If you had to guess, wouldn’t you think this guy

would believe the best way to market to people like him, would be to hire people like him?
Wrongo - Chemo Sapiens!

The New York Times recently reported on Lee’s (edit: the guy pictured) remarks at a big ad world confab. He seems to have said that the key to getting with it in the New World Order of advertising-marketing is hiring lots of youngsters and giving them more or less free rein to invent the future.

I’ve read one excellent management book in my life. Read it more than once. It was written by Tom Peters. I liked it so well I had the four managers that reported to me read it and we discussed it one chapter at a time. That was about 30 years ago. Every once in a while, I’ll bump up against his writing and he is still railing away.

He seems pretty cool, sent me a cap once. And he’s Sixty+.

I normally avoid reading about marketing to boomers because it’s just too big a topic and unless you are in marketing, it’s pretty boring stuff. But there have been enough posts and comments on this blog others I read about marketing to us, that his reaction struck a chord.

Here’s what Peters thinks (about marketing to boomers):
Awful.
Dumb.
Disgraceful.
Insane.
Stupid.
Pitiful.
Embarrassing.
It fits right in here! I’ve been all those things.

A couple weeks ago, I approached Valueclick to start putting ads on my site. Turns out, I wasn’t the right “fit” for their advertisers. Their loss. I think they are waiting for me to get over 10,000 readers a day.

There may be a couple dozen individual bloggers - without a political agenda - that write for boomers. Most of them The great ones are in my blog roll.

Smart marketers would have a whole houseful of geezers yapping away if they really wanted to be successful.

I’m working on Sergey and Brin, so I’ll leave it to Peters to work on Clow. While I’m pissing in the wind, he can be pissing in Clow’s ear.

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Tags: boomer marketing, tom peters