by Dr. Ellen Brandt
You're OK. We're OK. But maybe not so much on Skype or selfies.
The last couple of blogs in this series (see Boomers Versus Gallup and Boomer Myths and Misperceptions) may have been perceived as "downers," as we talked about some of the ways pollsters, economists, politicians, and our too-concentrated "mainstream media" have been getting the Baby Boomer generation absolutely wrong - sometimes on purpose.
They've tried to advance political or cultural agendas that seek to push the "Gray Population" off center stage - in the U.S., Europe, Japan, the rest of the Developed World, and China - at the exact moment in history when people over age 50 constitute fully 2 in 5 citizens - and consumers - and voters - in these countries, a statistic that may rise to close to 1 in 2 of their citizens within the next few years.
Boomers - now in our 50s and 60s - and all others in the 50-and-above age cohort need to stay vigilant and aware of such anti-Gray agendas and anti-Gray biases and prejudices, if we are to separate Friends from Foes, cultivating the former and avoiding the latter.
But as the title of this series demonstrates, it is now time to move beyond mere Anger and frustration and to embrace a new and positive Activism, not only because it will help our generation, but because it is of crucial importance, as we seek to help all generations, as well as our economy, our country, and our World.
We're going to start by talking about a certain kind of Activism Boomers have embraced pretty much since we were in diapers - the need to regain our dominance as business founders, "creatives," and entrepreneurs.
The next dozen or so stories in this series will outline some of my own, admittedly personal, suggestions about the kinds of companies, products, services, and business models our generation might respond to in a positive fashion.
And No, I am not a tout marketing companies and products which already exist. As many readers know, I have a rather dim view of marketing aimed at Boomers these days. (See A Fine Line Between Marketing and Harassment: The Case Against Age-Targeted Advertising).
I think professional marketers - in the aggregate - have misread and misjudged our generation badly in recent years. Of course, that's entirely understandable, since their ranks rarely seem to include actual Boomers anymore and are, we suspect, crowded with those who dislike us, dismiss us, and essentially disrespect us.
That needs to change.
And also, No, I'm not particularly afraid that the ideas for new companies, products, and services I am going to suggest will immediately be "stolen" and exploited by others - even if that could be partially true.
Ideas are inchoate until they are realized and put into action. Those of us who truly care about the Boomer generation and seek to help our fellow Boomers seize the day need to encourage - not be afraid of - creative thinking in a collective, as well as purely individual, sense.
In fact, here's a little test that you may find highly instructive: Go to your favorite search engine - any one you choose - and do a News search for Baby Boomers. I guarantee you will be thoroughly disgusted at what you see - and, more to the point, what you don't see.
The vaunted "mainstream media" in the United States - which some researchers now believe is restricted to just 4 or 5 conglomerates of related "partners" - has imbibed the Anti-Boomer rhetoric we talked about in earlier stories, even if some of them haven't been active participants in strident propaganda.
I guarantee that the results of your News search, whatever engine you use, will consist primarily of public relations blurbs from marketers of one sort or another - which, of course, are in no way actual "News" - stating that their internal research proves Boomers need to be sold whatever they are selling, which nowadays comes almost exclusively under the headings of pharmaceuticals or financial services - the two business categories I believe the vast majority of Boomers don't want to hear one more word about, ever again, on pain of death.
Meanwhile, real News about Boomers, collectively or individually, seems to have disappeared. You will be hard-pressed to find stories about Boomers' continued impact on politics, on entrepreneurship, on economics, or on the media itself - although we - and everyone else over age 50 - are now having a greater, not a lesser, impact on all of these realms of life than ever before.
In any case, this story will be the first of several casting ideas into the media ether - where one hopes some of them may attract supporters and crystallize into actual business formations.
We Think We're Still Attractive - And We Want You To Think So, Too
We're starting our sequence of Businesses-Boomers-May-Want articles in a somewhat roundabout way, which will - I promise - end with our proposing three distinct and diverse kinds of businesses which I believe our generation would like very much and would utilize, if they existed.
We'll devote a separate subsequent blog to each of these three suggestions, which - in different ways - are focused on the general concept of Boomers and Beauty.
Business Idea One is about Perception - specifically, about very negative perceptions of what the average Boomer really looks like. We believe such negative views of Boomer attractiveness stem from two major causes - one technical and one based on pure prejudice.
Let's start by "outing" the prejudice - or more to the point, those who have inspired it.
Some of you will remember our popular blog series (2009) Baby Boomers-The Angriest Generation. That series started with a piece called You're Decrepit, Greedy, Narcissistic Luddites-So Turn Over the Country to Us, which you might want to re-read, not only to refresh your memory, but also because pretty much every kind of bias we catalogued back then is, alas, still very much with us.
One of the things that story talked about was a widely-circulated article in the on-line publication Mashable, which made negative - and rather silly - comments about Baby Boomers' usage of technology, particularly focusing on E-mail.
This article, which may or may not have been written by an 11-year-old, was illustrated by a photograph of a befuddled elderly gentleman in a plaid flannel shirt, who appeared to be a minimum age of 98 - or possibly, 108.
Boomers, we note, were aged 44-62 - Yes, 44-62! - when this story came out. Quite a lot of us found this illustration of what "a typical Boomer" might look like a tad disturbing - worthy of, say, Nazi propaganda about Jews or the Ku Klux Klan depicting the attractiveness of Black Americans.
Well, guess what? Mashable and quite a few other publications which are somehow included in the concentrated "mainstream media" (Internet edition) are still illustrating most stories about Boomers - and soon, mark my words, Gen-Xers - with photos of people so elderly and frail, you expect them to disintegrate before you get to the end of the story.
Even pieces about prominent individual Boomers, especially if they are female, are often graced with photos which make their subjects look like the proverbial death-warmed-over.
Being ornery, if I see this kind of propaganda-by-photo, I tend to post a comment about it. For instance, although I am a Centrist Republican and at a far different point on the political spectrum than Hillary Clinton is, I get angry - and am not shy about saying so - when I see one of the many photos of Secretary Clinton, still an attractive woman, contrived to make her appear like a stand-in for the Corpse Bride.
I hope readers of this piece will at least consider making their own voices heard when they see similar propagandistic attacks-via-photo on anyone over age 50 - politician, celebrity, or ordinary Joe or Jane.
I understand, however, that in this imperfect world - and extraordinarily imperfect media environment - bias, prejudice, malice, and blatant propaganda will remain with us.
So let's turn our attention to the other major cause of Boomers being considered unattractive - current technology, especially as it applies to the Internet.
I believe the vast majority of today's Boomers - people in our 50s and 60s - look perfectly fine when you view us in person.
But we don't look anywhere near as fine, when we are "translated" digitally, whether we're talking about conventional film and TV or the apparently cruder newer technologies like podcast players, still-photo phone cams, or communications services like Skype.
I hasten to add that I am in no way an expert on why this is so. But we all know it is so - that as one ages, one simply does not look as good on camera as we did when we were younger.
That's why I think there could, should, and would be a mammoth market among Boomers and others over age 50 for new kinds of services which were somehow able to mask or enhance our basic attractiveness in video phone, video cam, and video player formats.
I'm going to do some quick research on this topic and expand on this suggestion in a separate story. Look for it over the next few days.
My Soror, the Celebrated Cappy
I'm going to approach Business Ideas Two and Three by an even more circuitous route, an episode of the new CBS buddy cop series Battle Creek, which ran a few weeks ago and both surprised and delighted many Boomers.
The episode featured my former Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority sister at the University of Pennsylvania, the lovely and talented Candice Bergen.
Bergen, who went by the nickname Cappy when she matriculated at Penn, was our most glamorous Miss University by far - very tall, very thin, very blonde - as well as a very nice person.
Despite her being a sorority sister, I didn't know her well - nor, I believe, did many at Penn, since she was constantly off on exciting modeling - and later acting - assignments around the world, a roster of commitments that caused her to drop out of school at the end of her sophomore year.
Bergen has not been seen much on screen the last five years or so. So I'm sure many of her fans and fellow Boomers were both delighted and surprised to see her on Battle Creek last month as the morally-challenged but loving mother of lead actor Dean Winters.
We were delighted, because it was a terrific performance, and one hopes it will lead to a frequent guest star gig, if the series continues.
But we were also a bit surprised, because two decades after her TV superstar stint as Murphy Brown (1988-1998), Bergen looks like . . . . the rest of us Boomers.
Please don't misunderstand. I think she still looks great - but great-different, in the ways women in their 60s tend to look different from women in their 20s - or their 40s. She is, of course, still tall. But she is less thin, less angular, and less blonde, more womanly, more rounded, and more mature.
Bergen's love interest in the episode was played by veteran quirky character actor Chris Mulkey (age 67) of Twin Peaks fame - also still quite dishy, but looking very different from a couple of decades ago.
I think most Baby Boomers who happened to see this episode of the new CBS series were pleased - pleased, first of all, that their age-peers in Hollywood were still getting at least a few plum roles highlighting their personalities and continued sexual attractiveness.
But they were also probably secretly pleased that even such remarkable physical specimens as Bergen and Mulkey now look - and are not afraid to look - like pretty people in their 60s, rather than pretty people in their 20s or their 40s.
And this leads to two more business ideas we'd like to see put into motion.
The first: A new major website, promoted as being a must-see destination for Boomers and others over 50, called something along the lines of "Make Me Beautiful Again."
The site would offer articles, blogs, podcasts, and audio surrounding the general topic of health, fitness, and beauty for both men and women who are part of the "Gray Population."
It would also offer totally non-biased reviews of health and beauty treatments, fixes, and non-pharmaceutical cures, from a small cadre of well-educated, experienced, and respected Boomer professionals and experts.
A site like this - I happily admit it - is one of the kinds of businesses I myself would love to become funded to start up. I think if it were very well done, it would be a monster hit from day one.
It would also present a much-needed and more positive view of Boomers' real interests in health, fitness, and beauty than that currently permeating the ranks of marketers and advertisers, who seem to think the entire Gray Population sits around worrying about exotic diseases we don't have and almost certainly never will - and the pharmaceuticals invented to treat them. Or that we are obsessed with drastic assembly-line plastic surgery, like the Tawdry Trollops - excuse me, Real Housewives - of Minneapolis, Montevideo, or Myanmar. (Why do all these poor deluded women look alike?)
Let Us Create - Collectively
The funny and sexy performances of Bergen and Mulkey in Battle Creek also suggest another kind of business - or rather, a new business model - which I hope may gain rapidly in prominence and success over the next few years: Creative Collectives, working on concepts, products, and services our Gray Population wants and needs.
In terms of Hollywood - or Bollywood - or maybe Dollywood - I'm talking about the establishment of production houses, independent studios, and screenwriters' collectives focused on producing quality media for, about - and most importantly, by - the Gray Population itself.
Creative people over 50 who need more work are all around us. Many desperately need the cold, hard cash. But we also seek a renewed sense of recognition and the emotional compensation of being people who still matter - in fact, matter a lot - as our society, economy, and culture evolve to embrace a rapidly aging Demographic.
We'd like to see Creative Collectives of Boomers and other "Grays" spring up, not only in the worlds of film and television, but also in theater, radio, pop and classical music, publishing, and the Internet.
In "conventional" - i.e. non-Internet-based - television, there should and, in fact, will be a burgeoning market for "Gray"-oriented material, if what many media gurus are predicting comes to pass, and fickle Youth abandon their TV sets to watch more and more programming on smartphones, tablets or any of the other "mobile" possibilities so many futurists are touting.
We'll expand on this possibility further in an upcoming blog and will also explore how the Creative Collective model might be applied to other kinds of Boomer-oriented businesses.
In fact, we intend to expand all three Boomer Business Ideas introduced in this story as the next three blogs in this series, followed by a number of other articles describing a diverse array of products and services we'd like to see developed by "Gray" entrepreneurs - and funded by a creative "new-old" breed of Venture Capitalists, who can see the lasting value of investing in businesses over 2 in 5 Americans might patronize.
Ellen Brandt, Ph.D. is Founder of the Bring Back the Meritocracy! project, an ambitious and broad-ranging non-profit, non-partisan, non-controversial effort to help the "Highly-Educated But Under-Employed" in the U.S. and abroad. Read about it at:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/114091094386273464410/114091094386273464410/about/p/pub
