Teens to Mobile Advertisers: Gimme!

More than one-half of teens do not want mobile ads. What about the rest?

If teens are drivers of change in mobile phone usage, can they also drive change in mobile advertising acceptance?

The good news is that, according to a 2008 survey by the Direct Marketing Association, 19% of teens ages 15 to 17 and adults ages 21 to 30 have responded to a mobile phone offer. However, the response rate dropped substantially to 7% among 18-to-20-year-olds.

The bad news? Harris Interactive and CTIA found that more than one-half of teen respondents were not interested in mobile ads, even in exchange for some type of incentive.

The silver lining: Teens were somewhat more likely than adults to be interested in mobile advertising; 64% of the adult group said they were not at all interested, according to Harris/CTIA.

Among the teens and adults who did say they would be motivated by incentives, the favorite was cold, hard cash. However, teens were more likely to appreciate free music downloads than adults. Free minutes were another popular incentive for teens, according to Harris.

Teens also were somewhat more responsive to ads that came in the form of polls or contests, according to comScore M:Metrics.

Assuming teens wanted to receive advertising on their phone, what would they most like to see? Ads aimed at areas of interest, such as sports or entertainment, according to Harris Interactive. Teens were substantially more interested in these ads than in restaurant ads, coupons or ads scheduled to arrive at a certain time of day.

Kids and Teens Are Always On

Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

eMarketer estimates that 82% of US teens ages 12 to 17 and 43.5% of children ages 3 to 11 will use the Internet on a monthly basis in 2009.

Comparative data from Nielsen Online indicates that about 19% of active Internet users in July 2008—or 32.4 million people—were under age 18.
MultiMedia Intelligence found that there were 16 million mobile teens in the US in 2007.

According to the US Census Bureau, there are 25.7 million teens in the US. That means nearly two-thirds of all teens have a mobile phone.

Pew Internet & American Life Project and the College Board’s National Commission on Writing found that a greater percentage of US teens have a mobile phone than own a PC
“This audience navigates between a multitude of electronic options for communication, including social networks, text messaging, instant messaging and virtual worlds,” says Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Kids and Teens: Communication Revolutionaries. “They expect transitions between communications media to be seamless—messages sent by one means ought to be accessible in another.”

In fact, the distinctions many adults make between “online,” “offline” and “mobile” communications are meaningless to these young multimedia mavens.

“Kids and teens just communicate, period,” says Ms. Williamson.

What tools they use to interact are less important than how simple the interaction is, how seamlessly they can move across devices and how engaging the experience is.

“Marketers have never confronted a faster-moving or more elusive audience,” Ms. Williamson says.