Advertising to 40+ Women :: Essays Papers

Advertising to 40+ Women We here at More feel it is time to change the representation of older women in the world of advertising, starting first with our own publication. In order to find answers to the problem of women over 40 lacking a voice and presence in magazine advertisements, we have enlisted the help of several advertising agencies. Each company was asked to devise a unique plan of action to better included mature women in our ads. The following three advertising agencies—GSD&M, Kaplan Thaler, and Dimassimo—have been selected because their individual approaches to our dilemmas were most successful in their accurate portrayal of older women. So read on and discover how these creative advertisers were able to not only solve our advertising problem, but also how they were able to expand and diversify our world of advertising by including people that look and think like you. Over the last few decades, there has been a significant rise in the number of women receiving college educations and a decrease in gender discrimination due to federal law. These two societal factors have helped the average woman to attain a higher paying job than ever before in our history. Presently, women are earning over half of all accounting degrees, 4 out of 10 law degrees, and just about that many medical degrees (Krotz 1). Therefore this gender group, which makes up about half of the American population, has a lot of monetary power. As a result, when women reach the peak of their earning power, they will have money to burn (Krotz 1). Women reach this peak around the age of 40 or older. In the last year alone, of all the women who purchased a new car, 53% were over 40 and so were 60% of those who bought new computers (Quinlan53). Evidently, the majority of buyers are older women. So why then is there a noticeable lack of this age group of women in magazine advertiseme nts? This is due to the simple fact that â€Å"there’s an 18-34 demographic desirability locked into corporate America’s mindset† (Quinlan 53). As a CEO of an advertising agency, Mary Quinlan can identify very well with the lack of mature women in the media. She relates to us, â€Å"I’ve sat in too many casting sessions where I’d hear, ‘We need one older woman to round out these models.