Colleges Are Still Advertising on TV for Teens
There are a ton of football games on any given week. In the NCAA football games, you’ll see colleges advertising their institutions, but the audience for television is missing teens who are rapidly pulling from traditional TV and headed to other video sources. 
Making reaching teens even more difficult is the fact that teens are more influenced by friends, influencers (bloggers, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat) than by their family members, celebrities or athletes. So if that TV ad is targeted at parents, it is probably not working either.
The Piper Jaffray annual survey found that Apple is a leader with teens, and 86% say that the iPhone is their next phone. More than 50% of teens say Amazon is their top online shopping destination. Nike is No. 2. Eighty-five percent of teens surveyed use Instagram, and 81% use Snapchat. Only 31% say they use Facebook. 
Teens have always been outliers of marketing, even when we didn’t want to believe it. The change in influencers leading purchase decisions will really impact college decision-making in the future.
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle. After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant. He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.” Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.” One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College. Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board. Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.
