Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Reminder to Marketers: Teen Life Happens at the Mobile Level

What do text messaging, encyclopedias, working from home, and marketing have in common. Everything, according to Susan Marshall, vice president of marketing at ChaCha (aka, “ur mobile BFF").

ChaChees — as the company’s users are called – can text a query to any one of ChaCha’s 55,000 “guides” – all of whom work at home and are on-call to answer questions. Marshall reports that teens have asked 150 million questions over the last 18 months.

For marketers “..The result is a comprehensive view into the psyche of a teen. They will be honest about what they want and marketers get a sense of how to direct some services towards them and direct the right kind of advertisements to them.” [Note: Teens ask most about sex, kissing, relationships, video game info, and -- the top "must-know" category -- humor.]

For the statistically inclined, consider these numbers from Marshall’s Media Post blog: Working on a baseline index of 100, teens use the Internet at a time-spent index of 82. Time spent using their mobile device for phone calls indexes at 67. Text usage goes off the charts at 338. There’s no end in sight. Marshall says, “We have found that 83% of the entire teen population texts, which is up 13% in the past year.”

Marketing Brillo sees a sub-text to all this: More work-from-home income opportunities. We like.

-- scrubbed by Marketing Brillo

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