 Good afternoon everybody and welcome to our lunchtime webinar express series. Today our guest speaker is Ellen Mills, founder and editor-in-chief of noon.org.uk. So before we get started with Ellen's presentation I'll just quickly go over a few things and how you can participate in the live Q&A. We'll be hearing from Ellen off around 30 to 35 minutes when we'll then move into a 10 to 15 minute Q&A session to answer some of your questions. If you're registered for the webinar you'll be able to post your questions for the Q&A at any time during the session by clicking on the question mark. If you are watching on a laptop you'll find the question mark on the right-hand side of your screen or on the top or bottom if watching on a tablet or smartphone. If you're watching us live on YouTube or Facebook and would like to take part in the Q&A's and future webinars you'll need to register for the session either via the CRM events page or through odd posts on the usual socials and watch via the go-to webinar platform. Ellen has very kindly agreed for her presentation slides to be available to download whilst we're broadcasting so if you'd like a copy just click on the handout icon and you'll find them in there. If you want to watch the session again it'll be available on our YouTube channel just head into the playlist section and find the webinar express folder. You'll find the entire back catalog of our express series in there too with sessions covering broad range of marketing skills and insight or free direct access and available whenever you want. And finally if you're a university student attending today's webinar then you may want to sign up to the CRM marketing club. All you need to do is hover your camera over the QR code and that would take you straight through to the sign up page. Alternatively you can hop onto our website and find it within the qualifications drop-down menu. It'll keep you up to date with the latest trends innovations and concepts in the marketing industry so it really is worth taking a look and signing up. And if you'd like to show your thoughts about today's webinar on the socials you can use the hashtag CRM events just remember to put the CRM bit and capital letters. So I'd like to introduce our speaker for today's session Alan Mills. If you want to turn your webcam on Eleanor I'll pass it over to you and the floor is yours when you're ready. Oh hello everybody and welcome to our session today which is called Queen Ages Not Walking Hot Flushes. So my name is Eleanor Mills. I'm the founder of a platform called noon.org.uk which I refer to as the home of the Queen Ages. Hopefully they will now have given me control of my slides so we can move into my presentation. Let's see what's going on here. Let me see. It all worked beautifully during our practice session but let's hope a little work now. Perfect. So noon this is the title of my platform for women in midlife, home of the Queen Ager and I set it up because I worked for the Sunday Times for 25 years. Some of you may have known me when I was a columnist there. I was a columnist. I was the editorial director. I was the editor of the Sunday Times magazine and I was also chair of women in journalism for nearly 10 years. So as a result of that I had quite a good overview of the mainstream media and particularly how it relates to women and how it sees women and I think it would be fair to say that the opinions and the views of women in the mainstream are very much often seen from a male point of view because men have traditionally run newspapers in the time when I joined newspapers there were very few women and the women there were were in what was known as the shallow end which was like the style section or the features bits, the art section and very few women actually directing the news. That's changed a bit now but often the kinds of women who do get those jobs still have quite a kind of male lens on the world. So I set up noon because I wanted to reflect the views of women in midlife. So by that I mean from between about 45 to 60 because I had looked at the research which we're going to go into now and I was pretty clear that our viewpoint and the world of the Queen Asia was not really being reflected in the way that I saw it and the way that I saw the women around me. So noon is an expert-led online media platform which is designed to inspire and engage the midlife woman and we're on a very load of different channels so we're on all sorts of different kinds of social media you may have come across us there and our main platform is a website called noon.org.uk. So I set up noon because I think that age is the box that no one ticks when it comes to diversity. That's a picture of me when I founded noon which was about 18 months ago and women in midlife I think are very much the forgotten cohort and I could see that there was a real opportunity here because our spending power is so massively underestimated. So we're behind 93% of all household spending decisions. Half of us are the chief income earner in our family. We are 90% more likely than those under 40 to earn over 40 grand and the reason why I think women in midlife, my queen ages as I call them, are particularly important now is because in 2019 for the first time ever women in their 40s started earning more than women under 40 for the very, very first time. So that shows a real social shift that it used to be that younger women earn more because when women started having families they and that kind of thing they dropped out of the workforce so they really cut down their hours. But women like me, I'm 51, have worked all the way through and that is now reflected in our earning power but the world has not caught up with us. So while we're behind all these spending decisions and we'll go into all the kinds of things that queen ages want to spend their money on, most of the world still it completely ignores us. We appear in less than 2% of advertising probably because so few marketing directors and heads of agencies are women in this bracket. So just to give you a bit of background women in midlife, my queen ages so that's like 45 to 60 have been dubbed super consumers by Forbes magazine in America. She spends £92 billion annually and she out earns her 30 year old friends and out consumes them by 250% so that is a lot. She's interested in all sorts of things and what we're particularly interested in at noon is reflecting all the amazing things that these women are doing, achieving joy in her second act. So I talk a lot about how women in midlife deserve joy, fun, all the good stuff, which again is not something that you hear very much in the mainstream media. She's more educated, healthier, active and purpose driven than ever. Not that you really know that in the way that we're usually depicted and she's very interested in ideas on how to spend her money but generally no one is really doing that. So that's why I think they're interesting. Age is a crucial part of diversity and if you think about race and sexuality and all those things that we usually think about in terms of diversity, no one's really thinking about age. Older women with all backgrounds suffer exclusion, modern cultures glorify youth and I think the wisdom of the elder female has been marginalised, our needs are met and uncated for and so I think women want real inclusion and that means really talking about what I call gendered ageism, which is where ageism meets sexism and which hits women particularly hard basically because that is where sexism that's all over our patriarchal culture also hits age. So if you think that generally in our culture we glorify youth, women in particular are valued for beauty and fecundity. So how fanciable they are, how many children they have within a patriarchy, that's very much women's kind of roles but I think that's rubbish. I think we need to start valuing ourselves. Do you think of women as like a rainbow? If we're only valued for our fanciability and our fecundity, which is kind of what the male lens does to us, there are all those other colours, all those other things that we can do, our intelligence, our purpose, our energy, our creativity, which don't get a look in. So this is why I talk about queen ages and I'm interested in really changing the story that we tell about the later stages of women's lives and that's why I set up Noon which is full of incredibly positive stories about what women can do at this point and what I do at Noon is to connect brands to these women so that they can have a different kind of conversation and reach what my friend Cheryl Sandberg, the CEO of Meta, describes as an incredibly underserved cohort. And as all of you know, within the marketing firmament, there aren't very many pieces of the map which are really kind of white space and I think that women in midlife really are that because so few brands actually target us. So at Noon, these women are our expert specialist subject. We call them queen ages and that came out of this big Noon research project we did which was called Meet the Queen Ages, which we did with the consulting firm Accenture. It's the biggest, deepest dive into women of this age and stage that's ever been done. So we know more about queen ages, we think than anybody else. And our findings were really interesting. So when by the time women get to 50 or 50, between 45, 60, they have been through a lot. We talk about queen ages as being forged in fire. They've survived over half of them have experienced five or more of these things, grief, divorce, illness, infertility, a piece of violent relationships, job losses, bankruptcy, parental death, financial crisis and more. But rather than that, they're making them kind of gloomy and despondent and depressed. For most of them, the vast majority, the greater the crises that they've been through, the more the happier they are now. So we had lots of, that's about slide actually, we had lots of women talking about how they now saw themselves as say, delightedly divorced. Or we had an incredible woman who'd become a celebrant. So she was a kind of humanist doing marriages and few rules and things like that. And she'd had cancer and she was but she said that and she left her big corporate job. But she said that this was the happiest point in her life that she'd never been as happy as she is at the moment that she felt like she was in her prime, that she was moving into her purpose and a real sense that this was her time. So many of the women say things like I've spent the last 25 years looking after everybody else. This is time for me. This is what I want to do more than anything else. So there's lots of stuff around I feel much younger than my age. They have over about half of them say that they feel invisible to society. They feel like they're becoming the woman they're supposed to be. They feel they feel like they are coming into their prime. But they don't feel the world is reflecting them at all. So I'm going to talk particularly today our big noon research project goes into how they feel about work, how they feel about their lives, all sorts of different areas because this is a marketing talk. I'm going to talk to you about the particularly about their attitudes to companies and brands. So this pretty well summed it up. This was a woman who's actually a partner in a law firm in London. So she's pretty well off. She says I'm single I'm 51. And it's like I just don't kind of exist. She never sees herself kind of replicated anywhere. But what is really interesting in our noon research about 40% of these women are living on their own. And the other thing that I think is really interesting is that between 25, 25% and a third do not have children. And 40% of the ones who chosen not to who don't have children have actively chosen not to become mothers. So that's also a massive hole. This is another quote basically I'm single I haven't got kids. And so yeah, I'm disposable income aroma. And yet no brands are talking to her which just seems to me to be completely crazy. And somebody took out the expletive in this which is basically I like nice things I buy nice things. And I don't have to ask anybody if I can buy the nice things because it's my money because I bleep earned it. They're quite forthright micro majors they don't they call a spade a spade. And what I thought was really interesting about this is that they they really will spend money on themselves. And this, this is our Newcastle focus group who actually spent quite a lot of the focus group talking about how they spent on vibrators. They were saying they would spend 240 pounds on the right kind of vibrator but again, not a conversation that we hear very much about in the mainstream. But they say basically brands are missing a trip because we're the ones with a lot more disposable income. The problem is they don't have the language to sell to our demographic, demographic queen ages, we don't just want it to look pretty. If people spoke to us in our language, and I think that would be more successful, we'd feel seen. And we want people who are a bit more normal looking. So that's really interesting. So if you think about the older women that you do see in adverts or on TV, they're often ones who have been very much kind of eucified. They don't really look like most of us kind of 50 somethings out there. They're the ones who if you think about say, Carla Bruni, he was married to the French president, who was on photographs on the catwalk. She's a model in Paris. She looks like she's maybe about 22. I've never seen somebody of 50 with such a flat stomach. So that those are the kind of women that the media likes to show us in older women. And I used to come across us a lot. I was the editor of the Sunday Times magazine. I'd go up to my editor often would say some amazing shots of a very kind of famous or amazing 70 year old woman or actress. And I usually get the reaction which would be a bit like, Oh, gosh, do we have to have had do we have to have been looking like this? I 70 can't we have her, you know, when she was 24, when she was in that movie, and she looked really sexy. So there's a real kind of sense, you know, within newspapers and within marketing, within advertising, that women are basically there. The phrase that they used to use in newspapers was women were there to let they go find out the page love, which basically meant putting a picture of a pretty girl make it look a bit more cheerful. So if you think that, and I had a lot of conversations when I was a newspaper editor around how women were depicted, a lot of women as chair of women in journalism, we did a lot of research around this, which would be to say, most of the women who were in the stories were either arm candy, so they were like a wag or something or somebody's partner, or they were victims. So most of the new stories you'd go down the list. And the ones that did feature women, the women would be either victims or arm candy. And I used to make myself quite unpopular by saying, where are the women with agency? Where are the women doing things in their own right? And it's the same in movies as something called the Bechtel test, which is, is there a female character which talks about something which is not the love interest for more than 30 seconds, and hardly any movies past the Bechtel test. So really think about how women are depicted in the culture, because this is what I'm trying to tackle at noon. It's a bigger thing. So this is the lack of representation. So the women feel largely invisible. They want to be seen the incredible women who did a lot of this research and did some of the focus groups for me. So she'd never seen a cohort of people. She's been doing this for 20 years, who was so desperate to be heard. Because they just felt that they would never ask their opinion about anything. They really want products that meet their needs and brands that engage with them. They really welcome tangible examples of good environmental practice, but they're very sniffy about greenwashing. And most of them say they don't really care about brands, but then they're wearing designer trainers. So there was one woman, I've got the quote here or not, who talked about she said that she'd spent £150 on some trainers, because if they felt like do those on her feet and she felt like she was walking on clouds. And so they these women have got money and they will pay for the things that work for them. So they love brands like the North Face that were like keeping them dry when they were walking their dogs, or they quite like things like Sweaty Betty, because they were kind of comfortable and they felt like they were trying to do some things for them. They liked John Lewis. And they found John Lewis Jacket, actually, very much home of the Queen John Lewis. But they want so but they feel most of the time that brands really do not give them what they want. So they want brands that are sustainable. They get things like Amazon and Apple, which aren't they want brands that will do something positive for the environment. So they talk about things like Tom's, I don't know if you've heard of that brand. They are they make a kind of canvas shoes. If you buy a pair of shoes, they'll give a pair of shoes to somebody in the developing world. There's a really some really interesting stuff in our search about what Queen ages want from work. I do quite a lot of consulting with companies around Queen ages, because basically, if companies get it right for Queen ages, what Queen ages want is flexibility, autonomy, control over their own time, meaning for work, sound familiar. That's because millennials and Gen Z want that too. So we reckon that if companies get it right for their senior women for their Queen ages, their women, the Queen ages are a bit like the canary in the coal mine on whether they really mean it when it comes to diversity, equity, inclusion for the rest of their workforce. So we're increasingly doing a lot of work around what are you doing for your senior women? Because if you're getting it right for them, then you're going to be the kind of place that other talent wants to stay. But what they get, they want to work jobs that give them flexibility, work, life balance, meaningful work. They don't really get that. And so they end up having to start their own businesses, lots of them leave. 27% of people over 50 at the moment have branded economically inactive. The Department for Work Compensions is trying to get them back. And they are also really trying to these women, the Queen ages are setting up businesses at a faster rate than any other demographic. So there are so many women like me who've worked for corporates for years, have kind of got quite sick of it or be made redundant, and are setting up on their own. So one of the things that we do at noon is we have something called the Queen ages directory, where we do a kind of hero. We hero the brands that are doing fantastic things for these women. And also our Queen ages entrepreneurs, because there are so many women doing things now in this space for these women, because the major brands are really not doing that. So that's a real opportunity, I think for a lot of brands. So they want clothes that fit their shapes. They feel like they're having to make do and research into new brands. Wonderfully, Glabra, 75 year old, was saying to me she gritted to the head of Zara, saying why don't you do anything which is kind of specifically for the older women saying that things are often too short of the long shape for her, but she wanted to look kind of, you know, current. And they want brands that celebrate all shapes and sizes. We know that's getting a bit better. I mean, I love something, there's a brand in London called Fabletics, which I love. They were showing pictures of women, really large women in gold leggings. And I thought that was a wonderful like celebration, different kinds of body shapes. So we're beginning to get a bit more of that body positivity. But even the brands that are doing that say around larger women and not talking about older women. When was the last time you saw a mannequin where the woman was actually obviously the older? Never. So they want like good quality healthcare. They get a mess that they have to knit together. There's huge solutions there. There's some really interesting people beginning to come into the menopause space we'll talk about menopause in a minute. They want to be recognised as a sort of health and advice. Queen ages are basically an army of supporters that we don't really notice. In the workplace, they're often seen as mentors. Women over 50 are twice as likely to mentor younger people of colour and other diversity within the workplace than a senior man. But again, none of that kind of extra work gets noticed. They really they're very keen on sex. The queen ages interested in vibrators. They want to do dating, what they get at apps that feel degrading. There's a huge opportunity there to do that in a different kind of way that we're going to set up a dating site on noon. That's going to launch in January. Again, the same on politics. They want politicians to get it. They get loads of men who don't. And they want things to be authentic, honest and funny. They get stuff being glossy, perfect and showy and not representing them. And what they really want is to be talked to as they would talk to each other. So I mentioned menopause. There's lots of menopause around in the culture at the moment. All that divina McCall stuff. It's really, really important that we are finally having that conversation. It's something that we do talk about at noon on World Menopause Day. I did a big debate. You'll see some pretty amazing women on there. It's something we might recognise. Top left there is Caroline Harris MP, who is a wonderful queen nature herself. She is a working class woman from Swansea. She was a barmaid. She worked as a dinner lady. One of her sons died. And then she went back to university and became and got a degree and became an MP in her early fifties. And surprise the first she is the MP who's been leading the charge on menopause care. We have just launched a shoot. So I've been writing a piece in the Guardian about how the menopause conversation is quite uninclusive. She said she'd gone to speak to a whole load of shop workers in her constituency in Swansea about menopause and they'd said to her, oh, aren't you posh having a menopause? Because it seemed very much as a kind of white middle class conversation. So I think that needs to be more inclusive. And also about if you look at rates of prescription of HRT in the UK, the richest areas of the UK are you're twice as likely to be prescribed HRT as you are if you're in the poorest areas or you come from a BAME or a non-white background. So there's a real problem here with access to information and all that kind of stuff around menopause. So that is a very important conversation that we're having. Many of you won't know but GPs haven't until now had to be trained in menopause even though it happens to half the population. There's real problems with access to prescription and to treatment. And there's a huge inequality around this. So it's very important that we talk about it, but at the same time what we discover in noon is that when now that the menopause conversation has kind of bubbled up and the women are really pleased that it has, but they don't want to be defined by menopause. It's one thing to say there's a huge health inequality here, but they don't want it, they don't want to be defined by it. I've got teenage daughters, they're 20 and 17, but I wouldn't define them as having periods in the same way I said this at Adweek, you wouldn't say to a whole room full of middle-aged men, you're in the Viagra years, you know, welcome to the Limp Whatever Club. So in the same way women don't want to be defined as menopausal even though they want access to the right treatment. And I think a lot of brands are getting this wrong at the moment and talking about menopause as if that's the only thing that's going on in a queen age's life. And of course it's just one of many things and lots of us are moving into different chapters and for about one in four women menopause is really awful and of course they need protection in the workplace and access to treatment, but for most of us it's really, you know, it's okay, we need some support and then we want the support so that we can get on with living our broader lives. And I think brands are missing a trick if they then just see queen ages as being about menopause we're about much more than that and in fact in the research that we did we found that 78% of women 45 to 60 did not want to be branded menopausal that's why I called this talk queen ages not walking hot flushes because while we want justice and health equality we do not want to be defined as menopausal and brands need to be wary of that trap. Of course if you're doing something health related maybe defining it as menopausal is fine but women of this stage want to be seen as who they are in the round and to for brands to reflect all their other interests lots of them going back to study setting up businesses. They say they're coming into their prime that they're doing all these things that they've always wanted to do so I think it's really important that they're not just put in a menopausal box. So let me tell you a bit about noon and how we work with brands so we have an incredible advisory board of queen ages some of the most powerful women in the UK many of whom are old friends and comrades of mine because I worked at the talk of the media for a long time so I've got a pretty incredible address book so we kind of pull on their support to help us and they really influence the kind of things that we cover. We have 150,000 unique users we do a newsletter some of you may have heard of Substack. Substack is a new massive in America where journalists and writers can reach directly out to a cohort. So I have a newsletter which has actually 10,000 newsletter subscribers now who hear from me every week and that has between a 50 and 80 percent open rate which is pretty massive. We also have a paying community there of super engaged one and the women love our content so we have an average engagement for about nearly five minutes and I know because I ran national magazines that that's a lot higher than a lot of newspapers. We have very active channels on LinkedIn our noon posts often reach up to you know 10, 20,000 subscribers up to half a million. We find that LinkedIn is a really powerful place for our queen ages. Instagram also is good. Twitter as you all know is a bit problematic at the moment. Facebook sometimes works so the way that we work with clients at noon we do thought leadership I'm just going to tell you about Vision Express the big campaign we just done for Vision Express fronted by Joe Wiley. We do events we run retreats we run workshops we do online online campaigns because we really know how to talk to these women and we also advise brands on how to speak to these women so that they connect and we use our community of queen ages to test brand messages for people so that they know that they've got it right. Queen ages are nobody's fool they know if they're being sold a pup and so we can convene quick focus groups from our community to find out what people really think about things so we do that kind of sampling. We do consulting and research and this big bit of research we did with Accenture so we're also speaking to their clients and lots of other blue chips about how to speak to queen ages particularly financial services because these women are controlling quite a lot of money and we do a lot of native content for other brands as well articles into these videos we've done a whole series of stuff around health inequalities for Theramax and we did some stuff for a Rome Therarchy Associates part of Boots so we work specifically with brands about content which we know will appeal to our audience. So this was the launch of This Is Me with Helena Morrissey and Joe Wiley at the Grouchy Club launching a queen age campaign for Vision Express you can see queen ages there so if you go into any Vision Express I hope you like my specs if you go into any Vision Express in the UK they've now got a whole queen age of thing which is being led by Joe Wiley which is my thought leadership around see yourself differently in midlife see yourself through a new lens let's reframe what women at this point are capable of. I absolutely love Jane X the marketing director of Vision Express they're really I mean queen ages make up a huge number of their customers so they've been really receptive to this new conversation about women in midlife and reframing that debate so we work with them we did a panel we did a couple of panels talking to lots of different women about why they love being 50 how they felt about moving into their prime and all of those conversations have been kind of chopped up and put out on social we live streamed this on Instagram this is in all the shops it's on the Vision Express website so it's all about saying you could be really positive about getting to this age it doesn't have to be the end you're not invisible there's so much more to come that's our big slogan at noon and Joe Wiley was is our kind of ambassador for queen ages at Vision Express she's just an incredible kind of queen age ambassador I think very kind of natural very much kind of in her you know coming into her prime um so there she is there's um there's Joe Wiley being queen age and chief new way of looking at midlife and so that's the kind of new kind of thought leadership in the way that we're working with brands so that is quite a lot from me and about noon and these some incredible queen ages some of whom you will recognise that's a very glamorous picture of me down on the bottom left which is taken by the photographer Rankin massively airbrushed just so you know that the kind of pictures that you see of kind of celebrities or that some Sarah Jessica Parker are usually kind of quite manipulated because you can see I didn't really quite look like I do when I was photographed by Rankin um but anyway there we are that is the end of my formal presentation if you'd like to know more about us at noon do have a look at our website and do sign up to our noon newsletter I write a newsletter every week queen age about all the things that I'm doing and all sorts of other things too really about moving into a new phase in midlife I've just come back from a six day silent retreat so I wrote about that swimming the seals and what it was like not be able to talk to anyone for six days um and so it's a it's a whole kind of mixture of things but really trying to reframe how women are coming into their prime in midlife and really challenge gender gendered ageism so all of you who are marketers if you're really thinking about how you might reach a demographic with huge spending power who are really underserved by brands hardly ever targeted because of the male lens of our society I think queen ages are a really good place to start thank you I'm Ellen the mills founder of me I'd love to take some of your questions thank you Ellen that was that was brilliant um before we go into the Q&A session I'll just read a comment made by one of the viewers today so Emma has actually said not a question but a big thank you this has been fantastic when I grow up I'll be a proud queen a just so that probably was nice was a lot of our viewers today um okay so that's so nice to hear I mean actually one thing I didn't say that but which I really believe is part of the reason I set this up is because I want my daughters to look forward to being 50 is when they come into their prime not to dread it as a point where they disappear and I think it's so important to combat and challenge some of the ridiculous kind of anti-aging messages in our society and how important it is and how lucky we are to get to 50 I've got friends who are now no longer with us so I feel joyful every day to be here excellent yeah well I think I'll say a lot of our viewers today will thoroughly resonate with what you've what you've presented today um we're going to have a quick short short Q&A we've already got some questions to get us underway which we'll get to in a second but please do continue to post your questions for Eleanor by selecting the question mark icon and we'll try and get through as many as we can in the next 15 minutes or so and just a reminder for those watching via Facebook or YouTube if you want to take part in future Q&As you'll need to register for webinars with the CRM events page or social posts and watch the session via the go-to webinar platform okay so Eleanor um first question one of our viewers joined the session five or seven minutes in and didn't pick up originally what age group you were talking about I know you're talking about 45 to 60s but um are there any is are they just one big lump on big cohort or is there are there any differences between the 45 year old and the 60 year old within the Queen ages cohort yeah so that's a really good question um in fact I've been criticized by some of the ladies in my community for stopping at 65 so I don't really think Queen age hood has a kind of you know upper limit I think it's really about kind of you know how we feel and um are there differences within the cohort I would say that the 45 year olds are probably have slightly different concerns but what I find really interesting is that so many women of my generation that there's a real spread on those of us who've had children as I say it's only like about two thirds of us who have had kids so not just defining us by being mothers but for instance I had my daughters when I was I had my first daughter when I was 31 one of my best friends has had her first daughter at 45 so my daughter's at university her daughter's still you know in primary school so I think that that's interesting that in some ways it's not really an age which is such a marker on this cohort but kind of what they the decisions that they've made about other aspects of their lives so I'm a kind of empty nest of my younger ones about to finish array levels the other ones at university but I've got contemporaries who still very much in the kind of weeds of kind of you know school parents evenings and all that kind of thing with much younger children so and and they will still be their kind of in 10 years time when my children will I might be becoming a grandmother so I think in some ways it's really interesting that age isn't necessarily the key marker of what stage women tend to be at in this cohort what I do see is many women move that what kind of whatever you've been doing by the time you get to 50 kind of what it tends to spit you out and you need to do something else I mean I'd work for the Sunday Times for 25 years but I was talking to a woman last week down in Devon who'd been worked in admin for the local council and she said that she'd just gone back and retrained as a reflexologist and she was also spending more time with her grandchildren and she'd taken up kind of crocheting hats she'd got divorced and moved into a new phase so I think that this is is really one of those things that we call it noon the midlife maelstrom that you never quite know but suddenly you're kind of you know you're you're kind of tromping along and then you just suddenly get hit by a whole load of things that might be your parents coming to bits because they get old or you have teenagers who's got who's got anxiety or maybe you hit menopause and it's really quite tough for you or work gets restructured and suddenly you're seen as a bit too old and your face doesn't fit anymore and you're and you're out but what I see and people getting divorced as a real as a massive thing called silver splitters which is women and couples in their fifties splitting up so but what seems to happen is just a whole load of changes all hit at the same time and I think a lot of women are left to queen ages feeling really kind of all at sea and that there are very few maps in our culture to what might come next so the reason I set up noon was well after I left the Sunday Times I really felt like that I remember kind of you know Googling kind of you know 50 something change of career and just nothing coming up at all and just thinking knowing from having been a newspaper columnist for so many years that things that I was going through other people tended to be going through as well and I started writing about it and the articles had a huge response and so I thought right I'm going to set up President Obama talks about being the change that you want to see in the world so I set up noon to try and help women into their next chapter to say you're not done you're not invisible you know we see you there are so many incredible women doing amazing stuff at this point and there are so many options you can go back and study you can fulfill all those dreams that you've had it doesn't matter kind of you know where you are in the UK or what your background is you can move into another phase and we'll help you and give you some of the tools to do that okay the question here is why the cohort term cream ages why are they called cream ages well your market is so you'll understand the value and the power of a rebrand and I definitely think that women in midlife needed a slightly more kind of sexy moniker I came up with queen age because well I've been running newspapers for years so I was always having to come up headlines whether it was like too posh to push or you know whatever headlines are kind of my thing one of the ladies in a Welsh focus group said to me that she felt like a teenager but in her own home with nice sheets and posh tea so that really stuck in my head and there were lots of women saying that they felt like teenagers again and I spent quite a lot of the time in Jamaica and out there women you're often referred to as a queen she's a queen is a kind of is a big thing and so I suppose the two things just coalesced in my head and I thought queen ages you know we're a bit emotional we're moving into it we're a bit hormonal we're moving into a new phase but we've got a lot of wisdom and experience and gravitas typically we are queens so I thought queen ages and it seems to it seems people seem to like it yeah it sticks doesn't it yeah okay so this question is given that us queen ages are largely invisible and unheard of in the workplace which totally resonates with me how would you suggest I start to bring about positive change in the company where I work oh brilliant question well I think the first thing you can do is maybe band together with some other queen ages the second thing you could do is really have a look at get in touch with me and I'll give you some important ammunition if you want because queen ages are incredibly important for company culture the senior women within organizations are doing so much of the kind of cultural glue which holds organizations together and yet they're really unrecognized for it I've done a lot of stuff with Cheryl Sandberg who was at Facebook who set up the Lean In Foundation who wrote that wonderful book Lean In which is all about how to get ahead at work and her research really shows that senior women are twice or 68 percent more likely than senior men to do that kind of informal mentoring and looking after kind of younger people within the organization so I think one of the things to do is to point out all the amazing things that the queen ages within your organization are doing and I think the second thing to do is to say do you know you know we're going into a recession a lot of people are going to have a lot less money actually one of the cohorts who are much more relatively insulated from recession repressions are queen ages I was supposed to ask all the other day 60 percent of women in this cohort have paid off their mortgages we've got a lot more discretionary spend than younger people who maybe have still got you know young families and haven't earned so much or haven't accumulated kind of so much wealth over their careers and so actually one of the categories that any business could be appealing to who are more likely to have money to spend are the queen ages and who better to understand them someone within their organization who is a queen age herself so those are the kind of two prongs of the things that I'm doing that queen ages are inherent to a company's kind of glue their culture there and how they how they treat and hang on to their kind of more junior staff and they're also key to a really underserved and lucrative demographic who are really not being spoken to so there's like a huge bit of headroom there if you start speaking to queen ages there's a really strong evidence that they will respond to that and they'll love your brand because nobody else is doing it and we've seen that I've been working with a small new brand called Jude who are interested in bladder health and then we did a whole load of work where we contrasted the adverts they did which showed kind of younger women and the ones which actually showing queen ages and the queen age adverts did much much better in selling the in in selling the products and it's interesting that some forward-looking brands are beginning to do this so I was speaking at the association of British travel agents massive international conference in Morocco a few weeks ago and there's a brand there called seaborn cruises who've just done a huge campaign round which is all about queen ages saying you deserve that dream holiday all those days you've got up in the morning and you've slogged out to your job and you know your reward is that you can kind of go on this cruise and it absolutely kind of encapsulates the kind of thinking that we'd be doing about queen ages I think that's really interesting that was actually done for them by a queen age or run creative agency in LA called grace creative which are a whole load of women in midlife who are actually crafting those adverts so they really understand this organ that the that mentality but what's really interesting is within the broader advertising marketing firmament if you go into some of the agencies in London which I've done a bit recently you don't see anybody 50 I mean there's like maybe like a handful in the entire building so it's not surprising that traditional advertising and marketing is missing the queen age because so many of the people who are creating those adverts are not queen ages and are not thinking about them and the men certainly aren't thinking about them and there's some good figures there was a big presentation that can people over 50 control 47 percent of all the wealth and appear in 2 percent of adverts so you know that really tells you something about the scope here yeah that's something that resonates with me as well I'm now 64 and I don't feel like I'm marketed to either so yeah I think it's an issue that the advertising industry needs to address it's interesting isn't it in lots of advertising campaigns they just have a kind of bucket so they divide everyone up very carefully you know under 20, 20 to 25 whatever and then they just say over 50s but you know I'm 51 over 50s is also my mum who's 80 and we have completely different needs and you know then there's you too so it's completely it's madness to me that we're the portion of the population which is controlling so much wealth and yet we're all bundling a kind of Zimmer frames and incontinence pads kind of bracket yes not quite there yet but yeah not far off probably and there are so many questions left to ask but I can't we've run out of time and also Ellen I've never seen so many comments about a session where people you know just so inspired by what is that you've you've presented so you've done a great job um I think this might answer quite a few of the outstanding questions is is the research available anyways can people actually find it and read up a bit more about this research there are some articles I wrote a big article in the telegraph about they they did a thing saying brands would be foolish to ignore the power of midlife women so that article is up on noon I haven't actually put it all up there because it's slightly my crown jewels that I use for consulting but these these slides are up there and a lot of the key a lot of the key insights and and anyone who's interested if you email me so if you go to noon.org.uk which is our website and you can sign up for my substat newsletter and if you look at that there's there's a lot of information in my substats about the research and if there's a lot of if and if you email me directly we have a kind of consulting team at noon and we we will help you and if there's also if there's real desire for it I can I can put up I can put up some more of it I can put up some of these slides about kind of working with brands the stuff about kind of Queen Ages and work I very much use when I'm consulting directly so we haven't put all of this out there but as I say if you get in touch with me I'm very happy to share kind of more of it with you yeah so just to head to your head to your website and make contact that way brilliant okay and also because we did this because we did this research with Accenture we're also doing you know some thought leadership with them around it too which is why we haven't released it all but I will actually have a chat with them I've got to see them next week about making this more available okay brilliant okay thank you very much Eleanor and unfortunately that's that's all the time we've got for our Q&A today so once again let's say thank you to Eleanor fantastic presentation and also to the CIMS Southwest Group for organizing the webinar we do hope you've enjoyed the session and found it interesting and worthwhile we'll be sending out a short survey in the next few hours and we'd love to hear your feedback it will only take a few minutes and all survey responses are anonymous so please do let us know your thoughts and what you'd like to see from our webinar express series in the future we'll be taking a little bit of a break now for the Christmas holidays but we'll be back in January so keep an eye out for our webinar express emails in your inbox and on the events page of our website see what's coming up next year so that just leaves me to say a final thank you to you for joining us today and we hope you've enjoyed the webinar take care everyone have a lovely Christmas a new year and we look forward to seeing you again in 2023