A few weeks ago, I was standing in my house filming myself talking about shoes. Earlier, it had been skincare. Before that, a health and wellness brand. There was a beauty campaign waiting in the wings, another script to review and emails from brands asking about availability. This is apparently what life looks like when you’re a woman in your 60s and the advertising industry suddenly realizes women your age buy things.
I’m an over 50 content creator specializing in UGC, and at this point I’ve worked on more than 300 brand campaigns, including projects for Microsoft, Tylenol, Jones Road Beauty, Laura Geller, L’Oréal Paris, Thrive Causemetics, OSEA and Allergan brands including Botox and Juvéderm.
These are not companies hiring me because they think it would be adorable to put an older woman on TikTok. They’re hiring me because women my age are their customers. And here is the part I find particularly interesting: I have more work than my 33-year-old daughter, who is also very good at creating UGC, which is particularly funny because she is the one who taught me how to do it.
My daughter runs Wolfe Creative, a Southern California creative agency specializing in content creation, social media, branding and web design. She was already working in this world when I started, and she taught me the mechanics of UGC, how to structure a video, how to think about social creative and how brands use this content.
Now we regularly get hired together as a mother-daughter UGC duo.
There is something wonderfully full-circle about being taught UGC by your millennial daughter and then finding yourself standing next to her on camera because a brand specifically wants both generations.
I don’t say that to brag. I say it because it tells us something about where advertising is going.
For years, marketers have been obsessed with Gen Z. Meanwhile, they’re discovering that some of the most valuable people to put in front of the camera look a lot more like Gen Z’s mothers.
And there’s a name for creators like me that I actually love: granfluencer. I’m a proud grandmother of four, with my fifth grandchild on the way, and I see no reason to separate that part of my life from the work I love.
What Is a Granfluencer? An Over 50 Content Creator With a Point of View
A granfluencer is generally defined as an older social media creator, the term itself being a mashup of grandparent and influencer. It has become common enough that researchers now use it seriously when studying older creators.
A 2023 PLOS ONE study of granfluencers analyzed 1,382 TikTok videos from creators 60 and older with at least 100,000 followers. Collectively, those videos had amassed more than 3.5 billion views. Researchers found that positive portrayals of aging dramatically outnumbered negative ones.
So yes, granfluencers are real, and I’m delighted to be one. I’m a grandmother with a growing family, a business owner and a working creator. To me, the word is playful without being limiting. Being a grandmother is something I’m proud of, not a detail I need to hide to be taken seriously in advertising.
The important distinction is what the term represents. We aren’t showing up in advertising as a novelty because it’s charming to see older people on TikTok. We’re showing up because we know how to connect with an audience, and brands have finally noticed who’s holding the credit card.
The Women Marketing Forgot Have a Lot of Money
Here’s the part of this story marketers should probably print out and tape to the wall.
According to AARP’s 2026 Longevity Economy Outlook, Americans 50 and older accounted for 43 percent of U.S. consumer spending in 2024 and generated $12.5 trillion in annual economic activity.
McKinsey and The Business of Fashion found that Americans 55 and older held 72 percent of U.S. wealth in early 2024. Globally, people 50 and older represented 38 percent of total spending in 2024.
And then there’s beauty, an industry that spent decades advertising almost everything on impossibly young faces.
NielsenIQ reports that Gen X alone accounts for about one-quarter of total beauty spending and projects another $80 billion in Gen X spending on beauty products and services over five years.
Follow the money and suddenly mature women don’t look very niche. We look like the market.
I’m Not Just Making Ads for “Old Lady” Products
This is one of the biggest misconceptions about creators over 50.
Yes, I’ve created content for products where my age and life experience are directly relevant. I’ve worked in mature skincare, wellness, women’s health, aesthetics and beauty.
But look at the range of companies hiring creators like me.
I’ve created content for Microsoft. I’ve worked with Tylenol. I’ve created beauty content for Jones Road Beauty and Laura Geller and worked with major names including L’Oréal Paris and Thrive Causemetics.
I’ve also worked with Allergan brands in the aesthetics category, including Botox and Juvéderm.
That range matters because a woman does not hit 50 and suddenly become interested only in wrinkle cream and orthopedic shoes. We buy technology, travel, makeup, clothes, pet products, wellness, aesthetics, financial services and experiences. We renovate our homes. We are still discovering products, we are still influenced by advertising, and we have considerably more purchasing power than advertisers have historically given us credit for.
There’s Just One Problem: We Want to See Ourselves
AARP research found that 91 percent of women 50-plus wish beauty and grooming advertising showed more realistic images of women their age. Even more relevant to brands, 81 percent said they prefer buying from brands whose advertising includes a mix of ages.
That doesn’t surprise me. When I’m demonstrating Jones Road makeup or Laura Geller foundation on my own skin, the fact that I’m older isn’t something the brand needs to disguise. It’s the whole point. I have actual mature skin.
If I’m talking about a beauty product, a woman my age can see what it looks like on someone who actually looks like her.
You can hire a beautiful 24-year-old to hold a firming serum. But if your customer is 58, she’s going to notice that the person demonstrating it doesn’t have the skin she’s trying to treat.
That’s not authenticity. That’s casting, and UGC is supposed to feel like the opposite.
UGC Changes the Equation
This is where the conversation about granfluencers gets particularly interesting, because what I do isn’t traditional influencer marketing.
UGC, or user-generated content, often has very little to do with the size of the creator’s audience.
A brand hires me to make the creative. I might film a 30-second skincare demonstration, a shoe testimonial, a telehealth ad or several different hooks for the same product.
I’ve created content about pain relief for Tylenol and technology for Microsoft. I’ve demonstrated prestige beauty products and talked about telehealth services. I can go from makeup to footwear to wellness to tech without changing who I am.
The company can then run those videos as paid advertising from its own accounts or use them across social media.
In that scenario, my audience isn’t necessarily what the brand is buying. They’re buying me as the customer, and that distinction matters enormously.
For decades, advertisers chased aspiration. UGC shifted the equation toward identification.
Instead of asking, “Who does our customer want to be?” brands are increasingly asking, “Who will our customer believe?”
Those are very different questions.
Sometimes the Brief Is Literally “Mother and Daughter”
One of my favorite parts of this work is that my daughter and I regularly create content together.
She runs Wolfe Creative, and she is the person who originally introduced me to UGC and taught me how the business worked.
Now brands hire us as a mother-daughter team.
That pairing gives brands something they can’t manufacture very easily: two generations who actually know each other, genuinely interact like family and naturally appeal to different age groups.
It also illustrates why the creator economy is becoming more interesting.
This doesn’t have to be Gen Z versus Gen X or millennials versus boomers. Sometimes the strongest creative is both.
A mother and daughter can use the same product for completely different reasons. We can react differently to the same trend. We can talk about beauty, technology, travel or wellness from two different stages of life.
For a brand trying to reach a wider household, that can be far more interesting than casting two unrelated actors and asking them to pretend they have chemistry.
In our case, the chemistry is already there.
Three Women Meet at a Telehealth Brand Event
I saw another version of this shift happen while working with a telehealth provider.
Two years ago, a telehealth provider hired me along with Shannon Hinderberger and Jessica Peavey to create content about its telehealth services.
The company invited us to a brand event, where we met and became close friends. Two years later, all three of us are still extremely busy creators.
Stephanie Wolfe, my daughter, came into UGC from the creative side. She is a graphic designer, content creator and small-business owner whose work has crossed fashion, lifestyle, travel and brand marketing. Her background is much broader than simply appearing on camera. Through Wolfe Creative, she works on everything from social media content and UGC to branding, web design and campaign strategy. She has created work for recognizable names including Crocs, Mejuri, Nivea and Sony Pictures. She is also the reason I got into UGC in the first place. She taught me how the business worked, and now we regularly get booked together as a mother-daughter duo, which may be my favorite plot twist in this whole career.
Shannon Hinderberger has done something particularly smart with her creator career: she has made being a Gen X woman over 50 the center of the brand instead of something to work around. Her content focuses on mature beauty, skincare, menopause, GLP-1s, fashion and the things women 40-plus are actually talking about with their friends. She also creates lifestyle content with her husband, Brian, covering everything from wellness and technology to food and travel. What I like about Shannon’s work is that it never feels like she is trying to prove older women belong online. She simply assumes we do, and creates accordingly.
Jessica Peavey took an entirely different route. She describes herself as an “accidental influencer,” and before UGC she was already a singer and performer. Today her work blends lifestyle, motherhood, wellness and health advocacy with brand storytelling. She has spoken publicly about PCOS, built experience creating content for a telehealth provider and frequently incorporates her family into her content. Jessica has the kind of natural energy that makes scripted advertising feel unscripted, which is probably why brands keep coming back to her.
I love that story because it turns the usual narrative upside down.
The media still sometimes talks about older creators as though brands have just discovered this adorable new species on social media.
The brands hiring us aren’t nearly as confused. They’re looking for people who resemble their customers, and what Shannon, Jessica and I have experienced is not three isolated flukes. It’s a market signal.
My Daughter Is Better at Some of This Than I Am
My daughter is 33 and she’s a talented UGC creator.
There are absolutely things she does better than I do. Again, she taught me. And yet today I often have more UGC work, which I think has a lot to do with supply and demand.
There are enormous numbers of talented creators in their 20s and 30s who know how to make a good TikTok or Meta ad.
The pool gets much smaller when a casting brief asks for a woman 50-plus who also understands hooks, retention, B-roll, calls to action, paid social creative and how to speak naturally into a camera.
That is where age stops being the thing working against you and becomes the differentiator.
When a company like Microsoft wants an older consumer talking naturally about technology, there simply aren’t as many experienced creators competing for that role.
When a beauty company wants someone to demonstrate foundation on mature skin, suddenly having mature skin is a professional qualification.
I spent years in business before becoming a creator. I understand technology. I edit my own videos. I understand what brands mean when they talk about hooks, conversion and paid media.
None of those things disappeared when I turned 60.
If anything, they became more valuable.
What Brands Still Get Wrong About Women Over 50
Casting a mature creator is not enough if the script still sounds as though it was written by a 27-year-old imagining what 60 feels like. We don’t need every sentence to begin with “At my age,” and we certainly don’t spend our days obsessing over looking younger. Some of us are grandmothers, some aren’t, and none of us should be reduced to a stereotype. We have different tastes, priorities and personalities, just like women of every generation.
One of the quickest ways to make an ad feel inauthentic is to hand an experienced creator a script full of outdated slang or assumptions about aging. The best UGC works for the same reason at every age: the person is believable, the situation is recognizable, the problem feels real and the product has a clear role. Above all, the creator sounds like an actual human being rather than a walking product page.
That’s why I think brands sometimes make a mistake when they over-script mature creators. If you hired me because I resemble your customer, let me sound like your customer too.
Maybe the Creator Economy Never Had an Age Problem
The more campaigns I work on, the more I think we’ve been asking the wrong question.
The question isn’t whether there’s room for older women in the creator economy.
We’re already working. We’re filming ads, negotiating rates and usage, testing hooks, learning what converts and getting rehired.
And some of the companies doing the hiring are among the biggest names in technology, healthcare and beauty.
The interesting question is how long brands can afford not to include us.
Pew Research Center’s U.S. social media data shows 85 percent of adults ages 50 to 64 use YouTube, 74 percent use Facebook, 40 percent use Instagram and 30 percent use TikTok.
These consumers are not sitting somewhere outside the digital economy waiting for their grandchildren to explain the internet to them.
We’re already here. We’re watching the ads, making the ads and, perhaps most importantly, buying what the ads are selling.
Call us mature creators. Call us women over 50. And please, call me a granfluencer. I’m proud of the grandchildren who call me Grandma, proud of the career I’ve built and excited to welcome grandchild number five. The name may be playful, but the work is serious, and so is the purchasing power of the women we represent.
Why Brands Should Hire an Over 50 Content Creator
If women over 50 buy your product, put women over 50 in your creative.
Not occasionally, and not as the token mature face in a campaign filled with 25-year-olds. Build a creator bench that actually resembles your customer base.
And don’t assume mature creators belong only in campaigns about aging.
Test us in beauty, technology, travel, fashion, wellness, financial services, food, home and lifestyle. And think across generations.
A mother-daughter creator team can give you two audiences, two perspectives and one authentic relationship in the same piece of creative.
Give experienced creators multiple hooks. Let us speak naturally. Run the creative and compare the performance. You may discover something women over 50 have known for a very long time: relatability can be a lot more persuasive than aspiration. And brands are finally figuring that out.
