Advertising has, for decades, worked under the presumption that the 18-49 age market dominates purchasing power and drives culture, so they are the primary targets of most ad campaigns. Sure, you don’t see ads for adult diapers aimed at young people, but that’s a niche market. Anything more general and broad tends to be targeted at this demographic.
This has been the consensus view of marketing for a long time now, and it never has made any sense to me. I remember being 18-25, and I never had much money. I remember well being in college and almost no one had any money. We drove beaters and ate fried Spam because it’s all we could afford, not because it was hip and trendy.
Ben Shapiro’s new book “Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV” is getting a lot of attention lately because it has a lot to say about entertainment bias and media politics, but what caught my eye was in an interview by John Hawkins at Right Wing News with Shapiro where he said this:
So advertisers focused on younger, more urban viewers and spent their money heavily targeting that age range with shows that appealed to that age group. They’ve been doing so ever since, and its a mistake.
Young people aged 18 to 25 don’t have a lot of cash. That’s the segment of the population hardest hit by unemployment, with numbers reaching to almost 20% in some places. When you look at workers who have abandoned the job search, the numbers climb much higher. Even though they have a higher percentage of cash as disposable income, they have less overall money to begin with.
As you move up in the age groups, people tend to be married, own more high end items, and have children to pay for, which means that as they begin to earn more in their careers, they have less disposable income.
Yet the people who have both the most disposable income and the greatest overall income tend to be people in the 40-60 year old range. By this age, most people have become established in their chosen profession, have the greatest earning power and, hence, money, and their children are growing up to the point they aren’t as dependent on their parents’ income. When the kids leave the house (when parents are roughly 50+ years old), then that significant expense is gone.
In other words, this focus on the 18-49 demographic is missing the boat; and advertisers actually tend to focus most heavily at the younger age as well; roughly 18-30. Those age ranges are not really your best target if you are looking for people with money.
Ben Shaprio points out that younger people tend to be more left-leaning and hence the shows appeal more to this, but there’s another aspect at play here. Culture is largely driven by entertainment in the United States, and when entertainment targets a younger audience, that means younger ideals in entertainment shapes culture. So the culture becomes more youth-oriented, as well as left-leaning, by design.
And advertisers are helping this by buying into studies which purport that younger people have more money to spend and are better targets for ads. Even if that were true, increasingly, the bulk of the U.S. population is growing older, past 50 at this point, as the boomers age. So advertising to young people makes less and less sense.
