Time to fight back against media’s mobile peer pressure
Opinion
We ban smartphones from our kids, but design media plans that depend on them. If mobile screen time has now overtaken TV, isn’t it finally time to do something about this contradiction?
“I would love for the school to just ban phones so the peer pressure disappears and we as parents aren’t the odd one out.”
As any parent knows, “peer pressure” is the Japanese knotweed of bad habits and bad ideas among children. Our poor little darlings’ instinct for social survival is full of traps created by the pressure of “fitting in”.
It’s actually difficult to think of anything worse than giving these impressionable pups a fully functional smartphone. Instagram at 13? With my spotty face and ultra-gelled mop? I would have been crucified.
This is why there’s a growing movement in the UK among parents and schools to formalise no-smartphones pledges. Not just to protect children from harm, but to remove the social pressure to comply with tech norms they don’t believe in.
That quote above is from a parent survey published this month from my daughter’s primary school. Only 15 out of 346 said their child had a smartphone. Over 90% have signed, or want to sign, a smartphone-free pact. Many want more support from the school. And a growing number want something stronger: a ban.
Another quote: “It would be very helpful if the government completely banned smartphones for under-16s due to the known mental health impacts.”
Parents are a powerful lobbying voice and we all need to be aware of this emerging consensus: smartphones are seen as the new smoking.
Split personalities and broken briefs
How many of us in this industry act like we’re the innies on Apple TV’s Severance: one person at home and a completely different one at work? (If you’ve not seen it, you will love it.)
How many people in tech, advertising, media and marketing are fully aware of the dangers of smartphones and social media, but still happily go to work and create all the stuff that powers it, whether it’s a “TikTok influencer campaign” or the questionable marketing benefits of “hyperpersonalisation”?
It actually borders on insanity, the way we’re still pretending we’re not helping to build a giant chaos machine during the day and then as parents are trying to dismantle.
A case in point: last week the IPA’s latest TouchPoints data says UK adults now spend more time on mobile phones than watching TV. For under-25s, it’s not even close.
Well, duh. Did you see anyone on the train this morning whose eyes weren’t glued to their iPhone? You’re probably reading this column right now on the toilet, because somehow boredom became the worst thing ever and we must cram phones into every activity we do all day.
But buried in that same dataset is something far more interesting: people feel worse using mobile. They’re 55% more likely to feel sad when watching video on a phone. TV, on the other hand, makes people 52% more likely to feel relaxed.
Because this isn’t just about screen time. It’s about screen mood.
This matters when we talk about earning “attention” — what kind of attention exactly, when your content or advertising is showing up in an unhealthy environment?
The effectiveness delusion
It should also make us think carefully about how effective any of this stuff is when we’re “always on” and increasingly numb to the real world.
Someone very clever last week was crowing about a trailer for the upcoming Formula 1 movie (F1) because when viewed on a certain mobile platform it featured haptic vibrations “as if you were in the racing car”. Err, ok. You’re still watching a tiny Brad Pitt on a five-inch screen though, right?
A senior UK TV industry insider, who was alarmed with the way the IPA communicated their TouchPoints data, tells me: “The IPA chose to throw TV under the bus for the dopamine hit of headlines. It flies in the face of their effectiveness data and the thing that binds all IPA effectiveness awards winners together.”
That person was not alone in that view. I put this to the IPA’s Simon Frazier, head of TouchPoints marketing and data innovation, who says: “TV content is no longer confined to the TV set, allowing us to watch TV/video whenever and however we want […] the blurring of these device lines mean we can enjoy that same great content in a way which fits into the fast pace of modern life and for us as an industry I’d say that gives us more opportunity to be effective than ever before.”
This is one of many big questions our industry needs to reckon with and I’m sick of us tiptoeing around it. Because the science on this is miles ahead of our industry, too.
A global consensus study, published last month (but not yet peer reviewed), surveyed 120 of the world’s leading researchers, who say: “Something is going wrong for young people.”
They overwhelmingly agreed that smartphone use is contributing to the mental health crisis among adolescents—especially girls. Especially when use starts young.
Their clearest recommendation? “If most parents waited until high school to give their children smartphones, it would benefit the mental health of adolescents overall.”
If our industry keeps ignoring it, we won’t just face backlash. We’ll face more regulation.
You pay one way or another
We already have the Online Safety Act, which finally required platforms like Meta, TikTok, and YouTube to prevent and swiftly remove fraudulent advertising. (And a bang-up job, they’re doing too!)
But the point is, this is no longer theoretical.
If a platform repeatedly fails to meet safety standards, Ofcom can order advertisers to stop spending on that site altogether. Platforms that breach the Act face fines of up to £18m or 10% of global turnover, which creates serious operational instability; if your biggest media channel is under investigation, so is your media plan.
And while the Act doesn’t target ad creative directly, any campaign that’s adjacent to fraud (or just is fraud) now carries real reputational and regulatory risk.
Let’s be honest, monopoly platforms will most likely pass the costs of compliance to the advertiser.
This means higher CPMs, reduced targeting, or stricter ad approval cycles, so you and your client will pay. Performance will dip. Returns will shrink. And no one will care that you didn’t see it coming.
Unless maybe, just maybe, we can start valuing media not just by time spent, but by what it does to people.
So much you can do now
My plea to this industry, full of smart, energetic and caring people who do right by their friends and loved ones, is to realise you’re not powerless here.
Use the emotional data in TouchPoints. Build team principles that say we shouldn’t plan for exhausted minds and we shouldn’t recommend platforms that you wouldn’t give to your kids.
Will we ever see this line in a deck? “This format made the cut because it aligns with audience wellbeing.”
Because parents are coming for their kids’ phones. We know enough about what really drives advertising effectiveness. And regulation, or costs (or both) will only squeeze harder.
Better to lead the change than wait for the invoice.
Or better still, maybe it’s time for a “no crap mobile advertising” pledge?
Omar Oakes was founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years and was previously media and tech editor of Campaign. His column on The Media Leader was nominated for the BSME’s B2B Column of the Year in 2024.