Are Marketers Dumb? Why Do They Continue to Misrepresent Us?

By Karen and Erica

During the last annual Medicare enrollment period we were reminded how incredibly sexist and agist some advertising can be. We were especially annoyed—again—by Medicare Martha, an ad featuring an obnoxious older woman, Martha, looking completely goofy, making dumb remarks, and being treated like a fool by an unseen male interlocutor. The ad ran incessantly. When we saw it we changed the channel. We will never buy Medicare coverage from anyone associated with this ad.

But of course insurance companies trying to sell Medicare coverage are not alone. Discover put out an offensive ad featuring an older woman who asks idiotic questions about a debit card, while a younger man treats her like the fool she seems to be. This ad too runs incessantly. This ad too will give us an incentive never to use any Discover product.

Then there’s this eHarmony ad. It was probably intended to present older women positively by showing younger women being impressed. But by what? An older woman seemingly bent on reliving her teen years. We aren’t in the market for dates, but if we were this ad would not entice us to eHarmony.

And there are plenty more.

What is so hard about this? Boomer women have vast spending power. Women over fifty, as a cohort, control $3.18 trillion in global purchasing power. Given this data, why on earth would advertisers and brands belittle us? Are very young men in charge, and do they somehow think their mothers would feel good about these visualizations?

Regardless of the wealth of the cohort, why advertise at all if this is what you have to offer? Do these ads work? Does someone think men make these spending decisions, and those men will be motivated by showing caricatures of older women? Wrong on both counts.

In fact, marketers, we are we are doing most of the buying. And we are much more likely to buy your product if if you show us to be the intelligent, elegant women we are. If you can’t find good models, we’ll even pose for you.

What do you think? Do you have ads to add to the list? Or maybe some good ones?