What used to take multiple pieces of equipment, over $3,000 and nothing short of a car trunk to lug everything around has today been replaced by the single smartphone.
There are 2.6 billion smartphone users today and a projected 6.1 billion by 2020.
That’s a lot of smartphones, and it’s really no surprise given how much they do.
- They are our computers.
- They are our radios.
- They are our CD players.
- They are our answering machines.
- They are our cameras.
- They are our video cameras.
- They are our video players.
- They are our tape recorders.
- They are our clock radios.
- They are our weather stations.
- They are our typewriters and word processors.
- And of course, they are our phones.
In 1991, RadioShack ran this ad as “America’s Technology Store” with sales on all of those things our smartphones have replaced.
A lot has changed in the 25 years since that ad, not the least of which being the prevalence and use of the smartphones. There is an app seemingly for everything we used to need in the 1991 RadioShack ad.
We have The Weather Channel app to check the forecast.
We have the ESPN app to get sports news and scores.
We have FoxNews, CNN, The Economist, theFEED and more news apps available to us 24 hours a day.
Americans have always been heavy technology users. Radio Shack wasn’t selling all of those devices for nothing.
Today our technology is all wrapped up in one little screen, though, and that focuses our eyes like never before.
Americans collectively check their mobile phones 8 billion times every day. The use of news and media apps has risen 26% from last year, and app usage as a whole grew 59% in 2015.
Smartphone users on average have installed 36 apps on their devices, and 26% of those apps are used each day.
We’re spending nearly 3 hours a day on our mobile devices – that’s actually a little more than what we’re spending watching TV. Of that time, 86% of the average user’s time is spent in apps.
Easy to carry.
Easy to use.
Hard to overlook as an important tactic in voter contact.
Learn More About Targeted Mobile Advertising:
#Mobile101: Not All Impressions Are Equal
Illuminating the Way: Mobile Ad Targeting
Mobile Killed the TV Star: Eyes Are Shifting to Mobile