Anyone who has spent more than a modicum of time in advertising will have noticed that it is an industry which tends to skew young. Sometimes by design. But often by choice.
It’s an industry which, on the whole, prizes the new over the old. New media channels, new creative technology and new people. Advertising grew up in the Western mind where there is a preference for new and young.
However, older consumers typically have the most money and a growing influence on their children and grandchildren’s purchasing decisions. And yet, there are precious few older creatives in the industry producing work for this important demographic cohort.
Born the Agency, B&T’s reigning Independent Agency with fewer than 50 Employees and a finalist again at the 2026 B&T Awards, presented by Rokt, has launched Seasoned.
Seasoned is a new creative agency. It will be initially supported by Born The Agency, but with the ambition to grow into a fully independent agency, with its own clients, people and creative output. It’s only looking to hire staff with more than 35 years of experience.
To find out more about the new business, B&T caught up with Shawn Griffiths, the newly minted managing partner of Seasoned by Born and David Coupland, Born the Agency’s co-founder and strategy director.
Perhaps the first and most important question is why there are so few businesses operating to specifically serve this consumer audience.
“I was gobsmacked,” said Griffiths, who departed his role as the general manager of Unity Bank to launch Seasoned.
“It’s crazy. It’s a lucrative market, an expanding market. That’s where all the time and the money is. I would rather have someone that’s had 30-odd years experience selling to me — it doesn’t need to go through a filter, it doesn’t need to be validated. But it’s so simple and so obvious that you wonder why no one has done it before.”
To an extent, media owners — particularly newspapers and magazine publishers — have dominated industry conversations around the value of older consumers.
Earlier this year, Powered by Nine found that Australians aged 55 to 64 — dubbed the “super consumer” segment — are becoming the country’s most consequential financial decision-makers. Currently $120 billion changes hands between generations in Australia every year; over the next two decades that figure is projected to hit $5.4 trillion.
Last year, Are Media found that women over 50 are set to inherit more than two-thirds of that $5 trillion wealth transfer as they outlive male partners and are living longer themselves.
“There’s nuances to the market and the way that we view ourselves,” said Griffiths.
“If you’ve got someone who’s 20 or 30 writing to sell to a 55-plus market, they’re going to miss a trick. You can get a bunch of 55-plus people together and we can joke about looking old, ageing badly and it’s funny. Someone younger says it and we bristle. You’re having a go at my autonomy, my capabilities and you’re ageing me prematurely… There’s a real importance to get messaging right. If you miss this market, you miss by a long way because you can actually piss them off without even knowing and that is commercially very costly.”
There are dedicated agencies serving clients across a range of demographics. That honour has not as readily been extended to older consumers, according to Coupland because of the way creative agencies can often think.
“There is a self-importance in general to believing that you know all the answers because you are a creative agency,” he said.
“It’s so limiting with creative opportunities but also generally how beautifully interesting this industry can be if you focus on connection and storytelling appropriately.”
Griffiths and Coupland have been known to each other for some time. Unity Bank was Born’s first retained client and the agency developed its repositioning as ‘The Bank That Works for Workers’.
“Shawn and I developed a working relationship based on what the belief of what we saw working first-hand, our idea of narrative impacting the outcome was shown in Unity before it showed anywhere else,” Coupland said.
Griffiths told Coupland about an idea — GOPSTAs (Gorgeous Old Person, Second Time Around) — born from a family vacation and seeing the disconnect between how older audiences are marketed to and their actual lived experience.
That kernel of an idea became Seasoned by Born.
“It was such a rich idea and it opened my eyes to it for the first time,” said Coupland.
“It’s a sweet spot. It’s flipping the script,” added Griffiths.
“Australia is about to go through the biggest transfer of wealth anywhere in the world because of the property boom. This generation is not only healthier, wealthier and more empowered — that might be patronising language — than any generation before it. But it’s absolutely underserved through it’s creative,” said Coupland.
“There’s also a big ageism issue with talent in the industry. If you’re a 50-year-old creative director and you happen to be out of work because you’ve been in the big holdcos who have been shedding staff, where do you go next? Where does that talent end up?”
Seasoned by Born, the pair said, will offer its services in a range of different ways. And in large part, they’re waiting to see how the market will react. It could, for instance operate within a broader agency village. It could be added as a service line.
The obvious sectors for the pair include travel, with more specialist experiences for older people emerging to the market, as well as retirement or assisted living and super funds. But Coupland added that there are opportunities for all types of brands — online dating, for instance.
“We’re excited by being able to go and find additional value for clients they’ve never considered this market before,” said Coupland.
“There’s upside for brands that have focused down so much that they’ve never looked up. It’s time for them, everyone, to start looking up a bit.”
We heartily agree.
