Here are four of the trends most relevant to college media

Shifting to visual: Mobile devices have driven the shift from textual to a more visual vocabulary and a greater emphasis on the aesthetic. This is having the greatest effect on college students, who have grown up in this increasing mobile world. Advertisements that are heavily wordy, rather than aesthetically pleasing, are less likely to be effective to this demographic.

Mobile is the prime screen:  The growing trend has been from reading, browsing the web, and watching videos on a computer or laptop to doing so more and more on a mobile device like a tablet or even a smartphone. Screen time on tablets and smart phones now exceeds screen time on laptops and computers. This is especially true for the technologically savvy college demographic, which is why mobile advertising can be so effective in terms of targeting college students.

Mobile changes how we socialize: The unique social tools for mobile, separate from the desktop, allow us to communicate with each other in different ways than ever before. It also allows communication to be much more continuous, as mobile devices are always with us, which allows for superior mobile communication with those not with us, but can hurt face-to-face communication. These issues with communication are effecting college students disproportionally among the adult population.

Privacy and security fears change the game: With mobile growing, there’s also a growing awareness of the privacy concerns related to mobile technology. These privacy concerns refer to the ease of access of potentially personal and private information to cybercriminals, corporations, and governments, among others. Even as people are becoming more aware of these concerns, however, there is still a tremendous amount of data available for marketing people to use to help them reach and better understand their customers, particularly if their customers are primarily young people.