Ricky Blue

His columns are archived here

RICKY BLUE

Hip, fast-talking, and cool. Not.

If you are a baby boomer, perhaps this has happened to you. You are watching the news on TV and an advertisement comes on for a product aimed right at you. But you are put off by the quick editing…

No shot is held for longer than three seconds. It's hard to know what is going on. And the hand-held, shaky camera style is annoying. You find it hard to watch. You wonder why someone who wants to sell you something would try to make you nauseous.

You turn it off.

Strangely enough, a multinational has given millions to an advertising agency to reach you. But like so many in sales today that agency has not adapted to you. You are the one who is expected to adapt. Even though fifty per cent of all discretionary income in North America is in the hands of people just like you -fifty years old and older.

There is a good chance that no one in that agency is over forty, and that the MTV School of Video is all they know. They think it's "cool." But baby boomers see it for what it is: the visual equivalent of the fast-talking salesman.

Yes, boomers were responsible for the rise of "youth culture" and its enduring myths, the greatest of which is the idea of "cool."

But what might have once been useful to differentiate the hipsters from the squares has now become a marketing tool. And the hipsters have all grown up. They now make their choices based on common sense. Yes, they used to live in Coolsville. But they've all moved out to the 'burbs.

Many goods and service producers don't know what to do about this. Take the clothing business, for instance. What other explanation could there be for the fact that all women's apparel is still designed for anorexic teenagers?

Don't clothing stores want the boomer's money? And you're not going to be able to persuade men over fifty to wear "bumsters" (Those are the trousers that are cut very low on the hips - it's in the Oxford dictionary). Boomers don't care if they are "cool." It's just plain weird to wear your pants hanging off your butt…

Record companies are also floundering. The gold rush is over. They blame it on downloads and file sharing. But baby boomers still like music. They would buy it. If only record companies would produce some. The idea that all music has to be played by kids is an arbitrary and recent phenomenon. Just listen to swing music. That is music for adults. Even the kids were adults back then.

There is a huge market out there. Whenever a merchant complains that he is losing income: It's simple. He is not following the money.

For so many years marketers relied on the unlimited spending of teenagers and young adults. Now the demographics have shifted. And they are completely unprepared.

As we baby boomers turn fifty our main problem is this: what will we do with the next fifty years of our life? We have finally gone through puberty. We now want to be adults. We have money to spend. But we are surrounded by a culture that is anti-adult.

When we were young we had to create a culture that reflected our reality. Now that we are adults, I guess we are going to have to do it all over again.