An elderly man fires off a tirade at a child who has asked “grandad” to return a mud-covered football that has landed on his gleaming car. He is then seen eating a microwave dinner for one and chuckling, with the now-deflated ball pinned to the table next to him by a large kitchen knife.
The TV advert for the Scotland-based Strathmore Foods, maker of the McIntosh of Strathmore ready meals stocked by most big supermarket chains, has been identified in a report by the UK advertising watchdog as showing an “offensive” portrayal of older people – by stereotyping them as grumpy and intolerant, and implying many are lonely and isolated.
The report by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) says too many brands are behind the times when it comes to the issue of ageing in advertising.
It says older people feel they are bombarded with adverts for funeral services, care homes and mobility aids. Many older people feel invisible because a lot of advertising reduces them to outdated stereotypes, the report says.
A survey and focus groups involving 4,000 adults of all ages found that more than a third thought people over the age of 55 tended to be negatively stereotyped in ads.
Almost half said ads that showed older people as unable to understand or use technology were potentially offensive.
More than a fifth of those surveyed believed that depicting ageing as something to be “fought”, especially in beauty advertising, had the potential to cause harm by influencing how an older person saw themselves, or how society might view and treat them.
Focus groups comprising a range of different age groups were shown 34 ads featuring older people made by brands including Amazon, Cadbury, Land Rover, L’Oréal, Pure Cremation and Tesco.
An ad by the Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, which used the strapline “Parents don’t get B2B”, was considered the most likely to cause harm. “If you think other people think you are stupid and that’s how you come across, I don’t think that is good for self-esteem,” said one female participant.
An ad for the fashion brand JD Williams that featured older women in bright, colourful and “trendy” clothes used the strapline “Feeling more girlfriend than grandma”.
“I can imagine some older women seeing beauty ads and thinking the goal for women is to look 20 years younger,” said one participant. “As if that is what will make you feel happier. This could be quite harmful because it forces an ideal on older women. It is kind of pushing the idea that they should aim to look young.”
Some of those surveyed felt it was a positive and atypical depiction of older women, while others felt it reinforced the idea that ageing was a negative thing and that women were not going to look or feel good unless they tried to fight the process.
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Nearly half of those surveyed said ads using humour at the expense of older people were likely to cause offence. And more than a third said they found stereotypical portrayals of older people, such as always being wealthy, grumpy or only mixing with older people, to be irritating.
Survey respondents also raised concerns about how ads were targeted, saying they were frequently shown promotions for “end-of-life” services – such as funeral or cremation services, life insurance and care homes – in media that supposedly drew a higher proportion of older people than others, such as daytime TV.
And 44% of those surveyed believed older people were either underrepresented or not represented at all in ads, particularly in categories such as fashion, beauty, technology and household goods.
Kam Atwal, the research lead at the ASA, said: “As a society, we’re living longer, richer and more varied lives. Our research reveals that some of today’s portrayals of older people in advertising are not being received positively, and that the public wants ads to better reflect the varied lives older people lead today.”
Strathmore has been approached for comment.
