Dr. Jim Gentry, Professor of Marketing and Maurice J. and Alice Hollman College Professor presented a paper at the Aging and Society Second International Conference on Aging and Society, November 5-6, hosted by the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC.
 
The paper, “The Denial of Aging in American Advertising: Empowering or Disempowering?” was co-authored with his daughter, Dr. Erin Gentry Lamb. Dr. Lamb is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Humanities in the Center for Literature and Medicine at Hiram College.

In the paper they looked at the portrayal of the elderly in advertising over the last few decades. Their paper drew attention to the fact that marketing has paid relatively little attention to the elderly market, in large part because it was not a lucrative market. The paper specifically looked at the retirement of baby boomers, and the amount of attention that will be paid going forward.

A literature review of content analyses of advertising indicates that the frequency of the portrayal of the elderly is now close to their share of the US population and the nature of the portrayals, at least those seen by the elderly, have become increasingly more positive.

The marketer argued that the positive nature of the portrayals provides self-fulfilling prophecies in terms of encouraging the aging to be more active and vibrant. The humanist argued that this aging denial does not create realistic perspectives of the later stages of aging in which disability and dementia are all too common. Published: November 9, 2012