About 40 percent of SMS users are adults who are 35 or older. About 70 percent of mobile news subscribers are over 25. What does this say about all of the advertisers only focusing on teens with phones? They are missing out on a huge amount of the mobile community.

It’s easy to assume that a 65 year old man may not have the required knowledge to operate a touch screen mobile device, let alone that tricky desktop computer thingy-majig. But adults, young adults especially, are using their phones all the time to organize their lives and advertisers are missing some great opportunities to reach them.

A recent survey indicates that 17 percent of adults in the US use mobile banking, and that number is expected to rise to 22 percent in the next year. Mobile commerce is growing rapidly as users can now shop on the go using mobile web. SMS and mobile apps are two other ways to access mobile banking but aren’t as popular as mobile web. SMS is expected to not increase in usage while apps and mobile web are.

In late 2007, Mazda launched a mobile ad campaign to showcase their new Mazda2 car using video. They targeted adults 25-34 as those who would be able to afford the car and would be interested in the stylish and bold look. Their results were very good and they were able to deliver 350,000 video ad impressions to the adults in the specified range with no wastage. Car companies, banks, sports teams, and news portals are among the groups that adults will be interested in on their mobile devices.

Adults are looking for information about the weather, news, health, business, and tech news. According to a report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, only 38 percent of Americans rely solely on offline sources for their daily news and only 2 percent of adults get their news from online sources only.

References:

http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/survey-finds-17-of-us-adults-use-mobile-banking-mobile-web-sms-leading-methods-5232/

http://mmaglobal.com/studies/mazda-2-–-mobile-ad-funded-video-–case-study

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/pew_report_2_percent_of_us_adults_rely_exclusively_on_internet_for_news.php