Designing an agency around consumers over fifty

An editorial interpretation of the conversation, distinguishing the guest’s arguments from verified business outcomes.

The two markets Geezer wants to reconnect

Brent Rivard describes Geezer as an agency built around two connected opportunities: experienced advertising practitioners whose skills he believes the industry is discarding, and consumers over fifty whom he sees as overlooked in many briefs. He traces the agency’s origins to conversations among its partners about what to build next. Their answer was a mission to put practitioners with at least twenty-five years of experience back to work while helping clients understand an audience beyond the youth market. He explicitly says the proposition is not opposition to young talent.

Bespoke expertise and transparent economics

The operating model follows that argument. Rivard describes bespoke freelance teams assembled for a particular client problem, with category expertise and, where useful, an adjacent perspective. Geezer is a creative agency rather than a media company, and he says its limited overhead supports transparent project costs and markups instead of selling hours. Retainers remain possible when a client wants continuity. He also welcomes sharing commercial risk, but argues that outcome-linked compensation must account for decisions an agency cannot control, including the client’s choice of idea and product pricing.

Why age-based assumptions are poor strategy

On older consumers, Rivard challenges the assumption that established preferences make them unreachable. He argues for allocating a reasonable portion of marketing investment to this audience, rather than abandoning younger buyers. Creative work, in his account, starts with an insight: the resulting appeal may be emotional or product based. He wants representation that reflects active, varied lives rather than an automatic visual stereotype of ageing. For hesitant marketers, he recommends a bounded test with agreed measures of growth, such as sales or new customers, and asks whether bonus structures reward engagement at the expense of the intended business result.

Mentorship, AI and the future of craft

The wider discussion connects mentorship, technology and agency economics. Rivard believes removing senior practitioners weakens the conditions in which younger creatives develop craft, and urges newcomers to seek mentors directly. He uses AI to challenge and develop his thinking while resisting its use as a substitute for insight; his broader concern is the treatment of people when profitability dominates decisions. He sees in-house teams and independent agencies as competitive pressures on traditional networks, while acknowledging uncertainty about the industry’s future. His closing advice is to learn from leaders outside advertising and bring that inspiration back to client work and team relationships.