Classic Jack: Turning 55 Years Old and the Suddenly Relevant Poltrack Doctrines

I have no predisposition against the younger 1834 audience segment In fact I recently published a counterpoint to a New York Times Magazine column that had attacked the integrity of marketers and media buyers who focus their ad budgets on reaching younger audiences at the expense of us older folks I remain comfortable with the points I made disputing the credibility of the NY Times piece As I read that piece though I was bewildered why the author made no effort to reach out to CBS39 David Poltrack who has been the most outspoken advocate of marketing to the 45 market For at least 20 years David has been in the forefront of promoting the viewpoints of quotAge Wavequot author Ken Dychtwald Poltrack39s research has become the industry standard for advancing the value of 45 and 55 audiences Of course Poltrack39s doctrines are selfserving since he represents CBS which has for years been punished by media buyers for its heavy weight of 55 audiencesAccording to Poltrack his reports and commentaries of past years are taking on greater urgency and importance quotWe have reached a critical marketing juncturequot he said in a recent presentation at the Mature Market Summit quotUp until now the marketer could feel somewhat comfortable with a broadbased target of 1849 or 2554 since the composition of that segment was relatively stablequot This reality has now changed says Poltrack because the two fastest growing segments of the population are at the older and the younger extremes with the younger 18 24 audience growing at the fastest rate quotIf a marketer decides not to change his or her agebased target from its current 1849 or 2554 base that marketer is in fact changing the emphasis of the marketing program The emphasis is shifting from adults in the older range of that age span to adults in the younger range of that age spanquotPoltrack acknowledges quotIt may be that for certain products or services given the size of the new 1824 segment a shift in emphasis towards the younger edge of the 1854 age span is warranted However I would argue that for most products or services sold today a targeting approach that does not assign some significance to the large and growing market of adults in their fifties is misguidedquotYouth Targeted Television Is Not the Most EfficientquotContrary to the common belief that the younger skewing programs will deliver the older audience much more effectively than the older skewing programs will deliver the young audience we see that the older skewing programs39 delivery of young adults is not much lower than the younger skewing programs39 delivery of older viewers And the Top 30 programs with Adults 55 deliver a higher rating among the key middleaged Adults 3554quotBrand Loyalty Does Not Exist says PoltrackAnother myth that Poltrack seeks to dispel suggests that younger audiences are more valuable because of their increased propensity to try new brands and the lifetime value they bring to the brands to which they develop loyalties quotThe fact is that brand loyalty doesn39t really exist todayquot claims Poltrack quotIn a study done for us CBS by AC Nielsen in 1993 brand switching was measured in thirtyone different packaged goods categories Approximately twothirds of the purchases made by Adults 1834 were made to a brand that was not the most often purchased brand For Adults 3564 that figure is higher seventy percent In other words no one is very brand loyal and the younger consumers are more brand loyal than older consumersquotThe results of this research have been summarized in a series of papers that Poltrack has written with Henry Assael of NYU These articles which have been published in the Journal of Advertising Research prove that age is a poor surrogate for product usage in most product categories that combining age with another demographic provides a much better fit with actual product usage and that direct product usage provides the best source of media evaluationAre Changes on the HorizonAccording to Poltrack quotOver the ten year span that we have published these articles no one has challenged the findings or presented any supporting evidence for the validity of the current agebased media evaluation Yet media buying and selling continues to be based on the same Adult 1849 Adult 2554 and Adult 1834 criteria as they were in the 1970s One reason for this lack of progress towards a better media evaluation system has been the lack of a reliable method of integrating product usage data and other meaningful advertising data with media audience dataquot Poltrack believes that for the first time there are promising new attempts at this integration He offers as examples Simmons39 new Behaviorgraphics approach that combines usage data from other sources with the basic Nielsen NTI data Next Generation Research39s Advertising Receptivity Report which measures media audiences in terms of both product usage and receptivity to advertising for various products and services and a variety of experiments with fusion techniquesPoltrack continues to believe that quotthe current state of media evaluation and advertising targeting is dominated by a fundamentally flawed and increasingly anachronistic agebased process This process is resulting in the misallocation of billions of dollars in media expenditures and in an imbalance in the programming mix of the mediaquot He believes that quotthe combination of marketers39 increasing realization that the important babyboomer market is disappearing from their radar screens and the introduction of new media evaluation systems may finally be turning the tidequotUntil my recent 55th birthday I really didn39t care very much about this issue I have suddenly become a believerClick the social buttons above or below to share this story with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE MEDIAVILLAGE CONTENT | BECOME A THOUGHT LEADERSHIP CONTRIBUTOR

Classic Jack: Turning 55 Years Old and the Suddenly Relevant Poltrack Doctrines

Author

Publish date

Channel

Archived in

Jack Myers

"About That with Carl Mayer": Involved Media Connected Audience Fall 2024 Report (Episode 5) - By Carl Mayer

More Videos:

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE MEDIAVILLAGE CONTENT | BECOME A THOUGHT LEADERSHIP CONTRIBUTOR

Classic Jack: Turning 55 Years Old and the Suddenly Relevant Poltrack Doctrines

Enjoying This Commentary? There's More to Love

Jack Myers

"About That with Carl Mayer": Involved Media Connected Audience Fall 2024 Report (Episode 5) - By Carl Mayer

Cookies