A metaphor for BIG change from the BIG game

How marketers can get line-of-site into target demographic shifts and trends.

You may have watched a little football this past Sunday. And, if you are a marketer like me, you may have picked up on some ch-ch-ch-changes in the approach from advertisers and the new and important target audience.

That’s right.

Change.

Now, as a result of The Los Angeles Rams winning the game over the Cincinnati Bengals, nothing really changed.

However, as a result of a halftime show featuring hip-hop legends, who had social media abuzz about it being the best halftime show ever, perhaps you were starting to sense the shift in target audience.

The icing on the cake, though, as a predictor of marketing trends?

Well, it was the big game’s commercials that harkened a shift in target market for the first time in a long time that tells us all, as marketers, this one trend and truth. It’s time to start targeting Generation X and Millennials.

You might be thinking….don’t marketers already do this?

Perhaps many do, but many still do not.

Is this trend something to watch because the big brands did it on the biggest Sunday in football?

Yes. Yes it is.

Where is the relevance of this for small businesses or nonprofits?

Let me get to the punchline.

For small and medium sized businesses and non-profits, who can’t afford to do the level of market research, being able to see a shift in target generational demographics like we saw during the Big Game commercials is the best kind of market research, it’s the kind done by others that you too can benefit from.

Now, don’t overreact. You do not need to throw away your current marketing efforts or demographics overnight.

But it might be a good idea to take stock of just who your target age demographic are.

The Big Game ads were culturally different. And a massive dose of nostalgia was your baseline for just which generations have the money that big brands want to target. Austin Powers, The Big Lebowski, Sopranos, Barbie, and classic He-man.

80’s and 90’s music was featured heavily, and while some of it could arguably be chalked up to it’s current cultural resurgence, big brands don’t spend money on cultural resurgence; they spend money to make money. And they’re spending it on the next generation, because while the boomers are still spending, the next generations have come of massive marketing target demographic age.

And if that’s you, like it is me, be prepared to watch your adolescence and early twenties appear in more commercials than existed when Grunge was a movement and reality wasn’t virtual… because it Bites!