Cell phones that are forever young

TAMPA - Brook Custer giggles as she scours the rows of shiny new cellular phones at an Alltel wireless store in Brandon.

Phones with big touch screens.

Phones with video cameras.

And the best of all, she says, phones with keyboards for text messaging.

“Yeah, I really want a new phone,” says Brook, who at age 10 is on her third cell phone. Her first phone she got at age 7. Her brother Nick got his first phone at age 9.

With school starting next week, their mother, Lisa Custer, sighs and says, “Yes, they’re getting new phones. They send me text messages all day. If I’m late picking them up for school, I get a text, ‘Mom, where are you?’”

That, in a nutshell, is the key to one of the hottest social trends in communications. Though spending on back-to-school items such as jeans and shoes could stay flat this year, more elementary-age children than ever will start school with their first cell phone. It’s not by accident. Cellular companies are pouring resources into advertising that reaches younger and younger children who happen to be more receptive to advertising on phones, converting them into highly profitable, multimedia customers.

Already, 8 percent of 8-year-olds have a cell phone, and they don’t want “kiddy” phones. They want state-of-the-art BlackBerries, Apple iPhones and phones with full-size QWERTY keyboards and social networking software to stay connected with other third- and fourth-graders. By age 12, more than half of U.S. youngsters have their own phone. By age 15, the percentage jumps to 84.

Cell phone makers are doing their part to stir up the youth market, making phones with catchy names such as Glimmer, Rumor and Scoop.

Parents, meanwhile, are left to balance tough questions: When is someone too young to get a first phone? What about the cost? What about safety issues: the need to reach children in an emergency versus the trouble youngsters could find being so connected?

“We see more and more phones every year,” said Joan Bookman, principal of Citrus Park Elementary. “We even have some first-graders with phones now, and they want phones just like the one mom and dad use.”

Marketing Onslaught

U.S. cellular companies can chalk up those kinds of victories to new marketing meant to reach youngsters.

Alltel now puts a significant number of its TV commercials on MTV and VH1 and on the social media Web site Facebook and music streaming Web site Pandora, said Lucie Pathmann, director of marketing for Alltel.

Alltel this summer added unlimited text messaging to its main calling plans, partly to reach younger customers, and it set up a special Web site where children can make customized “skin” covers for their phones, including Marvel Comics characters and Japanese anime cartoons.

Some of the hottest-selling phones this year are geared to the youth market, including the LG Scoop, the LG Rumor and the Pantech Duo, all with slide-out keyboards for easier text message typing.

Verizon Wireless this year launched a Batman-themed phone to coincide with the release of “The Dark Knight” and the beginning of the school year. That phone is among the best-sellers this summer, said Verizon spokesman Chuck Hamby. “We don’t market directly to kids, but we know they can be big influencers in the family,” Hamby said.

Often, cell phones rapidly become more than a random gadget around the house. They become part of the family dynamic.

One mom, Rebecca McDaniel of Wesley Chapel, has five phones in her family.

“We’ve got them all on a T-Mobile family plan,” she said. The peer pressure built rapidly among the children as the older ones got the first phones. “The oldest one, we waited until she was 16, but the youngest now got her first at 12. They want BlackBerries, but we drew the line and got basic phones. They end up passing them around like hand-me-downs.”

Phone Controls

If there is one trigger that persuades parents to buy children a first phone, it’s safety, the ability to communicate in an emergency.

Typically, parents start off buying a prepaid phone for their youngsters, partly to control what the phones can do, partly to contain costs and partly as a parental bargaining chip, said Nic Covey, a mobile communications researcher at Nielsen.

Twenty percent of children Nielsen surveyed said they have to maintain a specific grade average, Covey said, or they get “grounded from the phone.”

After that, however, parental control over a phone fades quickly, Covey said. Nearly 100 percent of parents say they have unwritten rules for phone use, but just 35 percent have managed to figure out the technical controls on the phone that restrict which numbers the phone can call and what times of day it’s active.

More often, parents simply take the phone away at bedtime.

All this growth in the youth cellular market seems to run into an opposite social trend: a cellular crackdown at schools.

This summer, Hillsborough County schools decided to ban cellular phone use on school grounds during the school day: A “bell-to-bell” policy that requires teachers and school staff to take away any phone they see in use. Using a phone during school counts as a “Level Three” offense, on par with plagiarism and cheating.

Growth Market

Still, the trend of younger and younger cellular users seems to be gaining steam, largely because they represent an untapped new revenue stream.

On average, a phone adds $28 to a family’s monthly cellular bill, Covey said. The research firm M:Metrics found that 23 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds will add more than $100 a month to the family cellular bill.

Even better for marketers, Nielsen research suggests that children tend to be more receptive to advertising through the phone, and they’re heavy users of data services such as text, photo and video messaging, plus Internet access, ringtones, wallpapers and other add-on programs.

In other words, they’re dream customers for wireless companies trying to sell profitable data services.

Cellular firms won’t say how much they spend on marketing to reach younger customers. Compared with the adult market, there’s also less hard data on just how fast the youth market is growing. That’s partly because cellular firms only now are turning their attention in that direction.

This year was the first that AT&T even tried researching the cellular market among 8-year-olds because the company had assumed children that young would represent too small a market to pursue.

AT&T had tried placing ads in parenting magazines for a very simple Firefly brand phone with preset buttons for “Mom” and “Dad.”

“But we found out that kids were growing up so quickly that they were ready for something new,” said Mimi Chan, director of youth marketing at AT&T, which stopped selling the Firefly this year. “Kids want phones that look like their parents’ phones. They want Motorola Razrs and BlackBerries. I’m surprised now when I see an 8-year-old with a phone that doesn’t have a full keyboard.”

Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at rmullins@tampatrib.com or (813) 259-7919.