60-somethings: fish nobody wants to hook

I worry that a world that still feels familiar to me is being bargained out from beneath my feet.

The bargains are being made between media and advertisers. Advertisers pay the media big money to place ads where they will reach the greatest potential number of desired potential customers.

The word “potential” is used twice because fishing for consumers is just that: The lake may have a million fish in it, but if you catch five with any given effort, it has been a good day.

So the advertisers do all they can to maximize the very small percentages with which they must work. It makes them extremely selective. They covet media that can put them in contact with the lucrative 11-year-old female market. They covet media that can place their products before the eyes of 20-year-old males. They twitch happily at the prospect of “owning” that group of media consumers who are 18 to 49 years of age.

They don’t care as much about the 60-plus male market. In fact as a 60-plus male, I feel more or less ignored by the media and advertising world. I resent that, some. I read a story about Paris Hilton going to buy clothes, and in the shop she saw a pair of shoes. They cost $1,000. She bought other stuff, but she argued to the sales staff that they should give her the shoes. When she wore them, she argued, they would be seen by many people who saw Paris wearing them in the newspaper and on television, and those people, loving Paris as they do, would want the shoes too.

They gave her the shoes. I resented that, but only for a moment. We all want to be liked, and I enjoyed a tiny fantasy rush, thinking about people wanting to buy shoes because I wore them. But the moment was washed away by a wave of relief that I am not Paris Hilton.

The feeling of being ignored is not a new one. I noticed it first some years ago, with all the fuss over the Baby Boomers, who as a body were viewed as a huge bulge in the belly of the marketing python. The Baby Boomers were those people born from 1946 to 1964. I was born in 1943. Missed the boat by three years. All that desirability, forfeited in a rush to get born.

It didn’t mean anything at the time. Marketing demographics existed in the 1940s and ‘50s, but only marginally. In those days there were only three television networks, some AM radio stations, and a slowly growing number of FM stations. There wasn’t much media, and only 24 hours in a day, and advertising was totally mainstream. Kids were kids, and were battered by the usual kid fantasies, but when they watched television, they watched what their parents watched. They saw the same movies as their parents, listened to the same radio stations, shopped at the same stores, wore generic kid stuff, because that’s all there was.

By the ‘80s, I was feeling left out and by the ‘90s I knew the only advertisers interested in me were those with products I would use to avoid the sorts of personal embarrassments and discomforts that came with a maturing body.

Now, in the 2000s, I am feeling less ignored than totally deserted. CBS announced it was canceling four shows because their appeal was to people in their 50s. The newspaper story about those cancellations used the word, “geezer.” It tells us 60-somethings all we need to know about our market value.

It was nice, feeling wanted, and I will miss it. But not as much as I fear the disappearance of that world I knew. Marketing and media with their power to target the desirable young people not only generally but specifically gives those people terrific power to shape the world in their desirable images. Carrying that cultural force to its extreme, it means that in my lifetime the First Lady of the United States could be Paris Hilton. I shudder to imagine who the president might be.

Leadership

My first exposure to leadership principles was in a long and comprehensive class in Officer Candidate School at Fort Sill, Okla.

I remember most of the material to this day and as I think about it, and its importance, I wonder why leadership was (and is) not part of the high school curriculum. Leadership was taught indirectly in high school: to do good things, you have to do things good, and if you succeed, people will look up to you.

But the principles were not laid out until Fort Sill. Learning them must have required more motivation than high school could provide. At Fort Sill we were taught that leadership principles were important to staying alive, and so we listened.

Variations on these principles appear in probably hundreds of so-called “leadership” books, but I prefer them as they were presented at Fort Sill, in Army Field Manual 22-100. They were the definitive source on national leadership, because FM 22-100 applied to the soldier’s Commander-in-Chief, the President of the United States.

The first thing I remember about FM 22-100 is how it defined responsibility. A leader, or a commander, is responsible for everything his or her organization does or does not do. Simple as that. It was the “does not do” that got to me then and gets to me now, big-time, because it explains perfectly my own recent conclusion, that winning without principle is the saddest form of defeat, not only for the loser, but for us all.

Responsibility must have been not only the first, but the original, leadership principle, and it was inspired by the need to survive. At some point, there were the original people on this planet, and their original need was to be led through real and constant danger and primal, uninformed, fear. Somebody had to lead. Fascinating, to wonder what spark must have struck in the minds of the few individuals, within those masses, to cause them to believe they must be the ones to lead.

When the spark struck, it made a person instantly different, and distant, and everybody knew it. This person had accepted responsibility, and everybody was glad, because they knew somebody had to do it, and now they had someone to follow.

From responsibility, the original leadership principle, other principles emerged, created by and for people as they desperately needed to be led, and the leaders responding to the need. The leader was strong and brave, but not only that, to his group, the leader seemed to understand things that they didn’t, or couldn’t. He seemed to know the land and the sky and sounds and the wind, and as he grew comfortable in his responsibilities – leaders are scared as hell, too – principles of leadership emerged.

The principles are essentially unchanged today. Authority can be delegated, but responsibility can’t. A leader has courage. A leader has humility. A leader honors and is honored. A leader is alone.

A leader understands that leadership is situational. A leader knows the best he can do is anticipate situations and react quickly in the interest of the people. A leader leads all of the people all of the time. Leaders get people to do things they may not want to do. Leaders take care of their people.

People know a leader when they see one. The principles, after all, were formed from their needs. Leadership principles were the first pencil marks of humanity, on the doorjamb, that measured human growth. The pencil marks are there still, can’t be erased, negotiated or litigated, and if you stand a man against them – mayor, councilman, governor, CEO, educator, clergy, president – you can tell instantly, in your heart, because that is the source of leadership, if the man is a leader or not.