Mobile Ads for PrePay Credit works with Teens

Here is some interesting research on mobile advertising. According to a recent survey, a staggering 82% (!) of 11-20 year-olds would be happy to receive advertising in exchange for top-up credit (76% for discounts/special offers). There was more to report on the survey of course, which you can read e.g. here.

The most interesting conclusion is that the kids apparently fully understand the mechanics of advertising: advertising business is paying for eyeballs. If you want my eyeballs, you have to pay me.

They do not really seem to give a hoot WHAT ads they actually receive (although at least 71% would not mind to receive ads on things of interest to them) but more what they get in return for allowing it. This would appear to create a small dilemma because it is somewhat difficult to communicate to the advertiser that one wants it to subsidise the youngsters' top-up credits ("so who was that ad from?" "Can't remember but was worth 2 quid"). At the very least, advertisers would have to take a different approach to the messages (as in brand message, not as in SMS) and the type of campaigns they create in order to take this into account.

Blackberry Platform Failures...

So, now we had it: no Blackberry connections for "millions" of users. Thousands of appointments unconfirmed because of the inability to get this last-minute change of plan out via e-mail, millions of leading executives severely disturbed and seriously troubled as they could not actually do anything on their way to work (a wonderful little account is here).

So what was it? RIM said it related to a disobedient "new, non-critical system routine" that had to be installed (cf. NY Times). Now, non-critical might sound soothing to an engineer. It will give every the overwhelming majority of Blackberry users, all the politicians, lawyers, marketing executives, bankers, etc the jitters: how bad will it actually be if it is critical???

The outage showed the weakness of the otherwise pretty compelling hard/software combination: it seems to contain so much hard-coded "stuff" that it entangles hardware, network and device so closely that one OEM-side error triggers outage across all networks and all devices, and that is not good! But then: according to Nasdaq, this "not good" is "only" worth $1.88 per share - that's how much the shares lost on Thursday.