Teens Prefer Texting to the Telephone

Texting is about to replace talking on the telephone as the favorite new teenage pastime.

 According to the Yankee Group, a U.S.-based research and consulting company, young adults 18 to 24 years old spend about 32 minutes a day texting. It’s OK if you said (or texted) OMG!

 And Madison Avenue has taken note.

 The Wall Street Journal recently reported on an upcoming campaign:

 “In ads that begin in two weeks for a new line of Degree deodorant for teen girls, Unilever is highlighting ‘OMG! Moments’. Print ads running in magazines such as Seventeen and CosmoGIRL show ‘High School Musical’ star Ashley Tisdale at a glitzy affair discovering that she has toilet paper stuck to one of her shoes.”

So texting is creating a whole new lexicon just as email did, oh just a generation ago (sorry if that makes you feel old . . . I’m still getting over it).

 
And it’s happened practically overnight. Americans sent a whopping 363 billion text messages in 2007, up from 81 billion in 2005, according to CTIA, the Wireless Association industry trade group.

 
But in addition to lexicon and advertising, those text messages flying around mean big business.

 
Last week at CTIA in Las Vegas, Evan Schwartz, cofounder and chief marketing officer of Thumbplay Inc. told MobileMarketer.com that they are announcing several new deals and initiatives to go after discovery of mobile content. “We announced the beta of a new program called the “Get” program. It’s basically a vertical mobile entertainment search . . . So all [that] consumers need to do is text “GET” plus any artist, game or content they want to the 48000 short code.”

 
Also last week RCA Music Group announced that Alicia Keys’ single “No One” has topped the half-million mark for ringback sales in the United States, making it the first-ever ringback to go gold. (Ringbacks are short codes.)

 
Coinciding with this was the interview we did announcing a new way to ensure all those texts and common short codes are getting through. Read it here.