Age, appropriate.

Ageing is just another word for living. That was the view of the late Boomer model and entrepreneur Cindy Joseph. As an older (but admittedly beautiful) model she broke the mould by bringing women of age into the advertising mix for high fashion and lifestyle brands. Amazingly she didn’t start her modelling career until she entered her 50s.

Closer to home, my late colleague and Mancunian impresario Tony Wilson similarly once exclaimed that as soon as he heard a house music track playing over an advert for Saga holidays, he thought the whole notion of ageing had been thrown out of a hotel window to crash on the pavement below.?

Add expletives into that last sentence by the way, to render it in the full Wilsonian dialect.?

So shouldn’t this backgrounding of age make it easier to find the right words, phrases and images to talk about, and engage with older people? Has the lexicon on ageing relaxed to the point at which age in everyday discourse isn’t really an issue any more?

You’d think so, but no.

I’ve just been on a Zoom conference speaking alongside Alex Rotas and Tom Scharfe organised by the Greater Manchester Ageing Hub and Greater Manchester Combined Authority. The focus was the representation of older people in the media, with Tom offering the perspective of a social gerontologist (and Twitter lightning rod for negative images of older people) and Alex sharing her incredible images of older sportspeople. Other presenters included Pauline Smith, Sabrina Fuller and Heather Bell, with Julie McCarthy chairing the event.?

My five minutes focused on the language we use to talk about older people in the media and mainstream advertising.?

Our team at Creative Concern has been more focused on this than usual because we have been working on branding and campaign projects for a number of clients working on the needs of older people, most recently in creating the brand and social media profile for the newly-established national Creative Ageing Development Agency (CADA).

CADA has been initiated and is hosted by Manchester Museum at the University of Manchester, works with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and MICRA, the University of Manchester’s Institute for Collaborative Research into Ageing. It is funded by the Baring Foundation and run by our long-standing colleague Dr Virginia Tandy and is dedicated to tackling ageism in the arts and heritage sectors and championing the right to end one’s days as a creatively engaged citizen is dedicated to creative approaches to ageing and to engaging with older audiences.

For our team, working with CADA has also included a crash course in understanding what works and what doesn’t work in defining, describing and empowering older people.?

We’ve learnt a lot.

Language use (and misuse)

The first challenge of course is definitions. Are we talking about older, old, or elderly? Seniors? The slightly grey? Pensioners??

Across major developed nations the definition of ‘old’ can kick in anywhere from 59 to 64, and the average is 61. Obviously a generation that brought us drink, drugs and rock and roll doesn’t take kindly to being pigeon-holed and so sensitivities over portrayal and the way older groups in society are described have increased significantly and there are ongoing national and international campaigns to combat everyday ageism, particularly through poor use of language.

Most people agree that some of the terms used are loaded and difficult:

• Elders - sounds tribal, but at least does communicate seniority
• Senior citizen - absolutely full of loaded meaning and very much resisted by older people
• Elderly - when tested this makes people think of frailty, poor health and being put in a home
• Older people - better, but covering an epic age range which at its most extreme is from 50 to 100

The tricky list of terms continues pretty much endlessly. Beyond this there are a very wide range of words used to describe older people which sound patronising and are hugely overused: sprightly, spry, eccentric, feisty, sweet, frail, vulnerable, etc. etc.?

Do we always need to talk about age?

One initial challenge in everyday culture and communications is to ask whether you even need to reference age at all in a story, headline or media campaign.?

In the mainstream media, like referencing race, referring to someone’s age really ought to be critical to the telling of a story, and not a veiled insinuation that they’ve lost it. For example a story that runs with a headline ‘76 year-old driver was found to be responsible for the crash which left two pedestrians injured’ is clearly elevating the issue of age and, not too subtly, making age an issue in the story where it may be entirely incidental.

Age is best avoided unless it matters... similarly some reports on the topic have rightly picked up on the tendency in the media to announce with surprise and wonder that older people are ‘still at it’ after all these years. For example:

• She’s still working, at 72.
• Even at 74, Fred remains a keen gardener.
• Janice still enjoys a daily jog, even at the age of 67.

And the worst of course...

• Even in their 60s, they still enjoyed a full and rewarding sex life

The idea that we should be surprised at older people being creative, active and yes, sexual is genuinely offensive and as soon as its called out, is incredibly inappropriate.

Stereotypes, cliches and woeful clangers

Everyday parlance is astoundingly loaded when it comes to describing older people. In fact, I’ve trawled the internet to see what others have said on this and found an incredible array of cliches and stereotypes which we’ll all recognise:

• Autumn years
• Long in the tooth
• Gimmer, fogey, codger, etc.
• One foot in the grave
• Dotage, declining, doddering, dowdy
• Ripe
• Waning

And then... there’s the real killer, referring to older people as ‘young’ ironically.

• He was a youthful 76
• With a countenance that belies her years

Or just ‘hello young lady’ used to cringingly greet someone 20 years your senior.

Positive vs Negative tropes

In fact, once you start to look again at representations of older people in the media or in advertising you quickly start to see really pronounced themes emerging. Many are profoundly negative while a few could be reclaimed as more positive.

One of the most challenging themes in recent years has to be ‘the burden’ of an ageing society, and the idea that Baby Boomers in particular have eaten all the pies, taken all the drugs, retired on epic final salary pensions and now have nothing to give but everything to take. Extend this common meme a little further and by reference every older person is then by association a burden to be carried by their families and society.

At its worse? This becomes described as the ‘demographic timebomb’ waiting to explode and take society as we know it, down in a hailstorm of bedpans and bypass operations.

Brexit hasn’t helped, and there is a slight Guardianista tendency to think of older groups as being Trump-loving, foreigner-hating xenophobes. Think Alf Garnet as a Dominic Cummings sock puppet and you’re pretty close to the mark.?

Even COVID-19 has become at times a narrative about a young generation seeing their future ‘sacrificed to protect the elderly’.

By contrast, there is the more rewarding trope of elder statesman, sage or senior figure to be offered a huge amount of respect: it’s a good list this one, including the likes of David Attenborough, Mary Berry, Ian McKellern Lenny Henry and anyone else that will attract the moniker of ‘national treasure’. The challenge back though is that the negative themes in common everyday culture are far more prevalent.

Invisibility in advertising

So you can get it badly wrong in representing older people in the mainstream media and advertising, but there is something potentially even worse - simply editing them out as being unattractive or irrelevant

Even though one in four of us are now over 65 and a hugely important market, older people too often are invisible, particularly in marketing and advertising.

One study in 2010 found that while in the magazine of Saga 62% of advertisements featured older people, this fell to 5.9% for BBC Good Food, 3.6% for Marie Claire, and just 0.9% for Men’s Health.

The only exception to the rule of invisibility in the media is if an impossibly attractive image of an older person is used as an unreachable ideal of eternal youth. Usually this is Jane Fonda. Or Cindy Joseph.?

Images and inclusion of older people in everyday culture and marketing are few and far between and it would seem are limited to where the product, service or story in question is triangulated directly at an older demographic. I’m currently for example being bombarded by images of silver foxes in my timelines and offers for wealth management advice or how to wrestle a load of cash out of my pension pot.

Perhaps one reason for the poor practice, particularly in advertising and marketing is that the sector itself (creative and digital) is seen as the preserve of Bright Young Things grabbing a coffee in a co-working pop-up shipping container just before launching the next Big App Thing, or that the traditional agency model in particular has relied on young (i.e. cheap) talent to make client accounts profitable for a much smaller number of older (male) shareholders and directors.

So ageism within the media and the creative sector could be part of the problem too. One recent survey of workers in the sector found that 54% of those who had worked in marketing and advertising for 15 years or more had indeed encountered ageism in one form or another. The same survey found that 65% also talked about gender bias and sexism, by the way.

A possible ‘Code for the Future‘

Working with CADA has led to our team looking at the challenge of talking about older people, relating to older audiences but also understanding older people as creatives, makers, artists and as a result thinking about our own practice.?

This has led me to thinking does the media, marketing and advertising sector need a major push to sharpen up their act? Undoubtedly. Some major brands, agencies and creatives have already made a start, but do we need a new code for the sector? Some new rules of the game?

Here’s a starting point. We could start drawing up a charter where we:

• Proactively increase the positive visibility of older people
• Counter cliches and stereotypes that are woefully outdated
• Forensically tackle language that is loaded with disempowering negatives

AND of course ensure that we don’t make age an issue if it doesn’t need to be. Include older people in the photoshoot, in the vox pops, in the through-the-line campaign, but only make age the focus if age is actually the story.?

After all, if ageing is another word for living, we’re only really tackling the story of life itself.

N.B. This online session was based around a photography competition called 'Old frame New Picture' run by Macc, the Greater Manchester Older People's Network and Ambition for Ageing which can be found here and which has a deadline of 13 November.