Nadja Litschko, Research Consultant for Wireless World Forum  and co-author of the mobileYouth 2007 report, looks at young peoples attitude to advertising on TV, on the web, and on mobile

Some wise marketing owl once said the medium is the message and for a generation we have followed his advice. The rise of network television in the 1980s and youth focused programming such as MTV made TV arguably the coolest medium for generation X.
Data from the latest mobileYouth survey 2007 showing 98% of under 25s owning a mobile phone and dedicating 13% of their disposable income to this latest youth icon would lead many to naturally assume that TV is dead and mobile the new TV.
Yet, TV still claims the largest proportion of all advertising spend. 19 billion was spent on advertising in the UK in 2006, with 43.7% of that sum going to press and 24.1% to TV, making the latter the second largest advertising medium after press worth 4.5 billion. (Source: Advertising Association, 2007; Open Gardens, 2007) TV also has a long history as an established marketing channel where the rules, practices and successful approaches are already well known, whereas on newer channels those still need to be discovered.
For almost a century, marketing has relied on interruption to engage consumers. Of all the available media, TV had developed the art of interruption marketing to its highest levels. Levis TV adverts touting the original jean as daring and sexy became the social currency of the 1980s teen.
Although the medium remains relatively unchanged for a generation, the generations they target have moved on. Youth have choice and choice means that viewers are no longer forced to accept interruption. Not only are they able to flick channels either manually or with the help of software when the ads arrive, but increasingly youths attention is elsewhere multitasking TV time with internet and mobile.
TV is able to reach a large, defined audience and the ratings demonstrate its consistency in performance. Viewing figures released by BARB confirm that viewing time in the UK has consistently increased over the past 10 years, and that the average adult watched 3.81 hours of broadcast TV every day in May 2007(Source: Thinkbox, 2007). However, lack of viewer data beyond raw numbers means the viewing figures may claim an audience, but advertisers are increasingly dubious as to whether the interruptions are actually registering.
In search of accountability in their spend, marketers have turned to the internet and to some extent mobile. According to Kieron Matthews, Head of Marketing at the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), Internet advertising grows around 40% every year in the UK and is estimated to be worth 2.5 billion by the end of 2007. This would make it bigger than Direct Marketing and the second largest channel after TV.
Mobile, however, is still in its infancy. Tomi Ahonen, author of reputable publications such as Communities Dominate Brands, sees mobile as the centre of future marketing campaigns with other media supporting it.
However, Matthew White, head of advertising for Channel 4, the UK channel that brought teens wall-to-wall Big Brother, warns in the mobileYouth report about the perils of overcooking new media. No matter what channel is chosen, he says, the crucial part is to deliver a relevant message to the right audience at the right time.
When MTV and a number of political forces in the US combined the Rock the Vote using SMS to underpin youth engagement in politics, the campaign flopped. Despite the apparent appeal of the mobile channel as a tool for engagement, the content still remained irrelevant. The trouble was, politics meant little to todays youth. So what is the key to successful youth marketing?
The answer lies in the right mix of media, and it is crucial to determine which combination of channels would be most suitable with regard to product type, message and target audience. Building a dialogue with young consumers requires a cross-media approach, where mobile and possibly TV support the overall objectives of the campaign effort, rather than making an isolated investment in mobile marketing.
So while youth may be less engaged with traditional marketing channels, neither one holds the answer. Neither mobile nor TV alone can validate a marketing campaign for an increasingly difficult-to-reach consumer base.