Advertisers: Ignore boomers at your peril!

Greg Dobbs writes,

Each year when the Super Bowl becomes the Olympics of TV commercials, most of the ads are trying to sell cars and trucks, colas and beers, detergents and deodorants, and more cars and trucks. Baby boomers use that stuff, too. All of it. Yet less than 5 percent of advertising is geared toward my generation.

Advertisers have always defined their ideal demographic from the age of 18 (when you start to make some money) to 49 (when they think you're still flexible enough to spend it on something new). My message to those advertisers is, the numbers have shifted. My generation's flexibility lasts longer. Ignore that at your peril.

The trouble is, they think we're set in our ways. Their mistake, again. Our parents, from the Greatest Generation, were like that. Once they bought an appliance from Sears, they bought all their appliances from Sears. Once they drove a Buick, they always drove a Buick.

But baby boomers, which is anyone born between 1946 and 1964, have long since turned that practice on its end. Tell me about a better car and I might buy it. Convince me there's a better beer and I might drink it. So before dismissing us, remember that it was baby boomers who invented everything from smartphones to the Big Bertha golf club to the Internet. Maybe our hair has changed, but our appetite for innovation hasn't.