We don't know about you, but our holiday shopping hasn't even begun, much less gotten done yet.

Perhaps we're running behind because we spent last week at a "Marketing to Boomers" conference in Toronto, Canada. There were representatives from major packaged goods marketers and cosmetic marketers. Plus, people in the media trying to better understand the importance of Boomers growing older.

For marketers north of the border, Boomers will be a significant opportunity -- or problem. In Canada, Boomers are one-third of the entire population, not just one-third of all adults over 21, as they are here. That concentration of a single age group (40-58) will have incredible impact on many industries and categories in the Great White North.

Back here in the USA, the November 2004 wave of the Boomer Marketing Report is tabulated and analyzed. Some highlights appear below in "Rock and a Hard Place."

Also, our second industry report is now ready for sale. Titled "50 Things Every Marketer Needs to Know About Boomers Over 50," this report provides information on the key statistics and data a marketer needs to know, and the resulting implications for your marketing communications efforts.

The second article provides some insights into how Boomers, especially those over 50, respond to imagery in advertisements. Called "Mixed Emotions," this article reports on findings from our Boomer Marketing Report as well as some fascinating research by Dr. Laura Carstensen of Stanford.

The last feature this month is called "Sad Sad Sad" and is about how marketers have confused "demographics" with "target audience." The two are related, but not the same. (Well, duh, you say, but take a look and see if you don't agree that far too often the two are intertwined).

We'd love to hear any thoughts you have on any of these articles. Just drop us a line.

Matt Thornhill
The Boomer Project

For the November 2004 wave of the Boomer Project/Survey Sampling International Boomer Marketing Report, we interviewed 1,800 adults, 1,200 of which were Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964.

We asked lots of questions about advertising and the advertisements they recall seeing. Our goal was to learn how they think and feel about advertising -- especially those Boomers over 50.

One of our key in-going hypotheses was that Boomers over 50 don't relate to advertising the same way as those under 50, or those younger adults 18 to 39 years old. If that turns out to be true, then we wanted to know why.

We also wanted to better understand that if Boomers "feel about 40," then they should be easy to reach if marketers just target the 18-49 segment. Right or wrong?

We got our answers, and learned some other interesting facts along the way.

Some of the highlights of the findings we'll share here:

1. Boomers' self-identity isn't tied to age at all, but life stage -- so traditional "age-based" messages are hard to get right, and even harder to make relevant.
2. Boomers grade advertisers "D+" -- even lower than younger adults, who typically are even more jaded about the ad business than Boomers.
3. Boomers grade financial services marketers even lower -- which is a shame, because Boomers over 50 are at their peak earning years, have the most disposable income in their lives, and haven't planned well enough for retirement.

The Boomer Marketing Report contains some significant findings and implications for marketers -- too many to share in this brief newsletter. We will publish longer articles about the Boomer Marketing Report on the Boomer Project Web site in coming months, as well as make available for sale the full report.

Plus, we will hold a public "webinar" next Wednesday, December 15th from 3:00- 5:00pm EST. To register and prepay online, go to our Seminar page.

Our research was less invasive and didn't require anyone to sumit to MRI scans. Instead, we simply designed some ads with positive, emotionally meaningful imagery and other ads with neutral images. Sure enough, the older the Boomer, the more likely they responded positively to the ad with the emotionally meaningful image. They either ignored the neutral image or decided it was actually more negative than neutral.

The lesson is simple: to draw the attention of older consumers, you're much better off using postive, emotionally-meaningful imagery.

That is, if you want amygdala activation. And you do, you do.

Source for ratings: ClassicTVHits.com.