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PARIS, France / International Herald Tribune / Culture / January 22, 2009
By Mary Blume
This is the one time of year when French newspaper headlines feature older citizens with awful tales of heatstroke and neglect, real downers when we should see them as the most vibrant segment of the population: a booming market, and these days there's nothing better than that.
Absolutely, says
Jean-Paul Tréguer, founder and chief executive of France's first and only marketing, advertising and consulting agency devoted to oldies,
Senioragency. With its headquarters opposite Montmartre cemetery ("I don't look," says Tréguer), the company has branches as far as Sydney and Tréguer is also a partner in
www.seniorplanet.fr, a Web site that was floated this month on the French stock exchange. The elderly, he says, are not to be pitied or patronized but wooed.
As a huge market representing one-third of the French population (the other two-thirds are equally divided between under 25 and 25-to-50 year-olds), seniors are ready for courtship. The problem, Tréguer says, is convincing younger ad executives: "That's the challenge, entering a room where 80 percent of the people are saying why am I here, what's so interesting about people who are 50-plus. I do 80 to 100 seminars and conferences a year all over the world, evangelizing, explaining how important this target group is, making it sexy."
Not easy. One way to deal with "le papy boom" (the granddad boom) is not to call it that. Senior citizen, a phrase used in the United States, wouldn't do in France either, Tréguer claims; just senior for the over-50s is better, and a grand word it is.
The earliest use of senior applied to experienced Roman legionnaires, he says in one of his books on the subject. In France it became seigneur, and you can't do better than that.
True, but the word also has its grizzly connotations. Take the bank chairman presented with a lucrative plan to cash in on seniors, a perfect plan until the chairman realized that at the age of 56 he was one of them and quashed it at once. In a country where no one forgets de Gaulle's terrible phrase, "la vieillesse est un naufrage"
(old age is like a sinking ship), it isn't always easy to make the shipwreck into a love boat and Tréguer himself can only reply, wanly, that de Gaulle's words might inspire seniors to live it up, and spend, while they can.
Tréguer, who recently turned 50, was making quarterly trips to New York, where he was on the board of an American agency, when in 1989 he had a chance Friday night drink with a man from the
AARP, once known as the American Association of Retired Persons. The man started telling him about this powerful group. "At the time I was a normal advertising manager who thought life was over at 50. This was like a revelation. On the Saturday morning I went to a bookshop and bought everything I could find on the subject.
"When I returned to Paris on Monday I had read three books. I was very excited and went to our Monday afternoon board meeting and said we will focus on seniors. My partners were very negative and told me to take a week off."
Tréguer persisted, educating himself, making contacts and in 1993 writing "Le Senior Marketing," now in its fourth edition and the first European book on the subject. In September Senioragency will celebrate its 10th year, and the best, Tréguer says, is yet to be: "My next objective is the U.S."
He doesn't expect that French seniors will ever have the political clout of the AARP or that they would enjoy the often sardonic British magazine
The Oldie or fall into the wide embrace of Britain's
Saga company, with its financial services, digital radio, group tours and its own cruise ships. French seniors snap up cruises but don't like to group together on land.
Still, they are an alluring market with 50 percent of France's disposable income, although ad agencies only allot them 3.8 percent of their budgets, Tréguer says. "The problem is that ad agencies in general are obsessed by their creative image. Their campaigns are to promote the agency, to make it famous, to win a gold lion at the Cannes advertising festival. We take another direction, which is what the consumers of that generation like to see. They are not looking for a creative image about funerals or humor about incontinence pads. What they are looking for is solutions."
Tréguer's chief weapon is television infomercials. Seniors are the main audience for daytime TV, when advertising is a lot less costly than in prime time. His infomercials are shorter than American ones because of French restrictions on advertising time and the audience's impatient attention span. "Speaking to mature customers is speaking to the most experienced customers," Tréguer says. "They have 40 to 50 years of consumption behind them. You have to know the language and values of their generational cohort and then you will find the right words, the right heroes to speak to them."
Subjects such as erectile dysfunction and long-term care are made more palatable by an educational approach and aging, well-known spokesmen. Robert Hossein, an actor-director, has done wonders for a brand of hearing aid, and in an earlier ad, Tréguer got the yachtsman Eric Tabarly to pitch a car insurance company, with a resulting 68 percent increase in business despite the query from Tréguer's teenage sons, "Who is that old geezer?"
The Internet has even more potential, Tréguer says, because on it a senior can be as old as he or she likes. "Nobody is saying, 'hey old guy, this isn't for you.' The fact that a 50-plus person masters sophisticated technologies means that he is modern, he is in charge. It's a kind of magic. For younger people it's convenient, for seniors it's magic. That's why they spend so much time on the Web."
Click here to visit seniorplanet.fr
The 50-plus market is the fastest-growing segment on the Web, with an annual growth rate of 25 percent. Tréguer's ad-filled magazine-style Web site,
seniorplanet.fr, had two million hits in the first quarter of 2005. If you ignore seniors you are ignoring demographics, Tréguer maintains. He expands the never-very-convincing "50 is the new 30" to a totally startling "youth is passé."
This leads to the small question of how to track down this attractive market. One way is by people's first names. "My first name is Jean-Paul and I was born in 1955," Tréguer says. "I found on the Web that the highest number of Jean-Pauls was in 1954. Now it is disappearing."
Likewise, a Paulette or a Monique would probably be in Tréguer's favorite generational cohort in France while a Kevin would not. None of the first names inspired by TV series and celebrity magazines are ready for the Zimmer frame, and as for the really weird latest popular names they are more corporate than conventional: Lexus, Armani, Oréal, Ikea. They are booming on both sides of the Atlantic, so future marketing experts may have to puzzle over exactly where they come from, but not when.
Copyright © 2009 the International Herald Tribune
Absolutely, says Jean-Paul Tréguer, founder and chief executive of France's first and only marketing, advertising and consulting agency devoted to oldies, Senioragency. With its headquarters opposite Montmartre cemetery ("I don't look," says Tréguer), the company has branches as far as Sydney and Tréguer is also a partner in www.seniorplanet.fr, a Web site that was floated this month on the French stock exchange. The elderly, he says, are not to be pitied or patronized but wooed.
As a huge market representing one-third of the French population (the other two-thirds are equally divided between under 25 and 25-to-50 year-olds), seniors are ready for courtship. The problem, Tréguer says, is convincing younger ad executives: "That's the challenge, entering a room where 80 percent of the people are saying why am I here, what's so interesting about people who are 50-plus. I do 80 to 100 seminars and conferences a year all over the world, evangelizing, explaining how important this target group is, making it sexy."
Not easy. One way to deal with "le papy boom" (the granddad boom) is not to call it that. Senior citizen, a phrase used in the United States, wouldn't do in France either, Tréguer claims; just senior for the over-50s is better, and a grand word it is.
The earliest use of senior applied to experienced Roman legionnaires, he says in one of his books on the subject. In France it became seigneur, and you can't do better than that.
True, but the word also has its grizzly connotations. Take the bank chairman presented with a lucrative plan to cash in on seniors, a perfect plan until the chairman realized that at the age of 56 he was one of them and quashed it at once. In a country where no one forgets de Gaulle's terrible phrase, "la vieillesse est un naufrage" (old age is like a sinking ship), it isn't always easy to make the shipwreck into a love boat and Tréguer himself can only reply, wanly, that de Gaulle's words might inspire seniors to live it up, and spend, while they can.
Tréguer, who recently turned 50, was making quarterly trips to New York, where he was on the board of an American agency, when in 1989 he had a chance Friday night drink with a man from the AARP, once known as the American Association of Retired Persons. The man started telling him about this powerful group. "At the time I was a normal advertising manager who thought life was over at 50. This was like a revelation. On the Saturday morning I went to a bookshop and bought everything I could find on the subject.
"When I returned to Paris on Monday I had read three books. I was very excited and went to our Monday afternoon board meeting and said we will focus on seniors. My partners were very negative and told me to take a week off."
Tréguer persisted, educating himself, making contacts and in 1993 writing "Le Senior Marketing," now in its fourth edition and the first European book on the subject. In September Senioragency will celebrate its 10th year, and the best, Tréguer says, is yet to be: "My next objective is the U.S."
He doesn't expect that French seniors will ever have the political clout of the AARP or that they would enjoy the often sardonic British magazine The Oldie or fall into the wide embrace of Britain's Saga company, with its financial services, digital radio, group tours and its own cruise ships. French seniors snap up cruises but don't like to group together on land.
Still, they are an alluring market with 50 percent of France's disposable income, although ad agencies only allot them 3.8 percent of their budgets, Tréguer says. "The problem is that ad agencies in general are obsessed by their creative image. Their campaigns are to promote the agency, to make it famous, to win a gold lion at the Cannes advertising festival. We take another direction, which is what the consumers of that generation like to see. They are not looking for a creative image about funerals or humor about incontinence pads. What they are looking for is solutions."
Tréguer's chief weapon is television infomercials. Seniors are the main audience for daytime TV, when advertising is a lot less costly than in prime time. His infomercials are shorter than American ones because of French restrictions on advertising time and the audience's impatient attention span. "Speaking to mature customers is speaking to the most experienced customers," Tréguer says. "They have 40 to 50 years of consumption behind them. You have to know the language and values of their generational cohort and then you will find the right words, the right heroes to speak to them."
Subjects such as erectile dysfunction and long-term care are made more palatable by an educational approach and aging, well-known spokesmen. Robert Hossein, an actor-director, has done wonders for a brand of hearing aid, and in an earlier ad, Tréguer got the yachtsman Eric Tabarly to pitch a car insurance company, with a resulting 68 percent increase in business despite the query from Tréguer's teenage sons, "Who is that old geezer?"
The Internet has even more potential, Tréguer says, because on it a senior can be as old as he or she likes. "Nobody is saying, 'hey old guy, this isn't for you.' The fact that a 50-plus person masters sophisticated technologies means that he is modern, he is in charge. It's a kind of magic. For younger people it's convenient, for seniors it's magic. That's why they spend so much time on the Web."
Click here to visit seniorplanet.fr
The 50-plus market is the fastest-growing segment on the Web, with an annual growth rate of 25 percent. Tréguer's ad-filled magazine-style Web site, seniorplanet.fr, had two million hits in the first quarter of 2005. If you ignore seniors you are ignoring demographics, Tréguer maintains. He expands the never-very-convincing "50 is the new 30" to a totally startling "youth is passé."
This leads to the small question of how to track down this attractive market. One way is by people's first names. "My first name is Jean-Paul and I was born in 1955," Tréguer says. "I found on the Web that the highest number of Jean-Pauls was in 1954. Now it is disappearing."
Likewise, a Paulette or a Monique would probably be in Tréguer's favorite generational cohort in France while a Kevin would not. None of the first names inspired by TV series and celebrity magazines are ready for the Zimmer frame, and as for the really weird latest popular names they are more corporate than conventional: Lexus, Armani, Oréal, Ikea. They are booming on both sides of the Atlantic, so future marketing experts may have to puzzle over exactly where they come from, but not when.
Copyright © 2009 the International Herald Tribune
