THE SPECIAL YEARS : 50 AND BEYOND: THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE : The Money Market : Companies Used to Fear That Targeting Older Consumers Would Saddle Them With a Dowdy Image. Now They Are Targeting the Age Group That Marketers Like to Refer to as Silver or Golden

Instead of showing teen-agers frolicking on the beach, a new Coca-Cola Classic commercial features actor Art Carney, 70, as a grandfather discussing Spin the Bottle with his grandson.

“Almost every age group is interested in Coca-Cola Classic, so it makes perfect sense to have an older person in the commercial,” says spokeswoman Georgia Camp.

Companies haven’t always thought this way.

Instead, they focused on a younger audience, “with no one really wondering what happened to someone once they turned 50--they just drop off the face of the earth,” says Treesa Drury, 52, advertising standards director for the American Assn. of Retired Persons.

The attitude toward a once-invisible market is changing as retailers realize that the 65 million people over 50 control more than half the nation’s discretionary income. And fast approaching their 50s are the first members of that trend-setting generation, the baby boomers, with their unparalleled purchasing power.

If older consumers have so much money, why haven’t companies bothered with them before?

Companies used to fear that targeting older consumers would saddle them with a dowdy image that would turn off younger shoppers.

People used to joke that it was a “dying market.” Now it’s a growing market, and you can expect to see more “oldster commercials,” says Scott Montgomery, 38, partner and co-creative director at Salvati Montgomery Sakoda, a Costa Mesa advertising agency.

“It’s not like you’re 50 and you’ve bought everything you need,” Montgomery says, although the myth persists that older people are miserly. Recent research shows that it ain’t necessarily so. Instead, it reveals what people over 50 have known all along: They have money and are willing to to spend it. More firms are targeting the age group that marketers like to refer to as silver or golden.

But please don’t call them “50 Plus” or even senior citizens. “Mature” and “adult” are the preferred terms.

Or you could try “suppies,” (short for senior urban professionals), a term mentioned by Ken Dychtwald in his new book, “Age Wave.” Dychtwald, a mere kid of 38, is the guru of a new senior consciousness. The Emeryville communications, marketing and consulting firm he founded three years ago--also called Age Wave--enlightens corporations about the trend toward older consumers.

“We’re like the Paul Reveres of aging America,” says Greg Gable, 32, Age Wave’s director of media projects. “We’ve awakened a lot of people.”

Age Wave isn’t the only company shouting, “The senior spenders are coming!”

Two months ago Richard J. Balkite started Mature Market Network, a Greenwich, Conn. consulting firm. His seminars, “How to Mine Gold from the Gray,” describe marketing to the suppies instead of their yuppie children, who are burdened with mortgage payments and child care costs.

“Companies just can’t grow with the under-49 market now,” Balkite, 47, says. And if they want to grab a share of the over-50 market, they need to change their game plan.

Older consumers are looking for value, Balkite says. They’re willing to switch brands, but you have to give them a good reason.

Demeaning television commercials were one of the top dislikes mature people mentioned in a 1987 study, Balkite says, running a close second to hard-to-open packaging.

Until recently, not many people in their prime made it to prime time, and the few who did were often goofy grannies, marketing experts note.

Men, meanwhile, had two roles--the feeble, decrepit old codger and “the wise man telling the dopey broad what side is up,” says Harold Kassarjian, 59, professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Management. After all, “any 60-year-old man knows a hell of a lot better about laundry soap than any 25-year-old housewife.”

Now “it’s OK to have a little bit of gray hair showing, even for women,” says Walter Henry, 53, associate professor and associate dean at UC Riverside’s Graduate School of Management. “Maybe Barbara Bush is helping this, too, bless her heart.”

Companies have to be careful, however, because some ads have aggravated instead of attracted older viewers.

Take the Denny’s commercial that has two “over-55” sisters debating about dinner. One sister can’t get the name of the restaurant straight and keeps calling it “Lenny’s.” AARP’s Drury is among those who contend that the ad reinforces a harmful stereotype of older women as frumpy and senile.

Not at all, says Sue Henderson, Denny’s vice president of marketing. “Most people see it as a bit of humor,” Henderson says. “To suggest that you can’t have humor in any specific group is very demeaning.”

Henderson acknowledges receiving “a few isolated complaints” about the ads, and quite a few compliments. “Seniors are a big part of our business, and we have no desire to offend any of our older customers,” she says. “Humor is very subjective, but humor is also very memorable.”

Grace Upton agrees with Henderson. “I’m amused,” says Upton, 67, a retired psychiatric technician from Whittier. Upton says she doesn’t take the absent-minded sister seriously. “People do get forgetful--young people get forgetful, too.”

Upton was less fond of the crabby character Clara Peller played in Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” commercials. “She didn’t portray what the normal lady over 50 might look like,” Upton says, adding that at least the Denny’s sisters dress better.

Appearance is another AARP concern. When it comes to looks, too often older folks--unlike other age groups--have been portrayed at their worst, Drury says. “TV’s teen-agers seem to be experiencing adolescence without acne, braces or weight gain, while seniors are shown as stooped, frail and frowzy.

One explanation may be that most ads are designed by youthful copywriters, who “just can’t relate to matures,” Balkite says. Using some older writers could help, he says. Another theory is that the image simply reflects the way American society views older people.

The frail image was firmly entrenched with advertisers for AARP’s Modern Maturity magazine. They figured readers must be a sickly lot, Drury says, and wanted to hawk “wheelchairs, hemorrhoid remedies and analgesics--everything with pain and doom and gloom.”

In the early 1980s the magazine banned certain types of ads (including both human and pet caskets), and limited others for medical items. Today Modern Maturity regularly turns down ads or suggests they be redone, as part of its mission to improve aging’s image.

Some firms are discovering on their own that gray-haired models can be glamorous, too. At Jockey International, one of the underwear firm’s most popular ads features a fit, stylish grandma, Wisconsin banker Catherine Councell Moll. When Moll, now 58, told the firm two years ago she wasn’t “thin and slinky,” they told her they were looking for someone realistic and personable.

Like Coca-Cola, more companies will switch to “trans-generational” ads to sell something, Gable says. “You don’t need to call it old people’s low-salt vegetables, just low-salt vegetables,” he says.

Advertisers will discover “they have to change their mind-set far more than they have to change their product,” Drury says.