They say these days that the 40s are the new 30s and that for advertisers, chronological age is becoming less and less of a measure by which to segment audiences.

This idea was brought front of mind to me recently when talking to Richard Jacobs, head of commercial strategy at Real & Smooth Radio Ltd. The station has a specific target audience of 40-59s; a demographic that historically would have been considered ‘old’. But no longer is this the case. For the first time in history we appear to be at an evolutionary stage whereby the generation gap between those in their 20s, 30s 40s & 50’s is closer than ever before – meaning that different generations can & do enjoy similar interests and pastimes.

As Jacobs pointed out; “these are the children of the baby boomers, we’re running the country, operating and managing businesses large and small, we are doctors, teachers, software developers and media planners!

“We buy ipads, brand new cars, clothes, crisps, smartphones, deodorant and expensive holidays. We are a group of consumers that the marketing industry hasn’t quite got its head around. You’ll seldom see us appearing in ads, which is fair enough as no brand wants to be seen as old, but the problem is that in many cases, we’re not even appearing on media schedules anymore. How many times do we see brands actively targeting consumers beyond 44 on a media schedule? We believe our research goes some way to addressing that problem and some of the insight is genuinely surprising and hopefully behavior changing.” 

From its own research, Smooth Radio suggests that because of increasing divorce rates (13% of all over 40's are divorced and 25% of over 40's are either divorced or still single), this age group has a ‘second lease of life’ mentality. In addition, having children later means more parents with young children in their 40’s. This creates a need for marketers to start extending their targeting to reach older people doing more and things in life you’d traditionally expect 20 & 30 somethings to do. As those in their 40s and beyond feel younger than ever before, perceived age versus chronological age is becoming ever more separate.

In fact these days it is not uncommon for the over 40s to be considered the ‘Highlifers’ in advertising circles. This demographic is in better financial shape with money it is willing to spend at the click of a mouse button. This doesn’t mean that this audience is not exercising control in a still cautious financial market,

The recession has made this group careful but still prepared to spend on what they feel is important or what they really value.

Real & Smooth Radio’s consumer research department, MediaLab, has spent the past two years examining the lucrative over 40s market and honing in on where advertisers can find it ‘hanging out’.

Perhaps most crucially of all (certainly to advertisers), the over 50’s have accumulated around 80% of the nation’s wealth and is the demographic with the healthiest rate of expendable income overall. This is due in the main to big increases in the value of their homes and economic benefits now less readily available to younger generations, such as generous salary pension schemes and affordable housing.

This group isn’t shy when it comes to embracing new technology either. Some two in five consider themselves to be early adopters. In focus groups, technology usage is described as ‘intuitive’ and absolutely vital to the way Highlifers live their lives today.

This is a demographic keen to retain looks and good health too. Eighty-seven percent of women say they actively seek beauty information with 91% saying that they trust word of mouth when it comes to beauty products and treatments – an interesting face perhaps for those brands looking to target 40+ women via social media sites. Eighty-one percent are interested in their health and seek information on keeping healthy, but 40% claim they have little time in which to actively research health products and would like help with it.

So what does all of this tell us about how advertisers should approach this increasingly youthfully-minded audience? Smooth Radio’s own strapline; ‘Love life, love music’, is designed to resonate with an audience enjoying the best time of its life. Yet it wasn’t that long ago that as far as advertisers were concerned, the 40 plus market was considered ‘past it’. It wasn’t unusual to see ads for the 40s market tailored to pension planning, and even funeral care! Fortunately, today’s adverts for this demographic are becoming ever more neutral, positive and engaging. Brands are realising that the 40-plus demographic is no armchair group. It is actively using social networks to engage (social networks are considered crucial to rekindling friendships or old romances for this group). MediaLab found that 77% use popular social networking sites - Facebook, Twitter and YouTube being the main ones visited.

And it not just the virtual world they are embracing either. MediaLab research tells us that, in the case of over 40s that have grown up children, they are increasingly indulging in past passions and hobbies. They’re going to concerts, festivals, gigs and comedy shows.

The ‘Highlifers’ or ‘Modern-Midlifers’ as MediaLab call them are a fascinating and economically rich group of consumers. They can really help to optimise a brand’s success, so long as they are communicated to and engaged with in the right way. And rule number one is to treat the over 40s as anything but a grey market!

Facebook is one of those global brands that has become the victim of its own success. A straw poll of Facebook-related headlines over any given month throws up a mixture of celebratory growth stories, alarming claims about privacy, and the usual one we all know and love about a teenager who throws a house party which is invaded by a thousand gatecrashers, ("It just got out of hand so fast, I didn't realise so many people would show up!" she said).

By Cream Editorial

With the Festival of Media Asia 2013 around the corner, 3-5 March in Singapore, our spotlight on Asia continues with the release of the latest Cream report: The Asian evolution. The report covers how the markets in the continent are changing, their digital consumption trends and the marketing landscape.

Dylan: Knew a thing or two about publishing

But, like Dylan said, "the times they are a-changing". After years of being locked into publishing platforms that could only cope with these IAB standards, new technology means publishers are starting to move away from the IAB units. It's not been an easy ride. Developments like click-word models were very difficult to sell to publishers who faced vehement opposition from editorial staff. But if we go for another Bob reference, you've “Gotta Serve Somebody" nicely encapsulates the feeling that advertising serves advertisers and viewers, not editors.

Love it or loathe it, click-words are a good example of how (some) publishers are willing to take risks. Ad formats that are new to the user come with added curiosity value, and with curiosity comes investigation. Ironically, online advertising needs to work on it's own advertising. When I speak to publishers, I don't talk about an expandable unit, I just show them Say Media’s ad units, and demonstrate how cool they actually are.

Different forms of advertising that are more unusual are being embraced by publishers a lot more than they were in the past. For their part, viewers like to see different, more visually exciting elements on a web page - which is hardly surprising given that they've largely been clicking on 68x468 pixel banners for the past 20 years. Ad units that don't fit the traditional models do really well.

But innovative advertising is only as good as the viewers who can see it, and that's where audiences are key. A group that can benefit from this are local media owners - they're the ones with strong community audiences. Larger national newspaper titles have spent the past five years struggling with paywalls - an issue that just doesn't exist in the local news landscape.

Paul Hood is Digital Director at Archant, one of the UK's largest independent media businesses, active in the fields of regional news, magazines and websites. He knows better than anyone that competition in the news media space that Archant operates in is particularly fierce. Using London as an example, there are at least five prominent news media brands dedicated to delivering news and sport information to a London-centric audience.

Paul Hood, Archant Media

“The result was London24.com: a London-centric news media proposition produced exclusively by knowledgeable, local, London-based journalists. Local freesheets do a great job of catering to the commuter – the top national and London news stories are well-packaged and presented to give a good overview. But there was no news media brand covering London from the local angle.”

London24.com

In February 2011, London24.com was launched. Eighteen months later, it is No. 2 in the market and is on track to be profitable by 2013.

Local community based titles like London24.com represent the ultimate examples of how powerful the combination can be when you have engaging advertising built around relevant, compelling content. Engagement rates on regional UK press are close to 2%, which stacks up very favourably against an average of 0.8%.

What becomes obvious from this stat is that community and special interest sites are hotbeds of engagement, which is strong incentive for media owners in this space to focus on their core audiences and avoid the temptation to dilute their audience as they attempt to increase it with more middle of the road content. An engaged community equals more passion. This sentiment is embodied by "Point-Of-View Publishing" – the key to success for the media companies of the future.

By Jason Lydiate, Head of Business Development, Say Media

The Top 10 Media Campaigns of 2012
By Cream Editorial

2012 is coming to a close and we’ve been selecting our favourite media campaigns from the past year. Cream scours the globe for the most innovative marcomms, but who has best engaged technology to maximise campaign impact, who has challenged media norms and which campaigns did the extraordinary? Here is our pick of the best campaigns of 2012:
1. Coca Cola/Google: Coke Hill Top Re-Imagined, Grow Interactive (Global) – multi award-winning twist on digital advertising
2. Mokesh: Danger Dog Poop, MediaCom (Israel) – simple but effective campaign impacting parliament to tackle major social issue
3. Paramount Pictures: The Dictator, MEC (UK) – best example of contribution by a media owner
4. Old Spice: Muscle Music, B-Reel and W+K (Global) – we couldn’t resist this viral video extending our fascination with Old Spice
5. Tim Hortons: Roll up the Rim, Henderson Bas-Kohn (Canada) – competition tactic just gets better with digital edge
6. Xerox: A World Made Simpler, Young & Rubicam (US) – beautiful, fascinating, heart-warming
7. Mercedes-Benz: Invisible Car, Jung Von Matt (Germany) – beat that Bond. Fab OOH
8. Ikea: Catalogue, 303Lowe (Australia) – turning retail discount promotion on its head
9. Emart: Sunny Sale, Cheil Worldwide (Korea) – perfectly targeted POS puts a spin on QR codes
10. Volkswagen: Bluemotion Label, Ogilvy Cape Town (South Africa) – experiential piece doing good for the environment

Looking forward to what 2013 has in store!

By Larry Allen (Real Media Group)

Pretty much every January since 2006, someone in the advertising sector has gone on record predicting that ‘this will be the year of Mobile’. And pretty much every December, the industry has looked back and thought to itself, ‘Errr...nope, that wasn’t it’.

There’s no doubt that mobile usage, and in particular, mobile internet usage, have exploded.  According to research from Strategy Analytics, the number of global smartphone users went past one billion for the first time at the end of the third quarter of 2012. And a recent study by the Online Publishers Association (OPA) in the US found that 68% of smartphone owners report that they “cannot live without” their smartphone, and 93% of smartphone users access content and information above any other activity.

So, it’s probably fair to say that "the year of mobile consumption" has definitely arrived. 

However, the adoption rates of mobile advertising are not nearly as impressive. The screens are now bigger, better and fully interactive, so with consumption soaring so dramatically what on earth is the hold up? Despite the efforts of many major brands to kick start the mobile advertising revolution, it seems that there are three key factors still holding us back:

1. Advertise like it is 1999: Back in the late nineties, web advertising was just starting to develop. Ad units were both small and ugly and slow connection speeds (thanks to dial-up modems) led to the infamous term “World Wide Wait”. Everything about digital advertising was a challenge: file sizes were restricted to 10k or less, animation was still a thing of the future and most ads didn’t even link back to the marketer’s web site.  Back then, most marketers simply put their brochure online and called it advertising.

Similarly, the mobile web today is noticeably slow (although getting better with the promise of 4G and an increasing number of Wi-Fi access points) and so advertisers are focused on building apps or HTML5 mobile sites to enable customers to engage with branded content. Why advertise if you don’t have some compelling content with which to engage – and why bother with an incredibly impressive ad if it won’t load in time to be seen?

2. A lack of standardisation: We see many different creative formats in mobile advertising today, and yet no industry-wide standard exists for building and delivering these units at scale across all the various devices, screen sizes, and capabilities available.

This presents a real issue for creative agencies trying to create consistent messaging and deploy ads quickly on mobiles. Each vendor they work with will have a recommended set of creative formats, but limitations arise when you stretch your plan beyond publishers that are certified. 

In order to enable scaled buying, it is essential that app developers and mobile websites adapt a simplified and standardised set of engaging ad units. Once this happens, and we solve the device support issues (iOS versus Android versus Windows Mobile), true creative design can begin to take shape.    

3. Targeting and tracking: For mobile to capture its fair share of ad spend it will need to easily enable the same level of targeting that advertisers find on the web. Additionally, mobile campaigns must be easily integrated, measured, and managed holistically across platforms so that users are not overwhelmed with the same message again and again on their PC, their mobile and video.

This cross-platform management is a critical step for brands. Hyper-local targeting was the big discussion last year and geo-targeting works best when it offers added value to the consumer. But that doesn’t mean they should randomly alert customers with a banner just because they’re walking past a Starbucks — they may be in the area but they’re not necessarily in the mood for coffee. 

Thankfully, there are companies and industry groups working tirelessly to solve these problems – and to create a mobile advertising environment that works for all brands and publishers across all platforms. So perhaps 2013 will be the year of mobile advertising after all; that would be a nice change of pace.

By Sri Sharma

Online advertising, and paid search advertising in particular, has been held up as the ideal for marketing because of its measurability and the level of tracking it offers. Conversely, offline advertising is inherently difficult to track.

 TV advertising offers a fantastic medium for brands to reach a mass audience and raise awareness of the brand and its product range. However, until now it has not been able to provide the same level of measurability as online. The arrival of smart TVs is set to change that.

The launch of Google TV in the UK, expected over the next six months, along with Apple’s rumoured move to launch its own internet-enabled TVs, mark a pivotal moment for brands looking to recreate the level of measurement associated with online, in a world that was typically known as offline.

Enabling consumers to watch terrestrial TV, surf the web and interact with Apps for TV simultaneously, smart TVs will offer brands with new advertising forms that are more measurable than traditional TV advertising.

Tracking interactions not just awareness

The first additional metric smart TVs will be able to offer brands is the ability to track when a consumer actually interacts with their advert rather than just registering it. At launch, the two biggest opportunities to create and measure interactions are:

• In-TV app advertising – like the adverts you can see within apps on mobile, such as those from Admob, when TV apps launch, brands will be able to place adverts within the apps consumers interact with on their TVs
• Targeting on-demand content

Considering how many apps consumers already interact with on their mobiles, including apps for banking, socializing and accessing media, in-TV app advertising could be a huge opportunity for brands. Indeed, it is likely that TV apps will quickly become as integral to consumers’ daily lives as mobile apps are now.

Once TV apps have become part of the daily routine more consumers are likely to remain logged into the apps. This will enable brands to target consumers according to their psychographics as well as tracking the adverts that result in a click-through.

On-demand content offers a similar opportunity to enhance targeting based on consumer demographics as well as the type of content they are viewing. And, with twice as many people watching some programmes on catch-up as they do live (source: Virgin Media), on-demand content is already popular. The introduction of smart TVs, which will make access to on-demand content even easier, will only increase the consumption rate here.

For those brands looking for further proof here, you only need to look at the success brands have already seen on YouTube, which is likely to be a central element of Google TV’s strategy.  Indeed, in the work we did for The Perfume Shop that used YouTube’s targeting tool, YouTube advertising significantly outperformed traditional search. Integrating smart TV advertising data into other channels.

The second key opportunity smart TVs present brands with is the ability to transform the effectiveness of their multi-channel campaigns.

In the US, the Google TV platform enables brands to pass the data from Google TV through to Google Analytics. This allows them to draw conclusions as to the impact each advert had on other marketing channels, including paid search marketing and display advertising.

Whilst this is unlikely to reach the UK for a while after launch yet, it illustrates the potential to demonstrate the impact of TV more measurably. For example, brands will be able to see the impact of TV on other marketing channels in specific locations at particular times. At a time when budgets are coming under increasing pressure and marketers are being challenged to prove their worth to the Board, this can only be beneficial.

No-one knows yet what the rate of uptake will be for smart TVs. However, we do know that data remains key to transforming any brand’s marketing strategy. Smart TVs offer access to a unique data set that could have a dramatic impact on campaigns run across all channels. For those brands looking to harness this potential from day one, now is the time to invest in understanding what data can be accessed and how to use that data to make offline as measurable as online.

 Sri Sharma is the managing director at Net Media Planet

The generation born in the 1990s will be entering the workforce and general consumer age bracket in the next few years. Open to innovation and change and digitally-savvy, their perception of what’s possible is likely to be a great deal less limiting than it was for their predecessors.

 How can marketers ensure that they are still heard above the noise and that their brands make a deep connection with their target audiences? le born between the early to mid-1990s and 2000s, the so-called ‘Generation We’, were placed under scrutiny in a recent study by an independent US agency. In the US alone, there are 62 million Gen We citizens with US$143 billion in purchasing power between them. Marketers, therefore, should be aware of the following truths about them.

1. They’re Not Brand Loyal

Unless you happen to be Apple, endearing iyour brand to Gen We in the long-term won’t be easy. They left MySpace forFacebook. They abandoned Guitar Hero for Angry Birds. And High School Musical became a distant memory when Glee came along. Gen We is more concerned with value and function over brand. Gen X wears Abercrombie & Fitch because of the brand, whereas Gen We will buy from a brand only if its products meet their economic and functional needs. To stay relevant to this audience, brands will have to evolve, demonstrate value, and market in non-traditional ways.

 2. They Expect Brands to Fit Their Mould

A great example of this is how this generation responds to technology and information architecture. Gen X had to learn to click the ‘start’ button to shut down a computer, even though it made no sense to do so. By contrast, Gen We won’t blame themselves or hang around when products and brands don’t perform the way they expect.

 3. They Care About the World

This generation grew up with cartoons like Dora the Explorer, and is the first to experience ‘green’ as a mainstream concept. They’re not going to be a group of tree-hugging environmentalists, but they do care about the world and want to associate themselves with individuals and brands that also care.

Consider the 13-year-old who started his own scented candle business – ManCans (www.man-cans.com) – featuring scents like Bacon, New Catcher’s Mitt, and Campfire. He makes his candles in soup cans and donates the soup to a local food bank. He’s received thousands of orders. Or the 12-year-old who started a mobile dance studio in an old school bus to tackle obesity. After school, Amiya’s Mobile Dance Academy (www.amiyasdancebus.com) travels to kids who can’t afford dance lessons and teaches them everything from ballet to h

 4. They Expect You to Entertain Them

This group expects to be entertained. They have short attention spans and an uncanny knack for processing massive amounts of information. This is a generation that grew up watching cartoons on the handheld video systems in the car. They played with their DS or their parent’s iPhone. And they will expect entertainment from you if you want to connect with them.

 5. They Actually Listen to Their Parents

Gen X parents and Gen We kids watch the same TV channels, wear the same clothing brands and play the same video games – often as a family. This group has a voice in family decisions, and they’re willing to listen and even copycat their parents’ purchasing habits. It’s going to be fascinating to watch this group become adult members of the workforce over the next few years. As consumers, they will force us to think differently to connect with them – making for interesting and challenging times for marketers.