The research also found people on average see themselves as seven years younger than they actually are. Plus, most are tech savvy, have broad media consumption and do a tonne of research before making a purchase of any significance. Which means that just sticking an old person in an ad is a bit of a miss, per Initiative’s Chris Colter.  

“Marketers with a myopic view tend to just go, ‘Oh well, I need to show someone with white hair if I’m targeting that audience’, and I think that that’s a mistake,” Colter said.  

He thinks planning as a whole should take into account that age can be largely immaterial to interests and cautioned against targeting too narrowly on that basis. Plus, he warned that algorithmic targeting can be just as guilty of unconscious bias.  

Colter cited Initiative research for a finance brand as an example.  

“We do a lot of digital twinning as one of our research methodologies – basically a fancy way of saying that we create fake social profiles and watch what the algorithm serves them.”  

In one instance, Initiative created two profiles with 'attitudinally identical' characteristics, but set one profile’s age as 24 and one at 57.   

“We just changed the age. But one was served almost exclusively with retirement ads, funeral insurance and anti-wrinkle cream. The other was served travel ads,” said Colter. “So I think we need to do better as an industry at tackling some of the algorithmic bias before we lean into some of that targeting. And also in thinking how we approach these audiences in more mass broadcast environments so that we’re resetting that norm as well.”  

Howcroft agreed: “We need to be sophisticated in how we go about execution to this really wealthy cohort.” He thinks the media industry might need to rethink how it packages audience demographics.  

“I’ve often thought that demography [based on] age brackets is a bit of a nonsense in a way. Rather than cutting people vertically, if we just go by – let’s call it values and attitudes – you’re going to find a lot of commonality no matter what the age.”  

Should that shift occur, some planners would welcome it. “I genuinely think we should be progressing marketers towards psychographics over demographics,” Initiative’s Colter says. Either way, “I think making sure you’re matching psychographics with demographics is super important.”