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My birth year is 1999, which puts me squarely inside Generation Z, the cohort born between 1997 and 2012, raised on the internet, and now one of the most commercially pursued demographics on the planet. I also work in communications. That combination means I spend a lot of time hearing the same marketing brief: “make it appeal to Gen Z.”
I hear it from brand managers, from project coordinators, from marketing leads who have done their research and arrived at a set of conclusions about what my generation wants. Fast videos. Trend-led content. Pop culture references. Influencer formats. Energy, urgency, noise. The brief sounds reasonable. The results, more often than not, are not.
Gen Z makes up roughly 25% of the global population and is now one of the most commercially active consumer demographics. What makes this audience structurally different from previous generations is not just its size but it is how it moves. Three quarters of Gen Z use TikTok as a search platform, with more than half preferring it to Google for product discovery. They shop in stores, buy through apps, engage through loyalty programmes, and follow creators whose recommendations carry more weight than traditional advertising. Reaching them means being present across all of those touchpoints.
The Gen Z marketing stereotype and why it fails
The version of Gen Z that most Gen Z marketing briefs are written for is recognisable: phone-addicted, attention-deficient, obsessed with trends, fluent in irony, impossible to hold for longer than 8 seconds. There is just enough truth in that picture to make it convincing and just enough distortion to make content built around it fall flat.
What gets missed is the other side of what my generation actually consumes. We watch three-hour documentary series. We read long-form essays. We follow creators who post 10-minute long TikTok. We are not allergic to depth: we are allergic to content that treats us as though we are. Research consistently shows that Gen Z responds to specific human accounts far more than to aggregated data or broad claims. A single person’s story lands harder than a statistic about millions, because it gives the audience somewhere to place themselves.
Authenticity is not a Gen Z buzzword but a filter.
The deeper issue is values. My generation came of age during a climate crisis, widening global inequality, and sustained institutional and political distrust. That context shapes what we respond to more than any content format does. We pay attention to whether a brand’s public commitments match its internal behaviour: on sustainability, on inclusion, on how it treats the people who make and buy its products. Diversity and representation are signals about whether a brand has genuinely examined who it is for. Pinkwashing and greenwashing are legible to us in seconds. A brand that posts a rainbow in June and has no substantive record to back it gets noticed and not in the way it intended. Authenticity is not a Gen Z buzzword but a filter. Brands that pass it earn attention. Brands that perform it lose it.
What Duolingo understood about Gen Z marketing
Duolingo’s TikTok presence is one of the most studied examples in Gen Z marketing, and it is worth looking at closely because the lesson is narrower than it appears.
The brand built a character: an unhinged, self-aware green owl with strong opinions and no apparent corporate supervision. The content is absurdist, trend-aware, and participatory. It does not look like Gen Z marketing ecause it participates in the same registers that Gen Z users use with each other.
The tempting takeaway is: be irreverent, be funny, use trends. The more accurate takeaway is: Duolingo understood the culture from the inside and built a presence that earned its place within it. And my guess is that they hired Gen Z marketing and communication officers who built the strategy from beginning to end.
Most brands that try to replicate this produce content that looks like a boardroom’s idea of irreverence: a slightly awkward meme, a trend reference that arrives two weeks late, a joke that needed three rounds of legal approval.
What Adidas understood about marketing to Gen Z
Earlier this year, Adidas released “Backyard Legends“, a 5-minute short film narrated by Timothée Chalamet, featuring Messi, Bellingham, Yamal, and Bad Bunny. It reached 4.5 million views in 13 days.
Five minutes. For a promotional film. Every standard Gen Z content playbook says that is too long.
It worked because the story came first. The brand was nearly invisible. The film launched 6 weeks before the World Cup, when the audience was already paying attention to football. Context and timing matter.
Three things made it land: a story worth following, the right people to carry it, and a moment the audience was already in. None of those three things are format decisions. They are strategic decisions made before a single frame was shot.
The lesson for any organisation producing Gen Z-directed content is the same whether or not you have Messi’s phone number. Know your moment. Build the story before you build the asset. Give the audience something worth their time, and they will give you theirs.
What this means for your Gen Z marketing strategy
The question worth asking before any Gen Z marketing brief is not “what format does Gen Z prefer?” It is “what do we actually stand for, and is our communication coherent with that?” Research on Gen Z purchasing behaviour points consistently to the same finding: this generation is drawn to brands that demonstrate their stated values through actual practice, and is more likely to trust brands that communicate transparently about pricing, sourcing, and decisions.
For brands and organisations targeting this audience, three things consistently matter more than format choices:
- Values coherence. Gen Z consumers check whether what a brand says publicly matches what it does structurally. That means the sustainability claim needs to be in the supply chain. The inclusion commitment needs to be visible in hiring and policy. This is commercial credibility with an audience that has grown up watching institutions say one thing and do another.
- Authenticity over polish. Produced perfection reads as distance. Content that shows the real people behind an organisation, the real process, the real constraints and decisions, tends to land harder than a campaign built around an aspirational image the brand cannot quite sustain. Research also shows that Gen Z is no more receptive to AI-generated advertising than older generations, regardless of how tech-fluent they are assumed to be. The shortcut of producing at scale does not close the authenticity gap.
- Patience with depth. Gen Z is not an audience that needs to be spoken to in fragments. If the story is good, the format can carry weight. Duolingo holds attention on TikTok. Adidas holds it for 5 minutes on YouTube. The constraint is whether what you are saying is worth the time you are asking for.
My generation is not hard to reach. We are hard to fool.
If you are a marketing officer or communications lead working on a Gen Z strategy, the most useful thing to do before writing a brief is to audit the coherence between what your organisation stands for and how it currently communicates. The format questions (platform, length, tone, frequency…) come second. They are execution decisions. The strategic decisions come first, and they are the ones most briefs skip.
Remember this: my generation is not hard to reach. We are hard to fool. The brands that understand that distinction are the ones that earn our attention and, eventually, our support.
