Media Decoder: Aging, Yes, but Still Consuming

For AARP, 50 is the new 65. And as the company begins a new advertising campaign this week, it wants media buyers and advertisers to keep that in mind.

AARP’s new marketing effort will promote the baby boom generation, as it ages, as a viable consumer target for advertisers. The campaign, which includes print and digital ads, will run in trade publications like Advertising Age starting Monday.

“Our sense is that we’ve reached a tipping point,” said Patricia Lippe Davis, the vice president for marketing at AARP media sales. “People are really recognizing the value of the audience that we speak to.”

The campaign is intended to reach what Ms. Davis calls “thought leaders,” senior marketing executives who tend to be middle-aged, and “media mavericks,” media planners and buyers who tend to be younger. She said she hoped it would debunk myths about older Americans.

Joseph Perello, a managing partner of the marketing and advertising agency Catch New York, which created the campaign, said its tone was intended to show that baby boomers, the generation born from 1946 to 1964, were “still very energetic, still active, still working.” Many media buyers “are probably under 35, and they have a very outdated notion of what AARP is and certainly an outdated notion of what it means to be over 50,” Mr. Perello said.

In addition to print advertisements in AdAge, ads will run in two of the trade magazine’s e-mail newsletters and on the Adweek’s AdFreak blog. Digital ads will be featured on Mediabistro.com, e-mail newsletters from MediaPost.com, and other industry trade communications.

Ads will also run on the Web site LinkedIn. The ability to reach users by job title, location, company and through groups on LinkedIn made it ideal for the ads, Mr. Perello said.

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