Do you get nostalgic when you hear certain music, watch old TV shows, hear about entertainers or athletes from a bygone era? If you are like most people, you have warm feelings about one specific time in your life. It is the time you were about 12 years old until you were around 22. That particular decade in most people’s lives stands alone as the period of time that will shape your thinking for the rest of your life in terms of what you like and don’t like. We call it the coming of age period.

Why is the coming of age important in marketing? If we can determine the age of our target market (what we call age demographics), we know who and what they will respond to based on what was popular when they were in that decade. If you think I am joking, take a look at the Super Bowl ads that will play on Sunday. Marketers are very careful about who they use as spokespeople in their ads. They also choose the music that is used, the images and icons that are carefully flashed in front of you. It is all to get you to have good feelings about what they are selling. You associate the era of your coming of age with the brand and, bingo! You are buying the product they are selling because it just feels good.

This has been going on as long as product commercials have been produced. We gravitate to a time in our lives when we were growing up. It determines our tastes and preferences for the rest of our lives.

The new era of invasive demographic slicing is upon us. That is what is happening when you use a web browser, a smart phone, a smart assistant (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant), or any other device connected to the internet. Some assumptions will be made about you based on what you search, listen to or ask in a voice-query. The ads you see on the internet are based on your searches and inquiries. It is why this is such a powerful marketing tool. Look for it to become more so. We are not far from tailor-made ads for the same product using different age demographic icons to reach a broader market. For instance, if I ask Siri what years the TV show "Full House” ran, I would find out it played from 1987-1995. The assumption is that I was between the ages of 12-22 at the time the show ran and it will push an ad for a product which plays a song from that era, like the Whitney Houston song, "I Wanna Dance With Somebody” to see if I take the bait. But if I were to search for the show "The Office,” which ran from 2005-2013 – a decade later, I may get the same product pushed to me with the song "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” by Taylor Swift. We are not too far away from your smart TV playing a different Super Bowl ad for you than it does for me.

Of course there has been a lot of pushback on the big tech companies that thin slice all of our likes and dislikes and makes these marketing assumptions about us. People have awakened to the fact that marketers want to figure out their preferences so they can get products and services in front of the people they believe are likely to buy it. It is nothing new. In 1984, when Pepsi signed Michael Jackson to promote their New Generation campaign, they were aiming for a specific demographic they knew the King of Pop would resonate with, they just didn’t have the internet to help define the target market for them. The reality is, until we stop buying stuff, the technology will advance to figure us out and keep pushing brands our way that appeal to our nostalgic little decade.