss in an occasional tweet.
We spend more time online than we do sleeping.
We travel internationally.
We read incessantly.
We watch a modicum of television.

In short, it might be expected that we are the people advertisers need to reach.

With, I suppose few exceptions, none of us have seen anything that was featured and feted in Cannes over the last ten days.

The irrelevant are creating and rewarding the irrelevant.

9 comments:

Riki said...

so true.

when you turn 50, you somehow fall out of every single target group on this planet.
even geriatric products target your children.

Anonymous said...

Odd...i thought there was some seriously neat, simple and effective stuff in there this year, for a change.

Jim Lestrange said...

Too old. Do not want.

dave trott said...

George,
Why would you dignify Cannes by worrying about it?
It always was trivial, it's still trivial.
Don't get sucked in.

Kate Ritchie said...

i'm not sure i get your point? are you saying that a load of things that weren't targetted at old americans aren't good because they weren't aimed at old americans? or are you saying that because you're rich and old, you're the only audience worth talking to?
the fact you hadn't seen them does not make them irrelevant or ineffective to those who did.
you're a small minority group, feeling put out and culturally seprated from the rest of the world. Get over it.

peggy said...

its true that there is much financial potential in the age group older than 21.

it cant take too long before advertisers as well as agencies go all in on this, not just with anti wrinkle creams, hair color, denture cleaner and products for incontinence.

Anonymous said...

George


Jesus. You get progressively more cranky every day. Millions of people know that work so if you don't that's not a commentary on them it's one on you. If you never saw write the future, it's brilliant. Those who continue to crap on Cannes need to get over themselves. Yes it's an award show but some great work is there and btw all of you list the awards you've won on your CV.

Come on George don't go dinosaur on us.

Anonymous said...

anyone denying the fact that most advertising is targeted at the 'youth'? and that the only relevance is on people 14 - 49? just because that was once invented out of the blue. anyone denying that the ad biz is filled with young folk? anyone denying that the money sits in household with people that are older, having achieved financial security? anyone denying that they do not get talked to because advertisers and agencies seem to be obsessed with youth and cool and older people are painted to be not, at least on their terms?
anyone denying that there is this myth of 'catching them when they are young'?
im fucking cranky. and rightly so.

peggy said...

im so cranky i forgot to put my name on it