Insight
Six point two percent
Your customers have already worked out what is wrong with your advertising. The industry's own census confirms they are right.
Gransnet and Mumsnet asked just over a thousand of their users what they made of advertising. 78% of the over-50s said they felt under-represented or misrepresented.
Then they asked why, and this is the part that should stop a marketing director in their tracks. 62% said they believe they are ignored because advertisers are simply too young to understand them.
That is not a complaint about creative quality. It is a diagnosis. The customer has looked at the output, inferred something about the people producing it, and reached a structural conclusion about your department.
She is right. Here is the industry's own number.
6.2% of the UK advertising workforce is aged 50 or over. The equivalent share of the working population is 32%. The average age in the industry is 33.9. Those figures come from the IPA's census of its own members.
For comparison, the over-50s make up roughly 22% of people working in finance, 28% in medicine, 30% in science and 35% in law. Advertising is not slightly younger than other professions. It is an outlier by a factor of four or five.
This is not the argument you think it is
I am not making a fairness case. There is one to be made and other people make it well, but it is not mine and it is not what gets a budget approved.
I am making a capability case. A department in which 6.2% of people are over 50 will systematically produce work that misreads the cohort responsible for 54% of household spending. Not because anyone is careless or prejudiced. Because you cannot intuit a customer you have never been, and intuition is doing far more of the work in creative decisions than any of us admit.
"But we test everything"
This is the objection I expect, and it deserves a proper answer rather than a dismissal, because it is true that most brands do test.
Testing has two limits that matter here.
The first is that research validates, it does not originate. A discussion guide can only ask about the things the author thought to ask about. If nobody in the process has lived the thing, the questions that would have surfaced the problem never get written. You will get clean data confirming that your existing options are roughly equally uninspiring, and no indication of the option nobody proposed.
The second is that people are polite. A woman of 60 sitting in a room with a moderator of 30 who is enthusiastically presenting work about her life is not going to say "this is patronising and whoever made it has clearly never met anyone my age." She will say it is nice. She will say she likes the colours. Then she will go home and never think about your brand again, and your report will record mild positive sentiment.
The failure is not that the research was done badly. It is that the research was structurally incapable of finding this particular problem.
What actually gets missed
The errors are rarely dramatic. They are small, cumulative and invisible to the person making them.
- Life stage collapsed into a bracket. A 52-year-old at the peak of her earnings, supporting a child at university and a parent who is starting to need help, has almost nothing commercially in common with a 74-year-old drawing down a pension. They share a census category. Treating that category as a segment guarantees work that is slightly wrong for everybody in it.
- The compliment that lands as an insult. "Still." "Young at heart." "Ageless." "Defying." Each frames her age as a condition requiring excuse. These phrases test well in rooms of younger marketers, which is precisely the tell.
- Casting that only signifies. If the only people over 50 in your creative are there to represent being over 50, you have told the audience that their age is the most interesting thing about them.
- Interfaces built by people with excellent eyesight. Light grey 14px body text is an industry default and it is disqualifying. If she has to squint, the funnel ends there, and it will never appear in your analytics as anything other than a shrug.
Ali, one example from your own career belongs here. A specific thing you spotted that the room had missed, ideally something small and obvious in hindsight. The more mundane the better, because mundane is the whole point of this article. Two paragraphs.
What to do about it
"Hire more people over 50" is correct and unhelpful, because it is a five-year answer to a problem you have this quarter. Three things work faster.
- Put one person with genuine authority in the room. Not consulted afterwards, when the work is finished and the money is committed. Present at the brief and at creative review, with the standing to say no. Consulted-afterwards is how organisations acquire the appearance of insight without any of its effects.
- Change who writes the discussion guide. This is nearly free and it is the highest-leverage change on the list. The questions determine the findings. If the same people keep writing the questions, more research will keep producing more confirmation.
- Watch, do not ask. Two sessions of a woman over 60 using your product in silence will tell you more than a quarter of survey work, because you will see the things she would never think to raise. She has spent thirty years adapting to interfaces that were not built for her. She does not experience it as a problem worth mentioning. It is still costing you the sale.
The uncomfortable version
An industry where 6.2% of people are over 50, serving a market where the over-50s hold three quarters of the wealth, is not primarily an equality story. It is a competence story, and it is costing money right now.
Your customer has already worked this out. 62% of her cohort named the cause correctly without access to a single industry statistic. She simply looked at the advertising and drew the obvious conclusion.
The question is whether anyone in your building is willing to draw it too.