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In 2021, when I was 37, I became a first-time car owner, first-time homeowner and first-time parent within a three-month span. After nearly two decades spent living in wildly expensive cities and focusing on my education and career, a global pandemic ushered in the rise of remote work and allowed me to move out of New York City while keeping a job in media. Under these new circumstances, I—and many people in my peer set—finally found myself with the time, resources and appetite to enter the life stages that my parents’ generation entered a decade younger.
As I met these milestones, I was struck by how much there was to buy to support this drastic lifestyle shift. After relying on public transportation to get around since I was 17, what type of car would I purchase, and who would insure it? After 20 years of only looking as far ahead as each 12-month lease, what kind of home would I buy, and where? What real estate agency would assist me? What bank would handle the loan? Where would I go for renovations, furnishings and upkeep? And in the transition from a “double income, no kids” household to a family of three, the spending opportunities were endless—from prenatal vitamins and maternity clothes to nursery fixtures, kids’ clothes and college funds. And that was before I hit a spendy, post-partum self-image reckoning, with its accompanying skin care, wardrobe, health tech and fitness expenses.
All of that spending should have been easy. Because I was not in my twenties, with its professional and financial precarity, and instead in my late 30s—15 years into a stable career and well-compensated—I had real money to spend in all these new categories. But as I went to choose a car, furnish a home and prepare for a baby with that cash burning a hole in my pocket (metaphorically speaking—I don’t carry cash, I’m not that old), I realized all the brands that should have been competing for my dollars didn’t seem to care all that much about winning my business.
Working in media, I know that the demographics of a publication’s audience are an incredibly important consideration when wooing advertisers to spend their marketing budgets with you. Media execs are incentivized to pursue a younger generation of users, trying to bolster the percentage of 18- to 34-year-olds in their audience so advertising partners know they’ve captured the trendsetters that marketers are so eager to get their products in front of. Older audiences are thought to be less influential and more set in their ways, not as susceptible to building affinities for or joining fandoms around new products. The (false) thinking goes that these consumers don’t have as much sway over others’ purchasing decisions as 20-somethings do and that they already know what product they’re going to buy and what brand they’re going to buy it from now until the end of time, goodbye.