One of the longest lines at Advertising Week New York was for a panel titled “Gen Z hates your ads.” Attendees had to be turned back at the door when the room reached capacity.
The question of how to reach the cohort of young adults born after 1996 hung in the air at all panels. Marketers debated reaching a tech-native, diverse generation with very different attitudes and media habits from even the Millennials that precede them.
This most diverse generation poses a cultural challenge to marketers. Their adulthood is being defined by the pandemic and its aftermath, by remote work and the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements shaping their attitudes to work and life. The Zoomer demographic lives by three key values: authenticity, innovation and interactivity, said Daniel Nunez, chief creative officer of ad agency Laundry Service.
“It’s really the personalized generation,” he said. They want content tailored to their likes and lifestyles, and want to engage with brands directly, Nunez said: “It’s about active participation.”
Zoomers are omnivorous media consumers, said speakers. “They’re consuming content everywhere, always on, all the time,” said Mike Van, president of Billboard.
Generation Z is the first demographic cohort that doesn’t remember a time before smartphones and social media. But even social channels work differently for Zoomers, with gaming an increasingly relevant channel to reach them. Gen Z consumers spend more time on Roblox than TikTok, said Charles Hambro, CEO and Co-Founder of GEEIQ, a data platform and insights provider. And when those consumers are in social channels, they often are interacting with content that is gaming related, he said. Hambro noted the average engagement on branded experiences on Roblox lasts 11 minutes versus 1.3 seconds for branded content on social media.
Even when they do engage with social media, Gen Z does it in a different way. Zoomers often don’t post directly on platforms, but instead share content with their peers via direct messaging, said Jesse Spencer, global head of influencer marketing for The Coca Cola Co. This means measuring their engagement requires looking at other indicators, such as sends per reach instead of shares, he said.
Values: “The ultimate best practice.”
“It’s a really unique moment in time,” said Anuj Bhasin, chief brand officer of Gatorade. Gen Z consumers want personalized content and “they can really tune you out,” he warned.
Gen Z and the even younger Generation Alpha are clear they will only ally with brands that are significant to them, said Billboard’s Van. These consumers will “severely punish any brand that fails the challenge of authenticity when it comes to its intentions, he said.
“Being very clear about your values and the value that you bring to the table is the ultimate best practice and everything cascades from that,” he said. “If you come to the table with that up front, everything will be easier.”
At the same time, Generation Z is more comfortable with expressions that may put off older audiences, about gender, politics or other social issues. “Brand safety is a big thing for us,” said Megan Chan Amic, head of media of American Honda, but she added “brand safety is a bit of a sliding scale with younger generations.”
What was not appropriate subjects for older cohorts “may actually be very copacetic for Gen Z or Gen Alpha,” Amic said. Marketers need to consider how those Zoomers may interpret an expression differently, she said, and noted her team found a young intern to be a useful resource to filter ideas.
Honda has partnered with Billboard for several years to produce Honda Stage, a series of performances targeting young, focused on rising stars of genres such as reggaeton and R&B that appeal to diverse audiences. The objective is to target younger, first-time car buyers.
Gen Z is very multicultural and agnostic about languages and consumption of global content, noted the speakers. Dana Droppo, chief brand officer Billboard, said the music magazine publisher has younger listeners enjoy world music in other languages besides their own. Latin music’s popularity is exploding, audiences are seeing Spanish spoken in awards-show stages and artists singing in other languages. “This bilingual expression has become more of a norm in the culture,” she said.
As an example, Droppo told about a concert Billboard sponsored at the South by Southwest festival where Mexican singer Christian Nodal sang his set in Spanish. When he did a cover of a popular song by the late Tejano star Selena, the whole audience knew enough of the words to sing along, she said.
Gen Z is also conscious of the threat of climate change, and makes decisions based on that belief, noted Eliot Hamlisch, chief commercial officer of Amtrak. The railway is on a path to net zero carbon footprint by 2045 partly because of consumer concerns, he said. A customer segmentation study found the issue is “supercritical” to consumers, especially the younger ones. To plumb that insight, Amtrak formed a partnership with Google which includes rail travel as an alternative in search results for flights, tagging the option with a green leaf icon that flags the train as a green alternative.
Gen Z consumers don’t want to see brand ads, said Bhasin. They are seeking to have relationships with brands that they trust. He noted Gatorade partnered with several of its athlete spokespersons to launch a drive to expand access to sports participation among underrepresented communities, because this is a drive that is important to the younger generation of athletes and consumers, he said.
To reach Zoomers, Gatorade had to evolve from a brand “talking at consumers” to one embedded in the culture by reaching consumers at key moments, Bhasin said. As an example, Bhasin noted that Gatorade recently signed JuJu Watkins, a rising star of the USA women’s basketball team. As other speakers at Advertising Week noted, Zoomers are big fans of women’s sports and will root for gender parity in sports.
The brand learned “it is almost better to be timely than to be great with what you put out,” he said. When it comes to Gen Z, he said, “The trust piece is real.”
