Opportunity Audience #3: Cross-Gen Viewers
Long-living, milestone-shifting Americans are cohabitating, co-viewing and changing how you should program around story and age
Linda Ong and Sarah Unger are cofounders of Cultique, a strategic advisory that analyzes and translates culture for businesses and brands — including major media and entertainment companies on all platforms. In a special series this week for paid subscribers to The Ankler, the pair highlight three growth audiences that offer major new opportunities for Hollywood. First, they explored the booming group of Bicultural Latinos, and yesterday, Heartland Americans. Today: cross-generational audiences.
In almost every aspect of American life today, age seems to be an inescapable cultural fixation — most dramatically in the recent disruption to this year’s presidential race. For youth, the fear of aging is contradictory: Though tweens obsess over anti-aging skincare, they also wonder if their planet will still be around by the time wrinkles set in. At the same time, they revere their elders — even elevating them as fashion icons and “gran-fluencers.” Millennials, now approaching middle age, are getting press for extreme measures: tech-bro hacks for immortality, a retire-by-40 movement to make sure their best years are fully enjoyed. Gen X faces the unique pull of caring simultaneously for aging parents and kids. And with life expectancy currently hovering around 78 and rising, Boomers’ life spans are cresting to a century: Take Linda’s own 96-year old “firecracker” mom, or how an 80-year-old Mick Jagger pranced miles around SoFi stadium this month.
This spotlight on aging comes at a moment when American culture has never been more receptive to — or at least intrigued by — cross-generational relationships and ideas. After all, there are currently five generations in the workplace: Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z. Gen Alpha, topping out around 14 this year, is close behind (just imagine what the next hit workplace comedy could look like). Fueled by the pandemic, a growing number of people live in multigenerational households. Today, Americans are quite used to living, buying, listening and viewing shoulder-to-shoulder with someone that doesn’t neatly fit into their peer group.
Even Pew Research, the go-to authority on “issues, trends and attitudes shaping the world,” is re-thinking its generational frameworks to be more in step with how people really live. Madison Avenue, too, is shifting focus. Coming out of this spring’s upfront presentations, where Hollywood companies pitch their TV offerings to potential advertisers, a headline in the Wall Street Journal hailed the death of demographics: “Age Doesn’t Matter.”
Although the article explored marketers (finally) embracing a 50+ audience, that’s just replacing one set of eyeballs for another. Simply switching focus from one age group to another is not the answer at a time when a 60-year-old and a 16-year-old may share as many affinities and cultural sensibilities (just scan the moms, dads and grandparents in the Eras Tour crowd) as with their peers. See Max’s Emmy-winning Hacks for a comedic duo whose Boomer-Gen Z age gap fuels their ambitions and material. Although friction and bias abound in the cracks in between age groups (see again, Hacks), the internet has enabled congregation around hubs of fandom that don’t necessarily self-segregate based on age. Streaming algorithms care less about when you were born, and more about what you just watched. Sure, formative life-stage experiences are worthy of acknowledgement, but as people live longer lives, and milestones shift or get disregarded entirely, is segregating by age the wrong way to think about content?
Even in our own work, we see the power of cross-generational thinking firsthand. Linda, who’s on the Boomer/Gen X cusp, complements the elder Millennial perspective of Sarah, and we both get the benefit of mentoring (and reverse mentoring), our mimetic desires reflecting learnings from our age gap. We’ve seen up close how much generational upbringing impacts — and sometimes limits — the thinking of our clients, partners, families and friends.
In part 3 of our Ankler series on opportunity audiences, today we are looking not so much at a particular demographic or audience, but rather at how cross-generational groups are sharing culture, including consumption of entertainment, and thus shifting how stories can be told and served.
Read on to understand:
3 ways studios and streamers can crack the code on cross-generational appeal
The phrase that should set off alarm bells when said by a development executive
The move to “new-stalgia” in TV viewing
The changes in how families live that every programming executive should know
The hit shows already leaning into cross-generational viewing
What shifts in parenting have to do with it
How multi-generational cultural experiences benefit young and old
How new generations redefine life-stage milestones — and how Hollywood can reframe them
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