Graham Brown from Mobile Youth takes the stage next at the Heroes Of The Mobile Screen conference in London – we've been covering it all day. His session will focus on what young people are doing with their phones.

“There's 1.2 billion mobile-owning youth in the world, from 5 to 25,” he says, with 50% of those living in Asia. “This market is the real mobile heroes,” he says. “This market discovered SMS. This market discovered Facebook. This market discovered P2P and file-sharing. This market discovered mobile music and ringtones. Where would we be without those?”

But he points out that 800 million youngsters in Asia have still to get their first phone – “a huge opportunity” - and that by 2012, one fifth of the world's  mobile youth will be living in India. But even now, the average age of a European getting their first mobile phone is 7.1 years.

Mobile youth spend 10% of their disposable income on mobile already too. They spend 12 times more on mobile than the entire global recorded music industry sales. “We often consider music as a key defining point in young people's lives. Well, it still is, but also there is now mobile.”

60% of young people sleep with their mobile phones, and given the choice, 81% would forego food than top up their phone. Isn't that because their parents buy food for them though? Just to inject an element of cynicism.

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However, Brown says there are winners and losers when it comes to what young people spend their mobile-related money on. 72% of students surveyed in the UK by Mobile Youth said they'd recommend their phone to friends, compared to 23% for Nokia (and a whopping minus reading for Motorola – sorry, the slide flicked off before I could write it down).

But word of mouth is hugely important – yet the mobile industry still targets them in the same old way – advertising. Only 34% of mobile youth believe the advertising from mobile handset brands, says Brown.

So what mobile heroes are engaging with young people successfully? Topline stuff. One unnamed handset company spent $35,000 on focus groups trying to find out which jingle young people would like for the TV campaign. This is a Bad Idea, if you hadn't guessed – presumably because the surveyees don't give a stuff about TV ads.

74% of young people think that mobile tariffs are confusing, untrustworthy or unclear. Only 27% of them trust their mobile operators. These are from Mobile Youth's most recent research report.

Oh yes, those heroes. People engaging with youth well. In the US, the most loved mobile brand is Boost Mobile – for its $50 unlimited mobile plan, which attracted 400,000 net additions in a quarter. “They proved conclusively that it wasn't about cheap and free when it came to youth,” he says.

Flip Digital is another, which Brown says successfully engaged young people at an early stage in the production of their video camera devices (and then sold up to Cisco for a huge sum).

Another company: Threadless, the online t-shirt company. And another: Monster, which makes fizzy drinks. It's apparently doing $3 billion in sales and is more profitable per employee than Apple. “They don't sell products, they sell what products do for young people,” says Brown.