What changes when you stop folding them into a 25+ plan and actually plan for them
Every morning at Arjun Nair’s home, the doorbell rings at least five times.
Not for him. Four of those deliveries are for his father, Raghavan, 68, retired, living in an EMI-free apartment with a stable pension and almost no financial obligations. Between Raghavan and his wife, a typical week sees vitamins, walking shoes, a kitchen gadget, perhaps an online course on stock investing, and on adventurous days, something entirely experimental that nobody in the family knew they needed.
Some of those packages come back, though.
Not because Raghavan can’t afford it. Not because he didn’t want it. But because the product, somewhere in its journey from a brand’s brief to his doorstep, was conceived for someone twenty years younger. The creative showed a 27-year-old. The size guide didn’t account for his frame. The product description assumed a vocabulary he didn’t share.
Here is the part that makes this interesting: Raghavan was in the target audience. The campaign said 25+. He is 68. He qualifies.
He just wasn’t who anyone was thinking about when they wrote the plan.
Being inside the bracket is not the same as being inside the brief.
The representation problem has a planning problem underneath it.
A recent piece in Economic Times Brand Equity called out something the advertising industry has been slow to acknowledge: India’s older consumers are largely absent from brand narratives. They appear occasionally: usually in categories that can’t avoid them, like insurance or joint pain; but as a rule, advertising in India looks and sounds considerably younger than the people who actually hold its purchasing power.
The piece framed this as a representation problem. And it is.
But the reason older consumers are absent from brand narratives is not primarily a creative decision. It is a planning decision, or more accurately, a planning omission.
When a brand targets 25+ or 18+, the 50-year-old, the 60-year-old, and the 68-year-old are all technically covered. They are inside the parameter. But the platform mix, the creative brief, the influencer selection, the OOH site choices, the content genres — all of it is built around the younger end of that bracket. The 50+ consumer receives a campaign that was designed for their child.
They are covered by the numbers. They are not considered in the plan.
That distinction between coverage and consideration is what this piece is about.
The audience inside the bracket that brands keep underestimating.
India has over 140 million people above the age of 60 today. The urban, SEC A segment of this cohort: the one with genuine and growing purchasing power — is expanding faster than the national average. By 2050, this number is expected to double.
Most campaigns that run a 25+ target are, in one sense, already reaching a portion of this audience. But reaching them through a youth-oriented campaign and actually planning for their specific media behaviour, their decision-making process, and their spending patterns are entirely different exercises.
The 30-year-old at the centre of most 25+ briefs is paying an EMI, possibly supporting ageing parents, saving aggressively, and burning through a lifestyle that looks expensive from the outside. Their actual discretionary spend: money available after all obligations, is considerably lower than the number on their payslip.
Raghavan has no EMI. No school fees. No home loan. His pension arrives every month. His children are financially independent. He spent four decades accumulating. He is now, finally, spending on himself, on experiences, on things that make his daily life more comfortable and interesting.
The 55–70 urban cohort in India is, in economic terms, the most debt-free, liability-light, discretionary-rich audience in the country. They are inside your 25+ campaign. They deserve a brief that actually accounts for who they are.
Why does a 25+ plan, when applied to a 65-year-old, produce the wrong results?
When a 50+ consumer is reached through a campaign designed for a 30-year-old, the engagement data looks unflattering. Lower click-through rates. Slower conversions. Higher returns on e-commerce. And the conclusion many planners draw is that this cohort is simply a harder audience to convert.
The diagnosis is wrong because the experiment was wrong.
This cohort didn’t grow up digital — they learned it, largely from their children. First WhatsApp, then YouTube, then UPI, then quick commerce. And because they have the time to explore, they go deeper into each platform than younger audiences typically do.
A 25-year-old scrolls past an ad in under two seconds. Raghavan watches the full video, reads the product description, checks reviews, asks Arjun, watches another video from a different creator, and then decides — sometimes across multiple sessions over multiple days.
That is not low engagement. That is considered engagement. The decision cycle is longer, but the intent when they do act is significantly more durable.
The returns from Raghavan’s orders are not a signal that this audience doesn’t convert. They are the predictable result of serving a 68-year-old a campaign written for someone half his age. He wanted to buy. The plan just wasn’t built to help him buy confidently.
The data looks wrong because the plan was wrong, not the audience.
Culture has already adjusted. The plan is the last thing that hasn’t.
The gap in planning is increasingly hard to justify given what is happening at the cultural level.
Milind Soman, redefining what fitness looks like past 50. Zeenat Aman, building a genuinely engaged following on Instagram well into her 70s. Sameera Reddy, talking openly about grey hair, body image, and the real experience of ageing. Seema Anand, doing long-form cultural storytelling that earns extended, attentive viewership.
The creator economy has made this audience visible in a way that advertising has not. These creators are not reaching a fringe. They are building loyal, high-attention communities that brands in healthcare, BFSI, wellness, travel, and real estate would pay a premium to access, if their plans were built to use them properly.
Right now, a brand running a 25+ campaign might whitelist a 45-year-old wellness creator as part of a broad influencer mix. But the brief, the creative direction, the talking points — all of it is still aimed at the younger end of the audience. The creator’s community of 50+ followers receives a message that wasn’t written for them.
The audience has moved. The creator economy has moved. The media plan is the last thing in this chain that hasn’t caught up
What the plan actually looks like when 50+ is the primary audience.
The clearest way to demonstrate the gap is not to describe it: it is to show what changes when you actually write the brief for this audience instead of folding them into a broader one.
At The Media Ant, we built two campaigns on Ant10, our AI-powered media planning platform, for the same product category: a premium athleisure brand. Same objective — brand awareness. Same six metros. Roughly the same budget.
In the first plan, the primary audience was 25+, SEC A, broadly, how most athleisure campaigns are briefed. In the second, the primary audience was 50+, SEC A, the same people who were technically inside the first bracket, but now considered on their own terms.
The outputs were not variations of each other. They were built on fundamentally different understandings of how each audience moves through the world.
The 25+ plan — as typically built:
CTV and OTT at 22%, airport media at 17.5%, premium OOH at 16.25%, and Google and YouTube at 14%. Influencer brief: Tier A metro athletes and fashion-forward lifestyle creators with large followings. Content: workout reels, gym-to-street transitions, hashtag challenges. A plan built for speed, social discovery, and aspirational association.
The 50+ plan — built specifically for this audience:
Premium OOH became the largest single allocation at 24%, but the site logic was different. Not near gyms and malls. Near medical hubs, parks, and premium residential clusters, which is where this audience actually moves through the city. Airport media at 18.8% because affluent seniors are among India’s heaviest airport users, with 45 to 90 minutes of unhurried, high-attention dwell time and a premium mindset that few environments match.
CTV at 13.4%, but targeted at news, cricket, and family co-viewing formats rather than sports and lifestyle. Google and YouTube at 10.7%, with affinity targeting built around walking, yoga, and preventive health rather than fitness culture and streetwear.
And then the channels that simply do not appear in a youth-first 25+ plan.
City newspapers: TOI, Mint, The Hindu, at 3.2%, because this audience over-indexes on print and reads with a level of attention that digital formats rarely earn. Apartment elevator and society screens at 1.6%, placed in gated communities with high senior density, because this is where family conversations about purchases actually happen. Metro station branding near hospitals and parks rather than gyms and colleges. Radio in talk and news dayparts to reach both seniors and the adult children who influence their decisions.
For influencers, the brief shifted entirely: physiotherapists demonstrating joint support, diabetes and preventive health specialists, and active-ageing creators trusted for their knowledge rather than their follower count.
Frequency: very high, because trust for this cohort builds through consistent presence over time, not a single moment of high impact.
Ant10 output — same brief, same budget. What changes when 50+ is the primary audience?
The plan didn’t just change channels. It changed what the plan was optimising for — because the audience was finally considered, not just covered.
The categories where consideration, not just coverage, makes the biggest difference.
In every category where the 50+ consumer plays a significant role, the difference between a plan that covers them and one that considers them is not marginal. It is the difference between a campaign that works and one that produces disappointing data and the wrong conclusions.
BFSI and fintech, where this cohort is the actual financial decision-maker, and where trust is the primary purchase driver. A plan built for 25+ will reach them. A plan built for them will convert them. Healthcare and diagnostics, where they are repeat, high-value consumers who will not act on a message designed for someone twenty years younger. Travel and hospitality, where time-rich, experience-seeking seniors are less season-bound and significantly more willing to pay for quality. Real estate — where senior living communities are growing rapidly as a category, driven by aspiration, not necessity. Edtech — because this cohort is actively investing in learning, skills, and experiences they never had time for during their working years. And caregiving and community services, still early but growing fast.
In each of these categories, a 25+ campaign technically reaches this audience. But a plan written for them would look like the second column in the table above — different sites, different voices, different content environments, different frequency logic, different funnel assumptions.
That difference is not a creative upgrade. It is a planning decision.
Back to Arjun Nair’s doorbell.
Every morning, it rings at least five times. Four of those deliveries are for Raghavan.
And some of them go back.
Not because Raghavan isn’t spending. Not because he can’t afford it. But because somewhere between the brief and the delivery, he was counted but not considered. The campaign said 25+. He qualified. And then everything: the creative, the platform, the influencer, the message, was built for the 28-year-old at the other end of that bracket.
He is inside the numbers. He is outside the thinking.
India’s 50+ consumer is not waiting to be discovered by advertising. They are already there, inside your current campaigns, showing up in your reach numbers, and occasionally converting despite a plan that wasn’t built for them.
The question isn’t whether to include them. They’re already included. The question is whether we’re ready to actually plan for them.
