Introduction
Media, Marketing, and Images of the Older Person in the Information AgeBy Maria D. Vesperi, guest editor
How do media and marketing influence and reflect current images of aging? Gerontologists and others seem to have accepted a broad assumption that "the media" promote youth culture in ways that universally demean and demoralize older people, and that elders passively accept and internalize media-generated images. But it is time to take another look.
First, it is easy to forget that media is a plural word, given the subject's treatment in many studies of popular culture. A lot has been written about "the media" as if print, broadcast, film, and online sources were simply different instruments for playing the same mind-numbing tune. To confuse matters further, some researchers have failed to adequately distinguish among advertising, news, and fiction. This failure has allowed for free but often misleading comparisons between situation comedies and the nightly news, or between lipstick ads and the diversity of topics in a magazine. Many analysts are reduced to whining about "the media" because they lack knowledge of the motives behind journalistic choices or the practical constraints on decision making. Underlying this state of affairs is a largely unexamined belief that most consumers are simply passive receptors of mass communication.
In this issue of Generations, we offer academics, working journalists, and older people themselves the opportunity to comment on these issues. Several articles suggest that elders are active agents in constructing their own identities, not hapless victims of media stereotypes. Other articles offer glimpses into the news industry, where perspectives on aging and older consumers are far from unified. Before taking up these topics, however, it is useful to consider why gerontologists have been slow to take into account major changes in popular stereotypes about the aged and how their perspective is thus limited.
Medicare and the community-based programs created under the Older Americans Act of 1965 were political responses to the cultural construction of older people as frail, dependent, and a collective drag on the economic landscape. The fact that older people were singled out as medically vulnerable marks a significant difference between the United States and other western nations, where subsidized healthcare was considered a basic need for citizens of all ages. Gerontology emerged as a major research topic a decade later, when government money was targeted to study where other government money was going. Not surprisingly, especially in hindsight, much of the seminal research conducted during the 1970s cast old age as a "problem" for policy makers and for elders themselves. Researchers and service providers shared an advocacy role; minimally, they saw themselves as good guys working to combat stereotypes and win benefits for the underserved.
Like all cultural constructions, the image of old age as a vulnerable period was transmitted to a generation of students. Able for the first time to specialize in the new field of gerontology, these students made their own contributions to research, policy, university teaching, and the expanding field of aging services. The need to protect the aged was even codified in institutional policy; review board guidelines for university researchers flag both children and subjects over age 65 as "special or vulnerable populations" (University of South Florida, 2001).
As often happens, however, the cultural landscape evolved before the "experts" could cobble together a new model for detecting and measuring change. In the late 1980s, the public dialogue shifted from discussion of the fragile, dependent aged to a focus on healthy older people with self-serving "lifestyles." A new group of lobbyists decrying a lack of generational equity said that old folks were hoarding resources in their gated condos and draining the medical coffers, with no end in sight. Portrayed as beneficiaries of fat pension portfolios, they were cited by fiscal conservatives as testimony to the wisdom of abandoning Social Security and the tax on capital gains. Soon the spotlight was on "woofies," well-off older folk.
As commercial targets, "yuppies" were among the earliest products of the information age, and woofies, though less acknowledged, were not far behind. The ability to compile large amounts of data on personal spending fed a new type of market research linked to finely calibrated demographics. At the same time, cable television and the Internet offered powerful vehicles for precisely targeted advertising. In a farsighted article, "After the Masses," the British social theorist Dick Hebdige (1994) discusses the rise of market research and its effects on social identity: "While it doesn't literally produce the social," he writes, "it's nonetheless the case that marketing has provided the dominant and most pervasive classifications of 'social types' in the 1980s (the yuppie is the most obvious example). We use these categories as a kind of social shorthand even if we are reluctant to find ourselves reflected in them."
Everyone laughs about yuppies, but the reluctance to take market-generated social types seriously has hampered research efforts to grasp their full implications. It is not enough to dismiss these new identities as exploitation fantasies; they have lives of their own. Unlike empirical approaches, which aim to identify the characteristics of consumers and hence predict their needs and spending habits, new, "speculative" forms of market research, Hebdige (1994) argues, "are designed to offer a social map of desire which can be used to determine where exactly which products should be 'pitched' and 'niched'." Once the functional relationship between product and audience is no longer the dominant concern, "niches" are limited only by the imagination, and "pitches" need not reflect existing stereotypes--they are free to create new ones. A familiar example is the Bennetton ad campaign that links a line of clothing with a one-world vision of racial harmony. More sophisticated is the effort to sell products through disassociation, as when blatant slogans such as "Not your father's Oldsmobile" evolve into images of staid family vehicles that can perform like race cars in those rare, precious moments when their harried midlife drivers are alone on the road.
The most intriguing concept mentioned by Hebdige (1994) is the notion of "aspirational clusters," which are marketing blueprints that predict and describe not only what people want, but what they want to be. Again, "yuppie" is the most obvious example, but Hebdige specifically points to "today's prime targets, the pre-teens and woofies." Once viewed as financial dependents at opposite ends of the age continuum, children and older people have come into their own as bearers of discretionary income. An image of the latter group has been carefully detailed in advertising for retirement communities. Aspirants to the well-off-older-folk cluster are by definition slender, healthy, financially secure, at leisure, casually but conservatively dressed, and heterosexual--usually depicted as couples or in leisure-time association with children and grandchildren.
The well-off older person is not just an obvious commercial target but also a standard against which aging has come to be defined and measured. Perhaps the so-called woofie has been accepted so readily as an aspirational cluster because the image seems a welcome change from negative stereotyping. After all, who aspires to be frail, dependent, short on cash, and alone? For most elders, however, reality lies somewhere in the middle, and setting the bar so high has unexamined implications for self- esteem and for the range of available and acceptable "lifestyle" options.
Precise demographic targeting has also led to a breakdown in the very category "old age." fihen is old, and does this definition change according to circumstances? How different is "50 and older" from "55 and older?" aarp now offers three publications for three targeted niches: age 50 to 55, 56 to 65, and 66-plus. How do market researchers identify age niches, and what characteristics are assigned to them? Such questions have profound implications for consumers, for the design of future research, and for policy making related to topics that range from residential planning to the future of Social Security.
Last year The New York Times drew national attention with an ambitious, multipart series on the subject of race. In October 2000, two Times editors and a reporter discussed the project at a forum on "Extraordinary Journalism" held by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida. They explained that the investigative team met for a year before reaching consensus about how to approach the topic and what to cover. Frustrated, they even left the office behind to brainstorm at an editor's home. The work was hard, in part because each member of the team was already acting on deeply ingrained ideas about race.
During the question period, someone asked whether any other topics might pose such a daunting challenge. Maybe sex, one editor mused. Maybe age.
In an effort to get beyond preconceived notions about mass media and their impact on older consumers, this issue of Generations includes articles by people involved in the production of news for and about older people. One contribution comes from Bill Krueger, an investigative reporter who attended the Poynter forum with one of his editors. Krueger was already hoping to do a major series on aging for the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Since then, he has discovered for himself what the Times team already knew; such projects gestate slowly because the people involved need time to work through their own uncertainties about the news value of stories about age and the demographics of who wants to read them.
One reason demographics are so crucial is that young adults have different reading habits; they are much less concerned than their parents and grandparents with broad-ranging coverage of news and features. Instead, young adults look to specialty print and online publications to address focused interests. Publishers, long responsive to this trend, have responded with senior sections of newspapers and whole new magazines for the senior market. John Cutter, formerly the "aging beat" reporter for The St. Petersburg Times, offers a look at the development of specialty publications for older people.
There are many reasons that such publications might not be a good idea, however. Observers have complained that specialty sections stereotype and segregate elders by presupposing their interests, much like the "women's pages" and "colored pages" of a former era. In their article on responses to images of aging, Don Bradley and Charles Longino raise the question of whether older people relate positively to categories that reflect their chronological age. Some research suggests that they do not. This finding might pose a challenge to advertisers who are marketing the woofie lifestyle, but aspirational clusters such as yuppies and woofies seem to work by pairing tastes and values with products. Bradley and Longino point out that autonomy, personal growth, connectedness, and other social values are already being evoked as marketing tools in attracting older consumers. In a related contribution, the business writer Frank Leinweber discusses how "value portraits" have been developed to help pitch products to tightly niched groups of older people.
The full complexity of this picture is revealed in a countertrend--older people are the most loyal readers of newspapers, the quintessential broad information format. Researchers say that the newspaper reading habit is most firmly ingrained in people who were old enough to track the movement of troops in the paper during World War II. In an intriguing contribution based on new data, Richard Somerville of the Readership Institute shares demographic research on newspaper readership and its potential impact on decision making in print journalism. While some analysts conclude that the paucity of articles for and about older readers stems from ageism, one practical reason that publications do not focus much on this group may be that they are already considered a bird in the hand. As Somerville points out, the highly competitive environment of the information age is leading newspapers to make active, conscious decisions about whether to spend money on keeping loyal readers or on reaching out to new ones.
Broadcast journalists confront similar problems, says Callie Crossley, a former producer at abc's 20/20. In a conversation with Generations, Crossley discusses how loyal, older viewers are ignored in the rush to lure younger audiences to television news programming. Older people are habituated to the concept of a news hour, while younger folks want information when it is convenient for them, a competing benefit offered by the Internet. Crossley explains the striking shift in the format of cnn Headline News as an appeal to youth--and as a gamble that might alienate established audiences. The bottom line is that television advertisers want their products to reach the "golden demographic," viewers who are 18 to 49 years of age.
Insiders such as Crossley are careful to avoid the apples and oranges problem that comes from mixing media too much. She limits her remarks to the content of news programming, which is radically different from commercials, televised films, or sitcoms. From where viewers sit, however, news and fiction are juxtaposed within a unified medium. The article by Nancy Signorielli provides a retrospective of images of aging in television programming during the 1990s.
In a snapshot survey of thirty-one magazines conducted for this issue of Generations, Judith de Luce inventories the presence of mature models and advertising copy aimed at readers 50 or older. Her findings are fascinating. For example, Forbes, Fortune and Prevention offered the most such marketing, suggesting a strong appeal to the well-off-older-folk crowd. Careful to distinguish between advertising and nonfiction, de Luce also analyzes feature articles that deal with age, the images that illustrate them, and the content of adjacent ads. For those who wonder how older models themselves might feel about how their images are constructed, an interview reprinted from The New York Times provides some surprising answers. Here Carmen Dell'Orefice, a working fashion model whose career began in the 1940s, speaks of the empowering aspects of being 70 years old.
Turning to the question of whether older people are victimized, empowered, or largely untouched by the information age, it is tempting to editorialize. Firsthand observation yields more relevant, useful questions: What products do elders identify as marketed directly to them, and how do they respond? Do they regard articles and television specials about health and retirement as information "for" them, or as information "about" them? Stated differently, do they feel like subjects or like objects, and what impact does this response have on their sense of empowerment and self-esteem? Current research suggests, quite sensibly, that the answers depend on who gets asked. Several articles in this issue of Generations gauge the information revolution by its impact on widely disparate older populations.
Natalie Rosel, a sociologist who does research on aging in place, is currently studying elders in rural Maine who report high levels of life satisfaction but certainly do not fit the "well-off older folk" model. Her article is particularly useful because the rural aged are sometimes ignored in assessing the power of media images on lifestyle choices. Joel Savishinsky is conducting long-term anthropological fieldwork on the retirement process among middle-class workers who might well fit the "woofie" profile. While most of Rosel's subjects are well past their working years, one might predict that marketing images would have a more notable effect on retirement planning and postretirement satisfaction among people who are still employed. Yet, like Rosel, Savishinsky has found that his subjects focus more on the examples offered by retired peers than on media-generated models of what the good life should be. (See page 75 for Graham Rowles's review of Savishinsky's book, Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America.)
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Older people do not differ markedly from younger consumers with regard to spending in key "lifestyle" areas such as clothing, food, entertainment, and personal care items (see figure 1). For those who aspire to identify as yuppies or woofies, these are the raw materials for instant makeovers. However, identity links to material possessions may change as people age, as Heather Whitmore learns by photographing cherished possessions in the homes of Florida retirees. Her essay demonstrates that the value of long-held objects is tied to personal identity in powerful ways that cannot be manufactured through marketing campaigns.
Based on small but closely observed samples, these articles indicate that elders are less vulnerable to suggestion than advertisers might like--or than gerontologists might fear. And as Jacob Climo and Lee Leavengood show in their contributions about aging and the Internet, some older people are using computers to override vulnerabilities that stem from restricted mobility or distance from kin. The ability to be "age free" in a chat room or other online context offers uncharted opportunities that will raise new questions about what it means to be old.
Finally, John Cutter offers tips for professionals in aging who would like to work more effectively with reporters to provide the best coverage of aging issues. In helping to shape--as well as analyze--news coverage, it is important to understand that overuse of the blanket term media confounds rather than clarifies key issues. Gerontologists who seek straightforward information about the needs and constraints of news professionals have the best chance to work within them, not against them. 1
References
AARP. 2001. Global Aging: Achieving Its Potential. Washington, D.C.
Hebdige, D. 1994. "After the Masses." In N. B. Dirks, G. Eley, and S. B. Ortner, eds., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
University of South Florida, 2001. "Application for irb Review of Research Involving the Use of Human Subjects." Tampa, Fla.
