The over-50s market is where the money is, says Ageist founder David Stewart
As a jet-setting photographer, Stewart lived the high life in the 1980s, until ‘digital changed everything in the 2000s’. That is when he stumbled upon a market that was being largely ignored. He now runs the Ageist media company that focuses on people blazing new trails in later life
Small-town boy I was born in a suburb outside Cleveland, Ohio, in 1958. We moved to Rochester, New York, when I was four, and I lived there until the summer of fifth grade. I spent the rest of my childhood in a farm town called Geneseo, south of Rochester. There were about 5,000 people in the town. There were fewer than 100 people in my high school graduating class. Most of them still live in that town. It was a lovely place to grow up.
School’s out My mum was a single mum. She got divorced when I was in the fifth grade, which was quite rare back then. Then my father was killed in a car accident three years later. So it was just me, my mum and my younger brother.
I didn’t really like high school. I was quiet and they thought I wasn’t very smart. But I knew that wasn’t the case. To prove them wrong, I did two years in engineering school studying mechanical engineering, and it’s still the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I got honours there but I felt I wasn’t really being educated, so I tried to get into their industrial design school but they told me I had no aptitude for anything creative. So I left and moved to Boston.
There’s this group of people out there aged 50 and above who spend a lot of money and yet nobody talks to them. And they’re usually depicted like they’re in need of immediate medical attention, rather than looking like me and my friends.
Photo finish I enrolled in Boston University and did a degree in political science – I wanted a liberal arts degree, but because it had the word “science” in it I thought it would be a better fit for me. It was a ridiculous decision. But going to a liberal arts school is about one-tenth the work of going to an engineering school, so I had all this extra time. I studied photography at a little technical school pretty much every night for about two years. I graduated and, as only a 22-year-old can do, I declared myself a photographer.
The big time I had a lot of success early on. I had my first full-page ad in Vogue when I was 23 or 24. And then I moved to Paris. That was the big time – or at least I thought it was. I was a young photographer from America and everybody wanted to meet me. It was the early 1980s and I was going to nightclubs like Les Bains Douches.
Eventually I ran out of money and had to leave. So I moved to New York, and that was the real big time. I lived in a loft in Tribeca and things were pretty wild. I went to Studio 54 a few times but I was more into the punk rock scene, so it was CBGBs, Mudd Club, stuff like that.
Fly boy In New York, nobody cares about anything you’ve done before. The only thing that matters is what you’ve done in New York. So I had to start at the bottom again. I did a little work at Interview, where I met Andy Warhol. Then I started working for magazines like Glamour, Mademoiselle, Esquire and GQ.
I also started doing a lot of advertising work. I worked all over the world for a while. I got an apartment in Paris but I was mostly working in New York so I was commuting back and forth. That was nuts. My circle would be New York, Paris, LA, sometimes Tokyo. And it was really great. But that’s not the healthiest of lifestyles.
Grounded When I was 48 or 49, I was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease. So that was the end of the travelling. I spent the better part of a year in a hospital being essentially a science project. They tried all kinds of increasingly severe drugs on me, and eventually they took my spleen out, which seemed like a radical move. But with the combination of taking that out and calming my whole lifestyle down, the disease just went away.
Picture this From around 2007 onwards, photography started to change dramatically. Digital changed everything. Magazines, that whole ecosystem, just slowly dissolved. So I found myself in my mid-50s, going to see art buyers and they were telling me things like, “You’re thinking too much. Just take a picture and make it look pretty.” And I would be like, “But do we really want to market the thing like that? That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
The folly of youth I was hired for a campaign in 2014 for a big American cellphone company by the pre-eminent youth marketing agency in the United States. It was a two-month, seven-figure contract. I was going around the country and taking pictures of good-looking young people who used the network for these billboards. And in the course of taking the pictures I discovered that 59 (out of 60 people) were on their parents’ contract.
So I told the guy who was in charge of the account and he said, “Yeah, we know that.” And I said, “Did you tell the client that?” “Oh, no, no, no. We don’t tell them that.” And I said, “Well, why did you just take two months of my life and spend a lot of money to market to people who don’t buy a product?” And he says, “We sell to younger people. Because that’s what we know how to do.” That was the light-bulb moment.
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The age gap I started researching, and what the statistics told me was that there’s this group of people out there aged 50 and above who have a lot of money and who spend a lot of money and yet nobody talks to them. And they’re usually depicted like they’re in need of immediate medical attention, rather than looking like me and my friends. I realised there was a massive opportunity, and the idea for Ageist grew out of that.
We started our newsletter about five years ago with 50 friends on an email list. Now it’s got more like a 100,000 readers. We just started a new podcast. We do increasingly online community events. So now we’re this global thing. But mostly we go back to the origin story: we have an understanding of this group of people that other people don’t.
There’s this real dissonance between the way they [the over 50s] feel internally and the way they see themselves reflected in the world.
High hopes We frame what we do in an inspirational and an aspirational way. Recently, we featured Helga Hengge, who was the first German woman to climb Everest. We say, OK, you’re probably not going to climb Everest, and that’s all right. But here are the other things she does that you can aspire to. This is what she eats, how she interacts with the world. This is how she stays open and curious. This is why she’s not a fossil. And you can do that.
Asia calling I was a keynote speaker at the Global Wellness Summit in Singapore, in 2019. I love coming to Asia. There’s a forward-thinking awareness of health and wellness that seems much more mass culture than it is in the US. There also seems to be more respect for people who are older, and a respect for wisdom. I’m looking to move to a point where about 25 per cent of our content is sourced out of Asia.
What I like about Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai is the compression. Things are compressed and people are compressed, and it forces this innovation and energy. The openness to new ideas is remarkable. We just interviewed (Hong Kong-based textile tycoon and philanthropist) Ronna Chao, who’s amazing. And Asia is filled with people like that.
Open up One of the things that unites the people we feature in Ageist is a positive outlook on the future and a sense of openness. Curiosity is key. If you’re incurious, you’re hopeless. There’s also an awareness of the importance of health, fitness and wellness.
And there’s often a sense of fearlessness. They tend to feel quite empowered, either physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually. That’s why all that messaging saying there’s something wrong with them really pisses them off. There’s this real dissonance between the way they feel internally and the way they see themselves reflected in the world.
Shooting stars Once in a while we might do a movie star or a famous musician, but generally the people we feature are the North Stars hidden in plain sight. They’re all around you, but they’re invisible to you and they may not even be able to see themselves as being like that – but we can see them.
