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Nerd Alert: Why Ads Reach Older Consumers Less
00:13:00
Welcome to Nerd Alert, a series of special episodes bridging the gap between marketing academia and practitioners. We're breaking down highly involved, complex research into plain language and takeaways any marketer can use. In this episode, Elena...
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Elena Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co host, Rob demars, the chief product architect of misfits and machines.
- [00:14]
B
Hello, Elena.
- [00:16]
A
Hello. We're back with your weekly nerd alert. Every week, I'll take a deep dive into academic marketing research and translate its complex ideas into simple, understandable language for Rob, and of course, for all of you. Are you ready to nerd out, Rob?
- [00:28]
B
My doctor just told me I'm in peak nerd condition for my age, and honestly, that's the only fitness metric that I care about anymore. So let's go.
- [00:40]
A
Somehow I doubt that knowing all of the different fitness metrics that you track, but okay, well, today we're talking about a topic that most marketers probably assume they understand pretty well, but do you? And that is age based advertising. This paper is probably going to challenge some of our assumptions about advertising to different age groups, which will be fun. But before we get too far, Rob, if I told you advertising in general was consistently less effective on consumers over 60, what would you assume is the reason for that?
- [01:09]
B
Gosh, my. My knee jerk reaction would be that older folks like myself are getting more and more skeptical because they've, like, heard all the pitches and they're just. But I actually think that's probably not the case. It's more that marketers still just create ads for younger people and they still don't know how to completely target an older audience. It's just that would be my knee jerk reaction because even when you cast and you do everything, you always age down your audience because people, they want to aspire to be younger. So I think we just are starting to forget the real mindset of the older audience.
- [01:46]
A
Yeah, so your feeling isn't that an older audience maybe is more like skeptical to advertising or it doesn't work as well. Your feeling is this is more of a marketer issue. Like, are we reaching them in the correct way?
- [01:57]
B
I think it's far more a marketer's issue than us thinking that, oh, they're just old and, you know, again, I'm putting myself in this audience. I'm calling myself old and in curmudgeony and just can't be persuaded anymore.
- [02:10]
A
All right, well, I'm not going to give it away. We're going to get into it. So I'll link the research we cover in the episode notes. And this week I read a paper titled Different Differences in Advertising effectiveness across age groups. This is by Philip McCready of the Research agency and Massey University, Laura Saatchi of the University of South Australia and the Ehrenberg Bass Institute for Marketing Science and Pamela Feedham of Massey University. This was published 2025 in the International Journal of Advertising. So sort of a recent one here. And the big question this paper looks at is this. When advertising isn't working on older consumers, is it because their brains work differently, or is it simply because the ads aren't reaching them in the first place? Those are two different problems with very different solutions. So what the researchers did was they surveyed over 1500 people in both the US and New Zealand across three product categories. Yogurt, video on demand, streaming services, and health and fitness tracking devices. They then split the respondents into four age groups. They had 18 to 39, 40 to 59, 60 to 74 and 75 and older. Then they measured mental availability, which is the ease with which a brand comes to mind when you're about to buy something. So it's sort of like a brand's foothold in your memory. And mental availability is made up of three things. How many people can link a brand to at least one relevant attribute called associative penetration? How wide someone's network of associations is, and then how much of the total mental share in a category is brand owns? Here's where it gets interesting. When you look across all those measures, only one consistently differed by age, and that was associative penetration, not memory depth or mental market share, just that first metric, whether someone could recall any connection to a brand at all. So for consumers ages 18 to 39, associative penetration scores were sometimes 27 to 29 percentage points higher than the overall sample for smaller brands. For the 75 plus age group, it was up to 27 percentage points lower. And the gap showed up consistently across yogurt, streaming and fitness trackers in both countries. So it was a consistent finally, and that points us to reach the ads are just not getting to them. The 40 to 59 age group, by the way, was almost identical to the overall sample average. So it's really 60 in older groups where this gap opened up and then it widened significantly at 75 plus. So, Rob, we think about reaching, quote, unquote, older consumers. If you think about your own media diet versus your parents, where do you think the biggest gaps are? Like, if a brand actually wanted to reach someone in their 70s today, where would you tell them to show up?
- [04:44]
B
Well, those are two different questions, because there's what I do. And then there's what the recommendation is for the world. Right. Because I'm in a weird position when it comes to consuming media because I'm in the sandwich generation. I've got kids that are in their 20s and I've got a father who's 82. So I'm like the pickle in the middle. Right. And when I look at how my father consumes media, you would think, oh, he's an old guy. He just watches linear TV and watches Fox News 24 7. And it's actually not the case. His consumption of media is a lot closer to mine and my kids, which I just think is unusual. I mean, he's binging Netflix, he's watching shows on Hulu. That's what I'm doing and my kids are doing. We all sort of have the same problems of just trying to figure out what our username and password is. So I am surprised by that with my own world experience. And I'd be curious to know as a marketer, if my experience is actually growing in terms of just how much connected video older generations are now actually engaged with.
- [05:50]
A
That's interesting. I have a grandma who's about to turn 90 and she definitely watches traditional media, you know.
- [05:57]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [05:59]
A
But I guess everyone's different. And I think part of the challenge is that as the study is finding, like, marketers are often not valuing that customer group, even though we know they carry most of the purchasing power. Think about all the work marketers go through to find their audience. They are so meticulous about it. The same thing isn't happening for older consumers. So you're right. Probably. If you looked at a cord study of people, even 75 plus, I bet it wouldn't. It's not all going to be live tv, like, people are watching in all different kinds of ways. So I think it's sort of the lack of effort in trying to reach them that's part of the problem.
- [06:31]
B
And maybe this is going too deep into the weeds. But if you look at the adoption that the older audiences have had to the iPad. Right. Because the iPad is something that's always been very elderly friendly in terms of its ease of use. You can carry it around. And so because their consumption is being funneled to an iPad, it's just natural that you would start to find video content through that device. Right, Right.
- [06:58]
A
Yeah. It just kind of, kind of leads there. Well, the researchers, they didn't just look at mental availability. They also looked at the purchase funnel. And this is where they did find some differences that marketers should be aware of. So older consumers, they narrow down their options a lot more sharply than younger consumers. So, for example, in the health and fitness tracking category, only about a third of brands in an older consumer's awareness set made it to their consideration set, compared to roughly half for younger consumers. And from consideration to purchase, the 75 group converted at 24% versus 70% for the 18 to 39 group. And then the last piece they looked at was product category knowledge. Younger consumers consistently rated themselves higher. The gap was smaller for yogurt, which hasn't changed much decade to decade. Maybe an opportunity there for somebody with yogurt. But for streaming and fitness trackers, these categories that have really changed over time, older consumers felt noticeably less confident even when they were current users of the category. So, Rob, think about a product category that's evolved a lot in the last decade, like streaming, maybe a smart home, any sort of wearable, whatever it may be. Do you think that older consumers feel less confident in those categories because the products have generally just changed, or do you think it's because the marketing we do doesn't provide the information necessary to help them understand them more?
- [08:19]
B
Yeah, I think use case is probably where in the advertising, it skews to a younger audience. Right? You have that young, hip person who walks into their house and greets Alexa and all kinds of magic tricks appear, or people are using Fitbits or Garmin watches in extreme sports scenarios and not you're walking in the neighborhood and whatnot. So, yeah, you could see how it's less relatable to an older audience. And relatability translates to confidence. Right. If you see yourself in the commercial, you're like, I know that product's going to be tailored towards me.
- [08:55]
A
Yeah, it's kind of interesting because I think that there is such a big opportunity in selling these products to older consumers. But the advertising, if you think about when advertising is built, like, they maybe don't want to show like a bunch of older people there, you know, like they want it to seem cool and young and hip. But Absolutely. There's great use cases, too, as a category entry point. But I guess some brands don't want to position themselves that way.
- [09:20]
B
Let's make getting older aspirational again.
- [09:23]
A
Yeah, I think so. I mean, what the heck, people? All right, so kind of the conclusion of the study is, you know, maybe most brands are not exactly ignoring older consumers on purpose. They're just usually following a digital media trail. And sometimes that trail doesn't reach as far as they think it does. But the good news is this is solvable. You don't need a totally different creative strategy. You just need better reach to reach these older consumers. So a few practical takeaways from the study. One is to track associative penetration across age groups in your regular brand health tracking. So if it's declining for older segments, that's a sign you aren't reaching them as well as the rest of your audience. And if older consumers are a part of your market, audit your media mix. Heavy digital skus may be creating invisible coverage gaps. If you're an established category, like groceries, older consumers, accumulated experience can compensate for lower ad exposure. But for newer categories, you really can't rely on that. You have to make sure that you're purchasing the reach that you need. And finally, pre and post campaign tracking by age group is worth the investment. It tells you who your campaign is actually hitting. Now, time for our RobGPT. Imagine you're a radio station broadcasting across town. You're playing great music. Your signal is strong in some neighborhoods, and people there know every song you play. But in a different part of town, the signal just doesn't reach as well. The residents there don't have a problem with the music. If they tune in, they enjoy it just as much. The problem is the tower isn't pointed their way. That's what this research found about advertising and older consumers. The ads are good. The older audience can respond. They're just not getting the signal. All right, Rob, what you think?
- [10:56]
B
I just think there's so much opportunity in how we continue to reimagine what the older audience value is in the marketing chain, considering people are living longer and will continue to live longer than ever before. So this is just going to be a growing category of opportunity for. For marketers.
- [11:15]
A
Yeah. Agreed. Important to important research is probably why it's so recent, too. Yeah.
- [11:22]
B
Love it.
- [11:22]
A
Okay, great.