NEW YORK — Baby Boomers ought to reimagine how they spend their time, advised the country’s first Boomer president, Bill Clinton, who, at age 60, is right on the generation’s leading edge.
“We can’t spend all our time watching TV Land,” Clinton said archly of the channel that hired him to address an audience full of potential advertising clients, while noting his 15-year relationship with TV Land’s parent, MTV Networks. The link was forged in 1993, when Clinton’s first administration tapped MTV for help with the Motor Voter registration campaign, and it continues today in the joint efforts of Nickelodeon and Clinton’s Alliance for a Healthier Generation, to fight childhood obesity and diabetes.
If it were Clinton’s call, the country’s 78.5 million Boomers would spend at least some of their time responding to the challenges of living in a newly interdependent world. “I believe it’s the first world of global interdependence,” the nation’s former chief executive said Friday. Pointing out this relationship is based on communications networks as well as economics, at a time when about $1 trillion a day crosses national borders, he added: “It’s good and bad. It means we can’t escape each other, even if we try.”
As Boomers age, the question about their legacy is whether they can share, sacrifice and leave behind a better world, not just leave the world as consumers who acquired physical goods and wealth, observed Bill Strauss, a generation expert who roomed with former vice president Al Gore at Harvard University.
“Boomers are always looking for a symbol and gesture in all they do,” Strauss said in an interview. “When they do something, they’re making a statement. It’s a cultural declaration. So the more marketers can infuse late-life products with meaning, that’s a positive thing.”
Marketers intent on winning over those now ages 42 to 61 will be targeting people with a life expectancy longer than any of their predecessors. Boomers who, like Clinton, would reach 65 in 2011 can expect to live an average of at least another 18 years, according to “The Boomer Century: 1946-2046,” a new PBS documentary produced by Alexandria Productions and Generation Entertainment, scheduled to air nationwide tonight.
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“Baby Boomers grew up believing we can’t lead authentic lives unless we look beyond the narrow scope of our own lives,” Clinton recalled. “The difference today is we can actually do it.” This opportunity, in large part, is founded on the unifying power and speed of the Internet, he contended.
“The Internet has given people the power to do almost anything if enough people in the world decide to do the same thing at the same time,” said the former president. “We cannot build the world we want without responsible actions by private citizens, combined with government action.”
For its part, TV Land, starting in October, will encourage its audience to give back to society through “Cause Change,” an on-air promotion that will emphasize the benefits of doing so via volunteerism, philanthropy and good citizenship. In his remarks, Clinton described the Boomer generation’s sense of mission as its most important contribution to today’s youths. “Our parents were World War II veterans and most of us grew up in the civil rights era,” he recounted. “This fostered a strong sense of citizenship.”
In a world that has already witnessed the deaths of 9 million people in World War I, more than 20 million in World War II and 6 million in the Holocaust, Clinton cautioned: “The difference now is this time we think it could be us. In an interdependent world, just as we can claim the common benefits, we can’t escape the hazards.”
Citing Alexis de Tocqueville’s vision of Americans as a people who, when faced with a problem, “roll up their sleeves and try to solve it,” Clinton tagged the U.S. government’s post-tsunami airlift in Indonesia as “clearly the most important international operation led by President Bush since he’s been in office.” By virtue of such actions, he said, “we are building a world with more partners and fewer adversaries.”
And the foundation on which solutions can be built for a world in which life is unequal, unstable and unsustainable, he said, is a closer-knit world community. “I’d like to create a more globally integrated world and create a greater sense of belonging to a community,” offered Clinton. He underlined the urgency of the pursuit by noting roughly 1 billion of the world’s 6.5 billion people live on only $1 a day.
In such a time, marketers will be making their appeals to a Boomer generation which itself is in flux, one that is entering new life stages — from empty nesting to grandparenting to entering second careers to retiring. This year, for the first time, more than half of Boomers are over 50. This will give them a critical mass that Lifestage Matrix president Geoff Meredith expects will enable the country’s most affluent generation to have more influence over pop culture than “since they were babies.”
While it has yet to take hold on a significant scale, generation expert Meredith is continuing to predict many Boomers will abandon hair color treatments, retreat from cosmetic surgery and embrace alternatives such as changing their diets and exercise regimens or going gray, within the next five years.
To date, Meredith said, few marketers have spoken to a Boomer mind-set marked by acceptance of the group’s stages in life. A rare exception, in his view, are financial services companies like Fidelity and Ameriprise. “I think they’re doing it best,” he said. “The Gap’s closing of Forth & Towne [later this year] is a classic example of getting it right strategically and botching it in execution,” continued Meredith, who has been hired to consult for Gap. The crux of the problem, he said, was that Forth & Towne abandoned its plans to focus on Boomers and instead targeted mostly women ages 35 to 40 when it opened in West Nyack, N.Y., in 2005 and expanded to locations in six states.
“Gen-Xers were making decisions,” Meredith noted, “and making them for too wide an age range.”