Male stars are also routinely subjected to airbrushing and Botoxing. Hugh Grant, 49, gave an unintentional peek at the contrast between life and Hollywood art when he stood in front of a blown-up publicity shot from the 2010 movie Did You Hear About the Morgans? The enlarged picture showed a slimmed-down, line-free face, while that of the flesh-and-blood Grant, still handsome, revealed the realistic signposts of middle age. Even so, men are permitted to age on-screen in a way that women are not. They can play heroes, villains, and everymen as well as romantic leads well into their 60s. (“Sean Connery is 300 years old and he’s still a stud,” an aging actress tells her plastic surgeon in the 1996 film The First Wives Club.) A tiny clutch of privileged actresses like Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give (2003), Meryl Streep in Mama Mia! and It’s Complicated (2009), and Julia Roberts in Larry Crowne (2011) get to play desirable, funny, smart women in their middle years without being reduced to cougars. The available parts are still nowhere near the numbers and range of those available to men. Researchers studying the “double jeopardy” of age and gender bias found that “youth was the most powerful criterion for women who won the Best Actress award, while middle age was the best predictor for male Best Actor winners.”
During the ten years it took Helen Hunt to produce Then She Found Me (2007), she remembers being bluntly told: “We’re not going to make it because it’s about a woman who is 40.”
Geena Davis, a glamour girl when she entered the business in the late 1970s, found herself in the unaccustomed position of promoting a film, Accidents Happen, without a distributor. “I know I’ve never done any independent film before,” the 53-year-old actress said in 2009, “but there aren’t that many other scripts out there with great parts for women my age.”
When she started in Hollywood, Davis said, “I thought, this is a new era, and I won’t have to worry” about parts disappearing for middle-aged women. “It will all be fixed by the time I’m 40! And of course, it wasn’t. All of us female actors think we can just keep going and going. . . . You wake up one day and you’re flabbergasted to find out . . . so, this has happened to me.”
Hollywood had typically been more cruel than kind to women in their middle years.
14
The Arrival of the Alpha Boomer
Paul Schulze as Eddie and Edie Falco as Jackie Peyton in Nurse Jackie
Middle age is a wonderful country, all the things you thought would never happen are happening.
—John Updike, Rabbit at Rest (1981)
The Midlife Industrial Complex is a formidable force in our culture, a vast network of interests intent on reinforcing deep-grained associations of middle age with insecurity and disappointment. Combating them is difficult. Midlife drags around a weight of past insults, expectations, and discrimination. The very words are bathed in negative connotations. Nonetheless, there are encouraging signs that more positive messages about midlife are penetrating the culture. Even within the fortress of the Midlife Industrial Complex, an expanded conception of midlife is gaining traction on television, in advertising, and among businesses.
Meet the Alpha Boomer
NBC Universal had a new character to introduce to reporters, advertisers, and ad buyers who attended a breakfast in December 2010: the alpha boomer, a member of the 55- to 64-year-old demographic, who number 35 million and spend more than $1.8 trillion annually. Clicking through slides filled with pie charts, graphs, and survey data, NBC executives explained that contrary to conventional wisdom, this slice of the population had the second-highest median income (after the beta boomers, those between 45 and 54 years old), frequently switched brands, and was annoyed that advertisers were ignoring them. They spent more on luxury cars, travel, dining, home furnishings and improvements, large appliances, cosmetics and beauty products compared with those between 18 and 49. They also owned more second homes. They adapted to technology like DVRs, broadband, high definition, and the Internet at the same rate as 18- to 34-year-olds, the delicious candy center of television demographics. And in the previous three months, they had spent thirty percent more on electronics and forty-nine percent more on online purchases than a typical Generation Y (born in the early 1980s through 2001) consumer. Like Rip Van Winkle waking from a twenty-year sleep, NBC had discovered that the alpha boomer was in fact the alpha consumer.
NBC’s epiphany had come earlier in the year when Nielsen reported that CNBC, the cable news channel, suffered a precipitous drop in ratings. Viewers had not suddenly tuned out. Rather, three of the people in Nielsen’s focus group turned 55 and simply disappeared off the ratings radar screen. “Every seven seconds someone turns 55, and once they do, they are eliminated from the highest-end Nielsen demographic measurement,” Alan Wurtzel, president of research and media development at NBC Universal, explained.
NBC, which had for years derided CBS’s arguments about middle-aged viewers, suddenly got religion, and was pushing Nielsen to track the TV habits of the 55- to 64-year-old group.
Many ad buyers considered NBC’s strategy evidence of desperation; when the network introduced the alpha boomer, only one of its shows was on the list of twenty-five highest-rated programs. NBC was failing, yet it was also true that ad buyers had consistently ignored any information that contradicted the 18-to-49 gospel. When research showed that people in midlife switched brands more frequently than younger people and were more avid consumers, television advertisers and buyers altered their rationale instead of their strategy. They stopped citing brand loyalty and spending patterns and declared that young viewers were more valuable because they were so difficult to reach. Baby boomers are a dime a dozen, they argued; they watch television and read magazines and newspapers in large numbers. Young people divide their attention among so many different media that it is hard to capture a sizable audience in one place. Thus, advertisers felt justified in spending two to three times as much to reach scarce viewers in the 18- to 34-year-old age group compared with those over age 35.
Nielsen’s own research presented an alternate perspective. Working with Hallmark Channels, a unit of Hallmark Cards, Nielsen discovered in a 2009 survey that middle-agers accounted for the majority of buyers for products generally thought to appeal to younger people, such as beer, soda, and candy. (Junk food and alcohol, it seems, transcend the generations.) The problem derives from misperceptions by people under 25. More than half of the postwar generation describe themselves as “open to new ideas,” yet only twelve percent of young adults think their elders feel that way. Surveys show that the young imagine much more memory loss, serious illness, infrequent sex, depression, and poverty than people actually experience as they age. In truth, the more years people accumulate, the younger they feel. When the Pew Research Center asked Americans how old they felt, most respondents in midlife said up to ten years younger than their current age, and those over 65 said between ten and twenty years. Callow media buyers have a distorted view of anyone over 35, due, in part, to the way that age group is portrayed in the mass media. It’s a self-defeating cycle: young buyers fall victim to the very misconceptions they help to perpetuate.
The deference to youth seems Pavlovian. The average age of a television viewer is 51. Ad buyers keep salivating though the consumers have stopped showing up.
Boomers are also the biggest spenders. Forty-seven used to be the age of maximum consumption, when people spent most of their income; in 2009, it was 54. This generation “has assets, not allowances,” said Henry Schleiff, president and chief executive at Hallmark Channels. The trend has held up through the recession. In 2011, Joe Stagaman, a senior vice president at Nielsen, said: “The misconception is that spending drops for people in this age group.” But those 55 and up switch brands and buy nearly as much as the 25-to-54 segment.
The determination to defy midlife stereotypes has rendered obsolete the traditional models based on age. “What advertisers are recognizing is that even though youth are still important, you can’t look at these big, broad demographic age groups” in a va
cuum, said CBS’s David Poltrack, for many years the lone voice championing midlife audiences. “There are just too many sub-segments.” CBS, the only network to establish a permanent site, in Las Vegas, to test audience reactions to its shows, has poured money into market research. The findings have encouraged the network to move away from broad generational labels altogether. Instead, it has created a bouquet of new psychographic categories, organizing its audience according to affinities and attitudes, like “sports extremists” and “surfers and streamers.”
The approach is one that Bernice Neugarten predicted more than twenty years ago: “Perhaps the most constructive ways of adapting to an aging society will emerge by focusing not on age at all but on the more relevant dimensions of human needs, human capacities, and human diversity.” Matt Thornhill, president and founder of the Boomer Project, a research and marketing consulting firm in Richmond, Virginia, currently offers his clients similar advice, telling them to bypass appeals based on age and focus on lifestyle. Two other consulting firms that specialize in marketing to consumers over 40 have conjured up their own taxonomies. These categories are not necessarily any more meaningful than previous ones, but they have the virtue of not using age as the sole measure of tastes. Age Wave, a California-based firm, divides middleaged adults into four groups according to how they envision their retirement: Ageless Explorers (youthful, empowered, and optimistic); the Comfortably Content; the Live for Today (like the ageless explorers but without the bank accounts); the Sick and Tireds (about one-third of adults, who are generally disappointed and more pessimistic about life). Focalyst, a joint venture of AARP and the consulting firm WPP, sliced the pie into narrower pieces. The firm surveyed thirty thousand respondents between the ages of 42 and 87, dividing them into six segments: Prime Time (active and successful); Going in Style (fortunate and ready); Healthy Outlook (positive and responsible); The Business of Me (regular folk); Negative Zone (overwhelmed and unfortunate); and Shutting Down (alone and ill). The four categories with a positive outlook made up seventy-three percent of the respondents; the rest fell into the two largely negative groups.
This doesn’t mean that Madison Avenue has been cured of what one consultant calls Chronic Youth Syndrome. In 2011, thirty seconds of ad time on CBS’s The Good Wife, where sixty percent of the fans are over 55, cost about $25 per thousand viewers, compared with the $47 that Fox’s Glee is able to charge for a thousand of its younger viewers. Even so, the wall of resistance Poltrack has encountered for decades is cracking.
Television’s New Golden Age
Advertising’s adjustment to demographic realities is affecting programming. While grown-up films occasionally interrupt the stream of cartoon and action movies Hollywood produces, the small screen is where middle age is most prominently emerging from the trite and the clichéd. TV Land, home to television nostalgia, was launched by Viacom in 1995 to attract a middle-aged audience. The network’s viewers have a median age of 55 and, according to Larry Jones, TV Land’s 40-something president, they could not be happier about it. “We believe there is this huge market opportunity that Madison Avenue and a lot of marketers haven’t really woken up to, haven’t embraced in a big way and, quite frankly, the American culture hasn’t embraced in a big way,” Jones said. In 2010, the station solicited series that other networks rejected because they thought the casts were too old. “We want our audience to feel like they’re part of the club,” Mr. Jones said.
Other cable networks have greater ambitions, experimenting with new, higher-quality shows featuring off-beat, full-bodied middle-aged characters, often played by well-known stars. Showtime’s Nurse Jackie, which premiered in 2009 and stars Edie Falco, is a case in point. Jackie, the head nurse in a big-city hospital, is strong, smart, not particularly glamorous, and unapologetically middle-aged, with closely cropped hair and a 40-something waistline. With a weakness for Percocet and lies, she is a mix of noble sentiments and grave flaws, compassion and common sense. Jackie manages to be sexual without being a predatory cougar. By contrast, the series’ handsome young doctor is more a figure of scorn than lust, and his romantic entanglements are played for laughs.
Showtime’s other midlife series include Weeds, with Mary Louise Parker as a suburban mom who becomes a major drug dealer; The United States of Tara, with Toni Collete as the owner of at least four different personalities; The Big C, with Laura Linney as a teacher and mother who discovers she has terminal cancer; David Duchovny as a middle-aged novelist trying to get back on track in Californication; and Shameless, with William Macy as the irredeemable, alcoholic father of a large clan. HBO has put middle-aged men at the center of Curb Your Enthusiasm, with the misanthropic Larry David; Hung, about a broke and divorced middle-aged high school basketball coach who moonlights as a male prostitute; Good Dog, about a middle-aged producer; and 40, with Ed Burns, about four middle-aged men in New York City after the financial crisis.
Ironically, the increasing fragmentation of the national audience has ushered in another Golden Age of television that is every bit as innovative, rich, and sophisticated as the one that shone in the 1950s. Pay-for-view cable companies, such as Showtime and HBO, depend completely on subscribers, which means they do not have to worry about advertisers. “I think the wider the audience, the less special the show, because if you want to appeal to the most people, you have to round off the edges,” said Bob Greenblatt, the former executive director of Showtime and the man responsible for presenting series built around talented middle-aged actresses like Falco and Linney. “That’s why cable is such a haven.” Greenblatt told me there was no particular mission behind the spate of new programs starring middle-aged female actresses. “I just thought over the last few years, there was a dearth of great female characters on television,” he explained. “It’s not like it became a goal of ours, it wasn’t a big strategy. It’s just that there are so many great actresses who you just never see.” In November 2010, a few weeks before NBC unveiled the alpha boomer, Bob Greenblatt was named president of NBC Entertainment.
Commercial cable networks aside from TV Land have turned their attention to the flourishing middle age market as well. On TNT, Kyra Sedgwick portrays a Los Angeles deputy police chief in The Closer; and Ray Romano, Andre Braugher, and Scott Bakula appeared in the short-lived comedy Men of a Certain Age. Lifetime and AMC have also successfully mined the landscape of middle age.
Comcast’s purchase of a controlling interest in NBC Universal in 2011 illustrated a shifting balance of power. When the cable company announced the sale, it stressed to its shareholders that its primary interest was NBC’s cable channels. The broadcast network, in last place and losing money, was mentioned as if it were an afterthought. The tail has started to wag the dog.
This transformation is shaking up the way television treats middle-aged experiences, characters, and viewers. CBS, long derided for its older Murder, She Wrote audience, was the most-watched network in 2009, 2010, and early 2011. Competitors envied the 13.6 million viewers (sixty-five percent of them women) that CBS has attracted for its drama The Good Wife, a series that not only stars a complex middle-aged woman but features single, childless women over 40 who do not conform to central casting’s standard-issue heartless female careerist.
Even Fox, which has bragged about its younger audiences (the average age is 46), has backed series with middle-aged stars, including the popular House, with Hugh Laurie as a misanthropic medical whiz. The magical spell cast by the 18-to-49 demographic has finally been broken. Patricia McDonough, a senior vice president at Nielsen, gave the eulogy: “35 to 64 is becoming a relatively common target now.”
The increasing fragmentation of the American public has troubling downsides, including competing versions of the news and the lack of a shared history and sense of civic responsibility. Yet it also shows that America is vast and diverse enough for every midlifer to find a circle that shares his or her tastes and preferences. You can essentially create a tailor-made psychographic group—a tribe based
on your own interests or personality traits (at least in the digital world, if not in the real one)—where you can ridicule frozen foreheads, cougars, aging hipsters, accountants on Harleys, sagging butts, or pruney faces to your heart’s content.
Marketing to Middle Age
Businesses catering to the middle age market are learning that they can profitably tell other tales besides those that glorify youth and deride midlife. The financial-planning company Freedom 55 reversed the familiar trope of tearful parents dropping off their children at college in its ads, and instead featured Mom and Dad leaving for a backpacking adventure as their college-age kids remind them to keep in touch. Other financial companies, like Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, have offered new services labeled “Second Acts” directed at alpha boomers. Mohegan Sun Casino and Resort is looking to entice middle-aged patrons. “Twenty years ago I was backstage with the band,” the ad’s middle-aged spokesman says. “Now I’m an actuary driving an eco-friendly car and doing Pilates, but I’m back rockin’.”
The hearing aid, an emblem of faltering senescence, is being rebranded as a “hearing device,” offered in colors like Crème Brûlée, Pinot Noir, Pure Passion, and Green with Envy, and compared with other devices for the ear, like a Bluetooth or headphones. Targeting middle-aged consumers, Miracle-Ear ran a print ad that featured a sixties-era teenager next to a photo of the same person, some thirty years later: “Back then you chose not to listen. Make today the day you choose to hear better.” Chris Toal, senior vice president for Amplifon USA, which manufactures Miracle-Ear, said the company had not gone after an audience this young before.
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