Why Aren't Old People in Your Ads?

I mean, they’re not in almost any ads, outside the obvious ones for medical devices prescription medication.

Do ads have to completely mirror your audience? Of course not.
But adland is stuck in a curiously ageist loop that could be leaving millions — or billions — on the table.

CreativeX sampled 3,500 ads from 2021 from big beauty, alcohol, & packaged goods brands. These are definitely not just ‘young people’ categories.

They found that people over 60 only appear in 1% of ads. ONE percent.

Graph showing the demographics of age and money on a chart.

This is despite them appearing in 15% of the waking world and controlling roughly HALF of the income, wealth, and discrectionary spending. (Depending on the metric.)

So while old people have all the money, advertisers are focused on Gen Z and Millennials.

Further, in the miniscule number of ads that actually featured people over 60, only 2% of them showed them in physical settings — like, ya know, doing something.

This is despite the fact that older people are more active than ever. Accordring to research, older people are retiring later, going to the gym more, and having more sex.

Do you have to show old people to market to old people? Of course not. Do people dream of the fountain of youth? Absolutely. And there are plenty of weird psychological (and maybe even evolutionary) reasons for our global fixation on youth.

But aside from the occasional Betty White (RIP) or Morgan Freeman, there’s a huge discrepancy between who’s got dough & who’s in mass-market ads.

That’s probably a loss — for creativity, for culture, and for brands.