At the end of August 2017, Guadalupe Fiñana, an 88-year-old Game of Thrones fan from Seville, watched the final episode of the seventh season of the hit series with her granddaughter. Throughout the episode, Fiñana didn’t stop commenting on what she saw on screen. What she didn’t know was that her granddaughter, aware of her grandmother’s grace, was taking her in. A friend uploaded the video to YouTube. “It made the video more masculine and from there I started recording more,” he explains in a phone conversation with EL PAÍS’ grandmother of the dragons, as Guadalupe Fiñana is now known on social networks.
In those five years, Fiñana has not only become a star on Instagram and TikTok (where she has 159,000 and 322,000 followers respectively), but has also made the leap to television with her participation in the first edition of the MasterChef Abuelos program. “I made some Roquefort croquettes that came out delicious and they took me, not because they’re mine, but I make them very well,” he says of the casting test. They took her, yes, but she also won the competition. Then came a recipe book and even a short film, Maruja, which was released just a few weeks ago. A project starring Fiñana herself, directed by Berta García-Lacht and co-produced by Isabel Coixet. The Sevillian is one of those grandmothers who are defying the digital divide and are still successful on the internet after 80. The naturalness of such profiles is perceived as a breath of fresh air in the age of filters, and the millions of people interested in their content make it clear that the social media bubble is not just reserved for the youngest.
The grandmother-grandson tandem
Behind many of these profiles are the grandmothers’ grandchildren and granddaughters who are responsible for recording and posting the videos and managing the account. On some occasions, they even act as proxies when it comes to dealing with brands that want to work with them. Such is the case of Mari Carmen and her grandson Héctor, the duo behind La Yaya Mari Carmen, with 305,000 followers on TikTok. “My grandson studied film directing, he was always holding the camera up and down, recording and making films,” says Mari Carmen, an 82-year-old from Leon who has lived in Barcelona for more than six decades. In October 2020, as TikTok’s growth exploded thanks to the pandemic, Héctor decided to upload to the platform his grandmother’s videos that he had been recording for years. “Costumbrismo has always fascinated me, capturing the everyday things of my friends, my family…” he explains. And this spontaneity of routine things we find in the videos starring Mari Carmen, with Héctor behind the camera. From preparing a traveling suitcase to reuniting with his sister Encarnita to his rehabilitation sessions, grandmother and grandson show a close but non-bossed relationship, like two friends from very different generations. “I am so. Everything my grandson records for me is spontaneous. That’s the way I am. And he is also what he is looking for. It’s all natural. Physically you can catch me in a robe, disheveled, screaming. And being yourself seems to reach people,” Mari Carmen makes clear.
Without commercial strategies, the grandmothers of TikTok have managed to connect with audiences as young as their grandchildren or even younger. Examples abound, with names like La Yaya Joaquina, 93, or La Abuela Antonia, 92, two ninety-year-olds with tens of thousands of followers on social networks (90,000 followers on TikTok for the first and 132,000 for the second). Con Buen Humor creators Rosa Vallejo and her grandson Christian have built a community of more than 7.2 million people. The pattern repeats itself once more: everything came unexpectedly, with a grandson in the middle and no claim to having a good time. “I started out on my own and made videos,” says Christian, recalling the exact date he first posted a video with his grandmother. “It was January 1st, 2013. People loved it. And from there we made a video, and another, and another, but it came out of nowhere, not expecting her to be that famous or anything. In fact, thanks to TikTok, it became so famous only three or four years ago, just before the pandemic.
In all cases, they claim to consider their presence on networks as a hobby. “I’m 82 years old, what I want is to live life because you’ve been through a lot of hosts, do you understand me? It’s like a second life, who would tell me that I would be famous at this age?” explains Rosa Vallejo, born in Andalusia and a resident of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat for years.
While not professional projects per se, there is a lot of work behind these profiles: creating and publishing content on a recurring basis takes effort and dedication. The brands, both those aimed at a family audience and those aimed at a younger audience, have not hesitated in these numbers to recognize an alternative to the usual prescribing doctors. “Virtually everyone likes the figure of older people, so it’s much easier for these types of profiles to empathize with the public and generate a high level of engagement. And what brands are looking for is to move away from the typical influencer campaigns and create innovative content that not only empathizes with the audience, but also allows them to interact with the content,” says Sergio Barreda Coy, CEO of the influencer Agency keeper experience. .
Challenge for the digital divide and a company facing loneliness
Finding an entertainment that you are passionate about after the age of 80 is usually not the norm, but when this hobby is related to social networks, it is even more unusual when we consider the problem of the digital divide, among the elderly people suffer . According to data from the Senior Observatory of the newspaper 65ymás, 76% of people over 80 are concerned about the digital divide. Adapting to technology at an advanced age has enabled influencer grandmothers to connect with a young and sophisticated audience, in many cases digital natives. The success of grannies on social networks (and on the Internet in general, as also shown by the phenomenon of pasta grannies), where they are the epicenter of a community that virtually embraces them, is contrasted with the loneliness that afflicts a large part of third age . According to a recent European Commission report, 11% of Spanish men and women have felt alone at some point in the last year. A situation that particularly affects older people, since it is the age group that most often lives without company. Some countries, like Japan, have even created a Ministry of Loneliness to try to address a social problem exacerbated by the coronavirus crisis.
Guadalupe Fañina confesses that she enjoyed “Sagram” (as she refers to Instagram) with her grandchildren growing up as a child and is happy to say that her favorite thing is “reading the messages that she gave me from the around the world, from New York, from New Zealand, from Ecuador, from Wisconsin, who didn’t even know where that was. You send me such beautiful messages that I get very distracted when I read them. I answer and am very grateful. As they walk down the street, run errands, or go to the market, they find fans everywhere asking for photos and hugs. “They recognize me a lot, the children and the elderly stop me. She’s TikTok’s grandmother, tell me,” says Con Buen Humor’s Rosa Vallejo. Mari Carmen has also noticed the affection of the public beyond the screen, always ready to take photos and videos with her followers. And he remembers an anecdote that happened to him in Madrid: “They stop me briefly on Gran Vía and suddenly group after group are waving and asking for photos, as if they had gotten off a bus. On another street, a blonde girl hugs me and starts to cry. I also cried with emotion. I will never forget that wonderful hug through tears. It shaped me a lot.”