The Report
The 2010 Youth Trends Report was compiled by What Youth Think (the brains behind mobileYouth) and the Youth Research Partners. The Partners are listed here on the right.
Part One of Three
File is available for download from mobileyouthnet (signup required)
We’re on tour, visiting 4 continents in 2010.
The tour is the result of a partnership between the Youth Research Partners managed in London by What Youth Think (the brains behind mobileYouth).
Want to find out the latest global youth media, technology and culture trends?
How are brand connecting with youth in the clubs of Mumbai? What’s cooking down on the streets of San Francisco? How are brands influencing the influencers of Harajuku Tokyo?We’ll share these insights with you on tour. Come join us on the What Youth Think tour and participate in a Young Ideas Salon at a city near you.
We start in Mumbai February 11th and visit 4 continents across the year. (registration open)
Updated Dates are here:
http://www.youngideassalon.com/agenda/Tour Schedule (as of Jan 2010 - subject to change so check back to confirm)
Feb 2010
11th Feb 2010 – Mumbai India
Mar 2010
10th March 2010 – Kuala Lumpur Malaysia
25h March 2010 – Johannesburg South Africa
29th March 2010 – SingaporeApr 2010
2nd April 2010 – Jakarta Indonesia
8th April 2010 – Tokyo Japan
15th April 2010 – Los Angeles USA
19th April 2010 – San Francisco USA
23rd April 2010 – Toronto Canada
26th April 2010 – Chicago USA
27th April 2010 – New York USAJune 2010
TBC – San Francisco
TBC – Sydney
TBC – Auckland
TBC – Shanghai
TBC – Singapore
TBC – Dubai
TBC – Helsinki
TBC – IstanbulAlso, partnership opportunities to get involved
I hope you can join us.
Preview copy of the 2010 Youth Trends presentation now available. We’re offering a preview because we’re *still* waiting for our tech support to switch the DNS and make Youth Research Partners active. Guess New Years was a little hard on them. So, in the meantime enjoy a taster of what’s to come. The original contains 40 trends and was compiled by our partners across the globe.
Downloads won’t be publicly available but may be available to friends & partners on request.
What are The Kids using their phones for? Mobile Youth explains
Graham Brown from Mobile Youth takes the stage next at the Heroes Of The Mobile Screen conference in London – we've been covering it all day. His session will focus on what young people are doing with their phones.
“There's 1.2 billion mobile-owning youth in the world, from 5 to 25,” he says, with 50% of those living in Asia. “This market is the real mobile heroes,” he says. “This market discovered SMS. This market discovered Facebook. This market discovered P2P and file-sharing. This market discovered mobile music and ringtones. Where would we be without those?”
But he points out that 800 million youngsters in Asia have still to get their first phone – “a huge opportunity” - and that by 2012, one fifth of the world's mobile youth will be living in India. But even now, the average age of a European getting their first mobile phone is 7.1 years.
Mobile youth spend 10% of their disposable income on mobile already too. They spend 12 times more on mobile than the entire global recorded music industry sales. “We often consider music as a key defining point in young people's lives. Well, it still is, but also there is now mobile.”
60% of young people sleep with their mobile phones, and given the choice, 81% would forego food than top up their phone. Isn't that because their parents buy food for them though? Just to inject an element of cynicism.
Advertisement
However, Brown says there are winners and losers when it comes to what young people spend their mobile-related money on. 72% of students surveyed in the UK by Mobile Youth said they'd recommend their phone to friends, compared to 23% for Nokia (and a whopping minus reading for Motorola – sorry, the slide flicked off before I could write it down).
But word of mouth is hugely important – yet the mobile industry still targets them in the same old way – advertising. Only 34% of mobile youth believe the advertising from mobile handset brands, says Brown.
So what mobile heroes are engaging with young people successfully? Topline stuff. One unnamed handset company spent $35,000 on focus groups trying to find out which jingle young people would like for the TV campaign. This is a Bad Idea, if you hadn't guessed – presumably because the surveyees don't give a stuff about TV ads.
74% of young people think that mobile tariffs are confusing, untrustworthy or unclear. Only 27% of them trust their mobile operators. These are from Mobile Youth's most recent research report.
Oh yes, those heroes. People engaging with youth well. In the US, the most loved mobile brand is Boost Mobile – for its $50 unlimited mobile plan, which attracted 400,000 net additions in a quarter. “They proved conclusively that it wasn't about cheap and free when it came to youth,” he says.
Flip Digital is another, which Brown says successfully engaged young people at an early stage in the production of their video camera devices (and then sold up to Cisco for a huge sum).
Another company: Threadless, the online t-shirt company. And another: Monster, which makes fizzy drinks. It's apparently doing $3 billion in sales and is more profitable per employee than Apple. “They don't sell products, they sell what products do for young people,” says Brown.
We’re one month before our public launch of the new youth research partnership. At this early stage, let’s take a look at just who’s in the mix as it’s been a lot of fun meeting, learning and sharing ideas with our new partners so I hope you’ll find something here of value too - perhaps you’d like to find out about joining?
Watch out for the official announcement January 2010
China
Malaysia & Singapore
India
Finland
South Africa
Nigeria
United Kingdom
