Ageism – The Impact of Images

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Stereotypes in our Mind’s Eye

Images strongly influence us in the way that we think about groups of people.??What comes to mind for you when I say pop star???Crooner???Rock star???DJ???Country & Western singer???All those different roles in the music industry immediately conjure up an image of an individual dressed in a particular way, probably seen archetypically as a man or a woman, and associated with a particular age.

Maybe for rock stars, your mind goes to the ageing rockers like Rod Stewart.??Maybe for the DJ, you’re thinking of people in their mid-forties who were at the height of the Ibiza explosion in their late twenties, or perhaps you think of those who run discos at weddings and community events and the age there may be different again.??When you think of a crooner, how often would you think of a young woman rather than the classic older man who has transitioned to being a crooner after an earlier success in the pop business???These words conjure up images and, with those images, archetypes, which we tag with an age.

The Role of Media

Many of those age associations have been created by the media.??However, perhaps the most powerful associations created in the media are created through advertising.??Advertising intentionally seeks to persuade, influence, and shape our attitude toward the world and the attitude toward the products people sell.??I found it interesting to see what Coca-Cola has done with its TV ads over the years.??In the past, it was all about youth.??Their most recent TV ad shows a more mature woman on roller skates pirouetting in the street and then flying off, launching themselves into the sky.??Age is left vague.??Is this Coca-Cola recognising that they need to respond to an older demographic???Perhaps the youth that they might have targeted in the past are interested in water or juice products.??Or is it a trend that the advertising agency is beginning to recognise the power of positive images of older people and that the cult of youth is over???This seems unlikely to me.??It is probably more likely that they choose different image types for different media, and they recognise that TV advertising is less likely to be seen by a younger demographic. But who knows?

Advertising that Leads to Change

However, the images that people use to represent people of different ages, whether in advertising, social media, stock imagery, or even job adverts, have a huge impact on our views and attitudes toward people of different ages.

Many people lauded the Benetton adverts, among their time's first multicultural clothing adverts. Similarly, Dove created a stir by celebrating a wide range of women’s body shapes.

However, when you look at the images of older people in the media, those positive images in advertising seem to be few and far between.

What does Hollywood Say

There are genres of films where you do get, particularly older men, successfully being action heroes into their late fifties and beyond.??They’re not usually celebrating their age.??They are, in effect, trying to show their youthfulness despite their age.??There is a whole genre of quite positive films featuring older people playing out the ends of their lives.??Whether it’s a comedy about scattering the ashes, or whether it’s a romcom where the elderly parents are trying to relive their youth, or even whether it’s one of the Mama Mia films where they are celebrating the older woman and her past.??But how often is that about a positive future rather than harking back to the days of youth?

A different kind of Image Library

I’m intrigued that the?Organisation for Ageing Better?has taken the view that it’s important to create a positive photo library of older people and a positive icon library that can be used in posts relating to them. They aim to shift the bias, as they perceive it, in existing photo libraries.??I encourage you to follow the?links?to those photo libraries and consider what they say about older people and whether you might have an opportunity to include some of this content, available on a free-to-use license, in some of your stock imagery going forward.

Hope from the Past for the Future?

For a range of protected characteristics, the media have taken up the challenge of positively representing people from those communities.??Whether it’s the disabled, ethnic minorities or people with different sexualities, over and over again, the media has taken up that challenge.

But I think we’re still waiting to see that challenge taken up in the same way for older people, to drive out discrimination and prejudice against older people in the way they are represented in film, advertising and social media.