Time Is What Buyers Want in the 1990s : Advertising: Consumers are going to be as interested in how to bank and save time as they were in banking and investing money in the ‘80s, an agency predicts.

If Madonna’s “Material World” was the theme song for consumer values in the ‘80s, Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle” may turn out to be the tune for spenders in the ‘90s, if you believe data released in a survey conducted by Grey Advertising, a New York-based advertising agency.

The survey, dubbed “Households of the 1990s: America’s New Grown-Ups,” asserts that time has replaced money as the currency for this decade.

“Consumers are finding themselves caught between a clock and a hard place,” said Barbara Feigin, executive vice president-director of strategic services at Grey. “During this decade, consumers are going to be as interested in how to bank and save time as they were in banking and investing money in the 80s.”

The Grey survey, which included 477 households in major metropolitan areas across the country, has reidentified the once highly attractive “yuppie” market of yesterday as the “new grown-ups” of the ‘90s. This market segment, made up primarily of 25- to 44-year-olds, is the targeted audience of most national ad campaigns and as a result, their values often influence the marketing efforts of major advertisers.

“The values of this group have changed dramatically, and as a result, the look of advertising is bound to change,” said Feigin.

The study showed 72% of those surveyed felt advertising is out of synch with everyday life. Consumers have grown tired of the hyper-glamorous, sexually explicit images that proliferated ad campaigns in the past decade, and are most concerned with family, home and friends.

Participants ranked having someone special in their lives, doing a good job at work and leading a satisfying life as top priorities. This shift in values away from material wealth and workaholism should be reflected during the next 10 years in more wholesome, realistic ads.

“They seemed to feel advertising was stuck in some kind of time warp,” said Dick Karp, executive vice president of creative services at Grey. “Although they weren’t happy with the slick, trendy ads of the ‘80s, they weren’t supporting a shift back to the ‘Father Knows Best’ models of the ‘50s.”

Karp said that in the ‘90s, consumers can expect to see more diverse households reflected in national ad campaigns that might show stepchildren, racially integrated couples and children taking on more of the shopping responsibilities for parents.

Although most industry experts agreed with Grey’s findings, some say that the study was not saying anything new and that the survey itself was in a bit of a time warp.

“There’s been a move toward a more conservative look in ads for sometime now,” said Ken Rabasca, vice chairman and creative director of Greenstone Rabasca & Roberts, a Melville, N.Y.-based ad agency. “I’m not sure that what they’re saying here is all that new.”