Last week I was walking on Bloor Street past the hoardings on the new Royal Ontario Museum, the kickstart of their second make-good to right the wrongs that architect Daniel Libeskind inflicted on the ROM in 2007.
Like many hoardings, these showed what we’ll enjoy inside and out when the new OpenROM expansion is finished in 2027. It was an elysian vision of happy families of many colours, gender identities, and physical frailties, all enjoying the biggest museum in the land.
But what there wasn’t many of was people of many ages.
Indeed, there were only 5 people with gray hair, the same number of people who were in wheelchairs.
Five out of 329. One point five per cent.
This is not only wrong, it’s dumb.
After doing my headcount of people portrayed on the ROM’s hoardings, I went inside to see what kind of people visited it. There, I spotted a loud horde of oldsters among the packs of school kids, all silent on their phones, cramming the entrance.
Indeed, in 2019, 16.7% of people who visited the ROM were over 65. This represents a 19.9% increase from 2011 to 2016. Odds are that percentage is even bigger today, as the Boomers bulge their way through the things that old people do en masse, like visit museums.
So why doesn’t the ROM’s marketing reflect their audiences? There were lots of Black and South Asians and mixed race people, and people living with disabilities, both on the hoardings and in the museum.
We could call this ageism, but perhaps it’s aspirational marketing based on age.
Twenty years ago, Jean and I started a mid-life women’s marathon training group called JeansMarines to run the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C. We were made up largely of women 40 to 60 (plus a few good men.) They had money to spend and the motivation to spend it. So we approached Nike to be our gear sponsor. They weren’t interested. We went at them again. Silence.
A friend of mine who worked at Nike’s head office in Portland, Oregon, told me not to bother because JeansMarines was “off brand.” We may have been the people who actually bought Nike gear, but we weren’t what Nike wanted the world to think were the people who bought Nike gear. They were younger, sleeker, waaaaaay cooler.
Branding is funny that way. Jean wrote a column in The Globe and Mail decrying the banks and wealth management firms for urging older people to invest their retirement savings with them, but appealing to people who were 10 to 20 years younger. She noted that after a divorce or a spouse’s death, “70 per cent of women leave their existing financial adviser and take their money to someone they’re more comfortable with.”
Most husbands don’t die in their 40s or 50s, but in their 70s and 80s.
Even retirement residences appeal to people who look to be barely of retirement age. Yet the average age of retirement home residents in Ontario is 86.7. Check out your nearest retirement home online. You will not find anyone anywhere near that age
Maybe marketers would sell more of everything by targeting their best customers and not insulting them with a cloak of invisibility. As the saying goes: “The only natural resource that’s actually growing is older people.”
Meanwhile…
1. Great things with odd names. First, Kilkenomics, the world’s first economics and comedy festival which runs next week in Kilkenny, Ireland. It’s been called “Davos with jokes”, and The Financial Times raved: “I’ve been to a lot of festivals and conferences, but Kilkenomics may be the best. More than that: it felt like democracy.”
Also, The Night Time Industries Association is a growing business lobby for Britain after dark. One of its member groups is the United Kingdom Door Security Association.
2. The Local is writing some amazing stuff. Last week they released a story looking at death rates by neighbourhood across the city (a 12-year gap between Moss Park and Rosedale), and this week a story analyzes calls to 311 by neighbourhood, which they call “the complaint gap.” The Local is a non-profit online magazine covering urban health and social issues in Toronto. Its editor is Tai Hunyh, and it’s a non-profit, so you get a tax receipt when you support it.
3. Do not put our lives in the hands of politicians. This from the wife of one of the world’s most famous politicians who I pray becomes one herself.
4. Finally, a book about money that 8 billion people should read. The Atlas of Finance is a century overdue.
Speaking of life and money, Morgan Housel offers one of his best essays yet, on the trickiness of nostalgia: “The past wasn’t as good as you remember. The present isn’t as bad as you think. The future will be better than you anticipate.”
5. Final flight of the airline magazine. At their best, they were blessed boredom relievers. American Airlines once published an inflight magazine exclusively for their business class customers that was made up entirely of the opening pages of not-yet-published novels by the world’s most famous fiction writers. But mainly they were print versions of TikTok, without the sweet addictive properties. Today, they are gone and soon forgotten.
6. No wonder it’s the largest public library in North America. This week, Mayor Olivia Chow announced that the Toronto Public Library will be open 7 days a week, with extended hours in many of its 100 branches. Chow promised during the mayoral by-election last June that if she won the race, she would open all of the city’s libraries seven days a week. Here are the details.
7. The Empire Strikes Back. The venerable Empire Club, now in its 121st year, is new again. You can now read every Empire Club of Canada speech (all 4,000 of them) from 1903. They’re yours here, from Alexander Graham Bell and Richard Nixon, and Margaret Atwood to Ronald Reagan. Next Friday, Nov. 8, catch their Remembrance Day virtual talk on Canada at War.
8. Stop-Action Lives. Cleaning your glasses is a special skill. Plus, our first 20 years.Plus meeting for a pint every week for 56 years. Plus, Shipbuilding 101. Plus, a robot solos with an orchestra. One of a zillion compilation reels. Jeff Goldbloom speculates with George Bernard Shaw. Plus fueling fast cars, then and now. What the New York City Marathon will be like on Nov. 3 and what Hallowe’en was like in London.
9. Two great unheralded Canadian women. We all remember Ken Taylor, the Canadian Ambassador to Iran who hid American diplomats in our embassy for four months in 1979. He earned global fame. His wife, Patricia Taylor, deserved some of that too. She died in September at age 95 in Ottawa. Patricia Taylor published more than 100 papers on tropical diseases and viral infections, was also an accomplished violinist and ballet dancer, and was a member of the Order of Canada. One of 11 children, Taylor grew up in Townsville, Australia, where her parents – part of the country’s large Chinese community – owned a grocery store.
In August, Maria Tippett, the Canadian art historian with a much bigger reputation in Britain than at home, died at age 79. Said The Globe and Mail’s obituary: “Curious, courageous, determined, Maria Tippett traced the development of Canada’s visual culture in a dozen books, among them warts-and-all biographies of some of the country’s most venerated artists.”
10. Meet the ARC Ensemble. They’re chamber music artists and faculty of the Royal Conservatory of Music. They play music that’s been suppressed, particularly during the Third Reich. So we get to hear for the first time works no one has heard for years. Their next concert is Nov. 10 at 2:00 p.m. Worth the trip to Bloor Street.
11. Blood tests for Alzheimer’s are here. Don’t let the headline fool you. While diagnosing Alzheimer’s is getting much easier, and this blood test is a big leap forward, be sure to read the small print: “There is no single, stand-alone test to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease today. Blood testing is one piece of the diagnostic process.”
12. What I’m liking. Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway, the pen name of John le Carré’s son, Nicholas Cornwell, whose thrilling new thriller is billed as “A John le Carré Novel.” I opened this book with my nose held high. How could the son of God write spy books as good as God? I’m not the only one who thinks this is as good, if not better than what dad could write. The interview and interrogation scenes bring back the best of the old days.
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WHY LIMIT NEXT SUMMER TO ONE ADVENTURE HOLIDAY WHEN YOU CAN HAVE TWO?
If you’re looking for true adventure next summer, Jean and I highly recommend karibu adventures who we went kayaking with off Vancouver Island and then hiking in the Alta Valsesia in the Italian Alps.
Five thumbs up! We hosted a webinar this week with all the details of these trips in all their glory. Here’s the recording to enjoy in the privacy of your own phone. Readers of the Omnium-Gatherum blog save 5%
Onward,
Bob