More evidence that venture capitalists are focusing on the 50+ market surfaced this week with the launch of Caring.com. The site takes aim at one of the most pressing, but problematic, Boomer information needs–caring for aging parents. Caring.com is the brainchild of Andy Cohen, a former manager at Intuit, and aims to provide resources for caregivers with elderly family members. The company raised $6 million in launch funds and went live earlier this week.

There are plenty of regional caregiver information resources around the country. But no one has yet successfully cracked the national market–even though the long-distance information need is real, with adult children struggling to provide care to parents hundreds or thousands of miles away. The opportunity is big, with Caring.com citing figures stating that 34 million adults provide “personal aid, financial assistance, or both, to an older family member.”

Here are the challenges:

• Much of the caregiver advertising market is local, not national. Obvious categories include the various segments of senior housing, health care and medical providers, and financial advisers.
• Big brand advertisers confuse the Boomer and senior demographics. Caregivers may be Boomers, but all those images of wheelchairs and walkers put off marketers of luxury goods, high end retailers, etc.
• Few caregivers identify themselves as such, and their information need often pops up in a crisis environment. That presents interesting audience development challenges.

News coverage of Caring.com’s launch is at Advertising Age, Reuters and CNET.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 10:14 am and is filed under Caregiving, Media, Venture Capital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.