Rod Stewart, Midlifers, Music Festivals - and Wine Marketing
There's an old saying that it's much more cost effective to keep an existing customer, than to recruit a new one. A lesson that's relevant to both the music and the wine industries.
Imagine, if you will, a television comedy sketch show from 50 years ago. Try to overlook the racism, misogyny and, let’s say, general insensitivity of much of the humour, and focus on the sketch about the music festival.
We’re watching British TV, so the model is the home-grown Glastonbury which began life in 1970 and now attracts an audience of 210,000, but it could be any Woodstock-inspired, sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll-with-mud-and-tents-and-questionable-sanitation type event.
The humour of the sketch, which has the 1970s studio audience rolling in the aisles, is based around a man old enough to be many of the festival-goers’ great-grandfather, coming on stage with his band and croaking ‘do you think I’m sexy?’
Boomers on stage
Last weekend, a few months after his 80th birthday and fresh from a residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Rod Stewart played Glastonbury to what the media described as “massive crowds”. Nobody was laughing - any more than they were at another of this year’s star performers, Neil Young, whose own 80th will be in November.
I thought about Stewart and Young and 63 year-old Jarvis Cocker whose band, Pulp, was a highly-welcome surprise act (check out the new album), when reading the statement by US wine marketing guru Ben Salisbury that “If your wine brand still talks like it’s selling to Baby Boomers, you’re already irrelevant.”
I usually strongly agree with Salisbury, but think he - and others - are being rather too simplistic when they say ‘focus on the young’.
The organisers of Glastonbury don’t publish data about attendees’ ages, but most estimates are that the average has climbed from 25 to 40. A recent article in the i Paper revealed that 40% of UK festival goers are now over 44, and focused on the 60-something ‘midlifers’ who enjoyed the event in 2024.
Judging by the footage of the crowds bopping or swaying to Rod Stewart, I’d say that this year, some of those younger midlifers’ brought their parents. The banner reading ‘Grannies for Rod’ was not the only evidence of fans who would have remembered dancing to his ‘Do You Think I’m Sexy’ hit in 1978.
But, as the cameras also revealed, there were also plenty of 20-30 year olds having a great time, just as there were in previous years in the audience for other antique ‘legends’ like Paul McCartney and Elton John.
Festivals and wine
All these numbers are very reminiscent of the data I’ve seen about the wine industry; consumers are spread across a wide range of ages, but they are getting steadily older - if only, in the case of Glastonbury, because of the hefty £378 / $520 ticket price and the belief by today’s sexagenarians and septuagenarians that they have the right to enjoy at least some of the same lifestyles as the young.
There is another parallel. Music festivals are losing traction. This year, there are just under 600 in the UK. In 2019, according to the Association of Independent Festivals, there were around 900. The picture is similar in the US which has lost Jay-Z’s Made in America, Chicago’s Pitchfork, Delaware’s Firefly, Atlanta’s Music Midtown and Florida’s Kickoff Jam.
Who’s your target?
This raises some interesting marketing questions. If you are running a festival, who do you talk to? And what language do you use? How do you reach the people who want to see Olivia Rodrigo, the 22 year-old American headliner who closed and ‘stole the show’, and 66 year-old Robert Smith of The Cure with whom she performed a couple of duets - as well as those Rod Stewart and Neil Young fans?
The answer in an age of digital marketing and social media, as any modern politician will tell you, is not to use a single weapon; you need to direct a range of messages towards the targets where they will have the most impact.
Learn from Trump
As Campaign Now noted after the 2024 US elections,
“A defining feature… was the Trump campaign’s use of behavioral targeting…Trump’s team combined public voter files with purchasable data from credit-card companies, internet service providers, and third-party data brokers to match voters with the device IDs of their smartphones, tablets, and computers. This allowed the campaign to deliver highly customized digital ads directly to individual voters based on their online activity and consumer behavior.”
Yes, Trump did a great job of reaching out to young voters - by initiatives like going on Joe Rogan podcasts - but he sure as hell didn’t overlook all those undecided Boomers, and everyone in between.
And canny wine businesses, whatever their political persuasion, would be wise to adopt a similar strategy.
Different strokes
Of course, even the biggest wineries don’t have a fraction of the marketing funds or data analytical skills of a presidential campaign, but they can affordably use different channels to talk to a range of different people.
TikTok, for example, offers the means to engage with Olivia Rodrigo fans who would never see the Facebook posts aimed at the Rod Stewart-loving Boomers - and vice versa.
Similarly, most of the people who saw Lady Gaga’s clips promoting Dom Perignon probably weren’t the ones who pore over tasting notes and scores for the Champagne in the Wine Spectator and Decanter.
Obviously, to Salisbury’s point, the language and imagery you use on any of these platforms is crucial and there’s a high chance that asking the same person to produce the material for 25 year-olds and 75 year-olds will be, well, sub-optimal.
But, over time, imagining that you should address all your marketing at one age group - or totally ignore another may feel like laughing at the idea of someone’s grand-dad headlining a rock festival back in the 1970s.
Apart from writing these posts and working on le Grand Noir and K’AVSHIRI, the two wine brands I helped conceive and co-own, I also offer strategy and marketing consultancy and a range of public speaking. If you think I can be of help to your business, or would just like to get in touch, please contact me.