Are Teens Really Receptive to Mobile Advertising?

(MoneyWatch)  If you read the story in today's LA Times, particularly just the opening paragraphs, you'd be forgiven for thinking that younger cell phones users are a promising new market for mobile advertising. But, uh, you'd be wrong. Here's how the LA Times story, with the headline of "Advertisers in touch with teens' cellphones," opens:

As she readied for last night's prom, Jamie McGraw asked her friends for advice about hairstyles, shoes and a dress.

She also turned to her cellphone for a little help.

McGraw receives daily text messages from Seventeen magazine about fashion, including tips about what to wear to the prom. She planned to take the magazine's suggestion to wear a brightly colored outfit and be prepared for "dress malfunctions." "When the texts recommend a certain look that sounds good, I will try it out, but it doesn't always mean buying something," the 17-year-old Laguna Niguel resident said.

Which even that, right there, is enough to put the whole conceit of the article skidding off the rails: she's getting updates from a magazine, not advertisements from a marketer. In fact, the great majority of the article focuses on teens using cell phones to get updates and information, not advertisements. When advertisements are mentioned, the teens, like nearly everyone else, seem a bit turned off:

Quentin Brown, an 18-year-old high school senior from Santa Monica, said he texted to vote during the National Basketball Assn.'s slam-dunk competition at this year's All-Star game. In return, he received a flurry of text messages with offers to buy jerseys and other basketball-related stuff. He didn't mind the texts for the jerseys, since he's interested in them and always looking for deals. But he didn't like getting ones about things he didn't care about, such as asking him to join an NBA fantasy draft or go to NBA summer camp.

"They were kind of stalking me," he said. "But then they stopped and I was glad."

I understand the desire for mobile advertising to take off. In the article, Roman Tsunder of Access 360 Media, a mobile marketer, claims to get click-through rates between 2 and 4 percent on their mobile ads, which would be massive compared to online advertising (though I'd love to see how they're calculating those numbers). Neilsen Mobile put out a report this March, finding that nearly a quarter of all U.S. cellphone users have seen an advertisement, and out of those:

[A]lmost a third of people who use data services such as text messaging or Web surfing say they don't mind advertising so long as it lowers the cost of their overall bill. And roughly 13 percent said they were in favor of advertising if it improved content. And 14 percent of those responding said they didn't mind ads if they were relevant to their interests.

But put those figures another way, and it's two-thirds of consumers do mind advertising, even if lowers their bill. I'm quite sure that your average teenager is more receptive to mobile advertising than your average middle-aged consumer -- indeed, the same Neilsen Mobile report found that 46 percent of teens were likely to remember seeing a mobile ad, compared to just 29 percent of users overall. But while the tolerance for mobile advertising may be slightly greater among teens, that tolerance remains selective and ready to bolt as soon as ads stop being useful and start being intrusive.