junior year

If you’ve spent a fair amount of time online in your life, you’ve no doubt noticed that advertisements for mortgages and credit cards are some of the most prevalent online advertisements.  What you should realize, though, is that they’re also big offline advertising markets, and for the same reason.  The reason is that when people sign up for credit cards or take out a mortgage, they become, in all likelihood, lifelong customers of the financial institution that they receive these goods from.  In this sense, the price for recruiting the customer (typically accomplished through advertising) is offset by the fact that this person is likely to be a customer for life.  If you get a credit card at age 22, for example, you might use the same one or at least the same brand for the next 20 or 40 years.  So, you’re a much more valuable customer than someone who buys a random commodity only once and then might buy a totally different brand the next time around.  For this reason, and because mortgages and credit cards both involve large sums of money, financial institutions spend a lot of money advertising for such products, especially at a young demographic.  A young demographic is worth more because they become customers for life, raising the per-customer potential revenues of the brand.  Hypothetically, a 22 year old customer should be worth more than a 60 year old one just because the 22 year old has more years left to rack up credit card fees.  You see this reflected heavily in online advertising.