Hire 50-plus women, hit pay dirt 

Women buy $28 trillion of goods annually. To win a share of that mega-market, the first thing for brands and agencies to do is hire those aged 50-plus, say Jane Evans the founder of the Uninvisibility Project; Jane Waterhouse, general manager of Bauer Media Australia; and Nicole McInnes, a marketer whose career has spanned WooliesX, Pandora and eHarmony.

Hiring older women will save time and money while moving the needle in terms of results, they suggest.

Evans founded the Uninvisibility project out of frustration. But she says it has taken on a life of its own – and the implications are profound.

Evans was a major creative force in Australia’s big agencies in the nineties. But once she hit 50, she says, “I became completely and utterly invisible. I had probably one of the most successful advertising careers for a woman. I created the Tim Tam genie campaign. I created the James Squire beer brand. But in my early 50s, I find myself totally invisible and irrelevant to my industry.” 

So she decided to start her own agency, figuring marketers would jump at the chance of striking gold.  Wrong. 

The invisible woman

“I found I was as invisible and irrelevant to clients as I was to agencies. So I thought, “Okay. If I can’t get the agencies and I can’t get the clients, I’m going to go and get the audience.” So, I set up the Uninvisibility Project on International Women’s Day this year - and it has gone through the roof.”

Evans says she is now talking to ”governments and business councils”, because the issue is endemic and goes way beyond advertising. 

“A societal change is needed,” says Evans. But for a marketing audience, her advice is succinct:

“You’ve got to stop thinking of us as mothers of old, so marketing 101 is out of the window. In my mother’s day if she wanted to change bank, it took her about three weeks and a lot of fuss. Now, we can do it in one press of a button."

Stop condescending

For marketers in Australia, women aged 50-64 represent 2.4m of the population. Bauer’s Defiant study attempts to better understand a category seemingly invisible to marketers and their agencies.

According to Bauer’s Jane Waterhouse, 41 per cent of those women fall into the ‘defiant’ category, defined as confident, independent and relatively affluent women in their fifties and sixties. That cohort is “classified by Roy Morgan as 20 per cent more likely to be big spenders”, says Waterhouse. Yet Bauer’s survey of those women across regions and cities should worry any CMO - plus the CFO, CEO, the board of directors and shareholders.

“What we found is that they didn’t speak about any brands at all. It was really uncomfortable and embarrassing,” says Waterhouse.

“In their words: ‘when brands do turn up, they treat me like I’m an idiot, like I’m digitally incapable. They talk to me only through the lens of being a mother’,” says Waterhouse. “Most importantly, they talked about the fact that they are meant to be fighting against who they are supposed to be - because we’re not supposed to age, apparently.” 

Jane Evans says the findings represent an ugly truth across not just industries, but society.

“Women in ads go from spotty teen, to vixen, to career woman, to mother.
Then it jumps to white-haired woman awaiting death.”

Rethink targeting and segmentation

Marketers, agencies and media owners must rethink audience segmentation, says Nicole McInnes. 

“Audience data is broken down into age segments where the volume of reach is 18-55, so briefs naturally focus on that. But that’s not meaningful,” says McInnes.

“We need to think differently around targeting people with buying power. Instead of going for volume and eyeballs, we need to target people with really big wallets, actually purses, who are buying for that under-19 group,” she says. “It might not be the bulls’ eye in volume. But in terms of money, it’s massive.”

The people buying for the under-19 group are, of course, 50-plus women - as they are across most other demographics. According to Bauer’s Jane Waterhouse:

Australian household wealth has grown significantly over the past 30 years but most of the increase in wealth has been accumulated by older households, who benefited most from the housing boom and growth in superannuation assets (Source: Grattan Institute).  

Women over 50 account for 27% of all consumer spending, and are spending $15 trillion globally.” (Forbes)

That, says Waterhouse, is “a ridiculous amount” to overlook. 

“Hopefully the Defiant study will make a lot of marketers wake up.”

Find out more about Bauer’s Defiant study here.