Moeez: Before I move on to tell you more about what this session is about, I have a few quick announcements to make. First is that we have the event survey live on the chat, if you can see there’s a button that says “go to survey,” make sure that you click it, leave your feedback and let us know how we did, because this is a recurring event, an annual thing we do every year, and we want to do it in a better way for you folks, so make sure it has a bit of detail so we can understand what specific things we need to improve on.

Secondly, I want to announce that we have the Cloud Awards live, you can check those out in the pinned comment in the chat, so you can start submitting your entries. And finally, I will be announcing the winners for all the giveaways after this session, so make sure you stick around till the end so you can find out who the winner is and you might be the lucky one. Moving on to this session, I have a very special guest with me today. The theme of the event was all about how we can future-proof our online stores for the next generation of buyers, and Grant McAngus, the founder of Bad Brain Media, is going to be doing exactly that, teaching us about Gen Z buying habits and how to sell to a generation that doesn’t like spending. Grant, how are you, and it’s so lovely to have you here.

Grant McAngus: Yeah, thanks Moeez, I’m really excited to be here. It seems like you’ve had three days of amazing sessions, I’m very grateful to be one of those and to be the last one, no less.

Moeez: Yeah, so I will give you the floor, Grant, without any further ado, you have the floor, you can carry on with your presentation.

Grant McAngus: Amazing, thanks so much, and thanks DigitalOcean for arranging this and thanks for everyone tuning in to watch. I’m really excited to take you through the session I’ve put together on the topic you can see on screen, who is Gen Z, Gen Z buying habits, and how to sell to this generation that maybe do or don’t like spending, that’s something we’ll go into. Can you see my screen, just give me a thumbs up. Oh cool, okay, seeing some thumbs, I’m going to carry on, I love a technical hitch.

So, who am I before we go into it? My name’s Grant, I’m founder of Bad Brain, we are a consultancy specialized for the creator economy. So among a few different things we do, one of the main things is helping small to medium businesses, startups, scaleups establish what their creator program looks like, what their influencer program looks like, and by the same token helping established brands, global brands, optimize their existing mature creator programs. We found that as the industry has matured, some of the first movers to adopt creators have found themselves in a place where their work streams are tangled, there’s lots of different departments doing lots of different things, we help to optimize that.

So based on what you know now about Bad Brain, you probably have an idea of where I’m going to steer this ship in terms of Gen Z buying habits. I think first and foremost, it’s really important if we’re going to talk about generations or age ranges to define who exactly we’re talking about. Generations are one of those things that we have a broad understanding of, people roughly understand what we’re talking about when we say millennial or boomer or Gen X, but there are nuances to the exact classifications depending on what school of thought you subscribe to. For the purposes of this, we’re using the Pew Research Center in terms of what they define as Gen Z and Gen Alpha, and we’re saying that Gen Z are anyone born between 1997 and 2012, so that would make the youngest among Gen Z 13 today and the oldest 28.

By the same token, while there’s a little bit of debate on when Gen Alpha started, broadly speaking we’re classifying Gen Alpha as anyone born between 2010 and 2024. So hot on the heels of Gen Z, Gen Alpha are very soon about to start making their strides into the working world and into becoming consumers themselves. So the topic at hand, are Gen Z spending less? This was something that to my mind clashed with what I understood about Gen Z, because the last I’d heard, this generation were the largest portion of our global population, which is in fact true, Gen Z make up 24.6% of the entire global population.

So by that token you would think their spending power would equate to that and maybe even outsize other generations, but according to studies that is not quite the case. Gen Z’s spending power sits at roughly 17%, which is smaller compared to their size, when you look at the millennial age group who are 22% of the global population and 22% of spending power, and Gen X who actually occupy a smaller percentage of population but the largest overall percentage of spending power.

So why could that be? Well, the easy answer I suppose we could all come back to is the economy. When GWI ran a survey this time last year, with the question being how do they see themselves spending over the next 12 months, a third of those respondents said that they were in fact going to be spending less, actively spending less money, and when they asked the reason why, cost of living and the inflation of essential goods was listed right up at the top of the list. So there’s obviously some macroeconomics at play as to why Gen Z may be spending a little bit less than some of their older counterparts.

There could also be, and this one may be up for debate, that Gen Z may just be better at saving their money, actively putting their money away. According to another GWI study looking at 18 to 27 year olds in 2017 and then in 2024, it revealed a stark difference in how much people were investing money in different institutions, whether that being gold or stocks and shares, bonds, or investment funds. Now to me, while I think this does say there’s some better financial literacy among a younger generation, it’s probably also fair to say that in that seven-year period, we’ve seen a huge rise in digital banking, in challenger banks, in your Revoluts, your Robinhoods, and anyone that’s used those apps will know it’s pretty easy to chuck money into these different pots quite easily at very small and high scales. So there’s probably something to be said for the idea that Gen Z are saving more and maybe that’s why they’re not spending.

But I don’t think that’s it. If you want to ask me my personal opinion, it’s because this is still a very young generation. I think just because us as a society and as marketers and business leaders have gotten so acutely aware of this idea of generation labeling, we’ve maybe got a little bit over our skis in terms of the fact that just because Gen Z have now come of age, that they should be spending like every other generation. Going back to that first slide, remember the youngest in the Gen Z cohort are still 13, they’re still not really in the working world, they don’t command their own income. The eldest among Gen Z are 28, so while they are in the working world, they aren’t necessarily at the peak of their potential earning career where they’ll have the most disposable income.

So there’s maybe a little bit of hot air over the idea that Gen Z aren’t spending as much as their population should be. But if you are sat there at the end of this presentation thinking about your brand and looking at your customer base and saying our product should be doing better among this generation than it is, then it is something worth going deeper on. And I think if it isn’t economics, if it isn’t truly spending decisions, I actually think the alternative is that it’s the way that we as brands interact with this generation. And there’s one big thing that’s happened over the last 20 years, and that is the complete upending of our media ecosystem.

So the next few slides are going to be hitting some very obvious nails on the head, so just bear with me, I know they’re going to be like, yeah, tell me something I don’t know, Grant, but just bear with it. If we look at the last 20 years of media consumption, basically the whole lifespan of the Gen Z cohort, there was a study by Ofcom in the UK who measured what the media diet was like for people back in 2005 in the UK, and sure enough, three and a half hours a day was the average amount of time people spent in front of the TV, and TV was the predominant media delivery system in the home. Mobile existed, but we were just playing Snake on it, or texting and calling, maybe I was just playing Snake on it.

So in the last 20 years, obviously that’s completely changed, we now have more of our time spent on mobile as a pure media consumption device and TV has somewhat shrunk. We all know on this call that that blue circle hides many different nuances of what the new TV ecosystem looks like, it’s not just broadcast linear TV anymore, it’s streaming, it’s ad-supported TV, it’s connected TV. We also know there’s going to be an overlap, the time you spend on mobile is not always the only focus of your attention, it’s likely the TV is on in the background. So just in those 20 years, how we get information and consume media has completely changed.

Some other stats that back that up, in 2023 less than half of 16 to 24 year olds watched broadcast TV within the space of a week, so over half of that Gen Z age range didn’t tune in to live TV within a given week, which going back 20 years would be mad to think of. In the UK in terms of share of viewing, YouTube has become the number two video service behind the BBC, which is really significant. And I know there’s been talk of studios and networks and broadcasters having all of their focus on Netflix and the streamers, they kind of took their eye off the ball when it comes to YouTube and it’s now become such a big part of the ecosystem.

So these are all the obvious things, the way we get media and by association advertising has completely changed. Let’s go a step further and look at what that media diet comprises of across generations. This is a study from Deloitte, and again it’s going to show you things you’ll probably be aware of, the oldest among our population spend the least amount of time with media and the most of that time with traditional broadcast live TV, and Gen Z of course, their media diet is typically nearly seven hours a day and it’s comprised, more so than any other generation before them, of playing video games, listening to podcasts, consuming social media, watching UGC content, which the study categorizes as YouTube content.

So no big surprises there, no revelations. But the one thing I take away from this that’s not immediately obvious is, what do all of these platforms on the left-hand side have in common? Almost all of them, in fact maybe all of them, to me it is creators have become part of all of those platforms. You might think of podcasts as being podcasters, but ultimately people that started in podcasts and, because of the migration to video and YouTube, have become creators in their own right. Creators have launched their own podcasts, video games, it was really easy on the surface to think of that as a solitary activity, but instead it’s become a place for people to connect online, a place where people watch great gamers play who then in turn become creators.

You’ve obviously got UGC, you’ve got social media, and even the likes of Amazon Prime and the streamers starting to bring YouTube creators like Mr. Beast over into their world. So you’re seeing the creator landscape really start to touch all of these different points of media. The point I’m making is that when we’re thinking about Gen Z, keep in mind their media diet is pretty vast, pretty varied, very digital, and very creator-first. But the interesting part is that if you ask Gen Z why they go to social media, very few respondents in this survey would actually cite specifically following creators as the reason they go to these platforms.

They say they’re there to find funny posts, look at memes, find out what’s going on in the world, see what’s trending and being talked about, without paying mind to the fact that the sources of all of those things they’re seeking are coming from creators. Creators are the absolute wallpaper of these platforms. Funny story anecdotally, last year my partner, she’s a teacher, invited me to the school’s career day, and naively I went along thinking that as someone who works in social media and with influencers, I might be able to get in the good graces of these guys, that they might actually be interested in what I have to say. And I was completely wrong, I think teenagers are a tough crowd no matter what you’re saying, but they were really not interested.

And when I was speaking to them and saying, hey, I know you use social media, what influencers do you follow, what creators do you follow, they scoffed at the idea of them following creators or influencers. And to me that says that to them creators are just part of the wallpaper, it’s not something you would categorize, it’s so intrinsic to the content they consume that they don’t even think of it in the terms of influencer. And that is one of the reasons I’m very resistant to the idea that younger generations are pulling away from advertising, or that advertising wouldn’t work with this younger generation, because all of the content they consume is in some way related to the creator economy, and the creator economy is just another word for the advertising economy. The difference is how these ads, these sponsorships, are communicated with this younger audience, that’s the big difference of whether or not they’re going to respond to you.

But I’m getting off track. If we go back to our media diet, our landscape, not only do I think that something all of these platforms have in common are the creators, another part is that these platforms are no longer purely passive. Almost all of these channels actually offer, and in some respects live and die by, some form of participation where they’re getting something from the user. Podcasts have migrated over to video where there’s a comment section. Video games, we know that Fortnite is considered a third place for young people because they will go there not just to play the game but to chat with their mates and hang out. Of course user-generated content, social media is a place where there’s participation, but it goes beyond just speaking to people in DMs or comments, the content itself is there to be remixed, taken apart, reused in a different way, grab the sound here, stitch this piece of content there, sync up with this part.

And so thinking again in terms of Gen Z, every piece of content they consume is in some shape or form coming from a creator, someone they don’t know personally but isn’t backed by a big media conglomerate, and has some form of feedback they’re able to give and receive in kind. And so when I think about brands saying they’re not resonating with Gen Z, this is the big insight from my point of view, that in order to communicate and be heard by Gen Z, you need to come to these platforms ready to speak their language. The feed is a playing field, that’s the insight I would take and run with from this, this is no longer a world in which you can just broadcast the message and expect to get nothing back and expect it to be heard by everyone, specifically by this younger generation, and it’s only going to get more so with Gen Alpha.

I want to hit you with a few examples and then give you some practical guidance on how you could incorporate this. If anyone has been on social media in the last six months, depending on where you’re from geographically, but I know it’s been quite far and wide, you probably have been exposed in some way to Jet2 holidays. For those who don’t know, they’re a budget airline in the UK, and if you’ve ever flown with them, from the moment you sit in your seat to the moment you leave, you’re bombarded by their advert, which is Jess Glynne, who’s a dance pop singer over here, her song with an ad read over the top telling you about your family holidays and how you can save more money.

And it’s so incessant, so continuous, that people started to create videos on TikTok using the sound and created a comedic, funny, or ironic spin on that by applying video content of people either misbehaving on holiday or having funny fails, and by the juxtaposition of the optimistic ad read and song blended with people just doing funny stuff, it just took off, and everyone was doing this by building on this trend. So taking the song and putting videos of fails on top of it, and it basically took over all of social media in the UK. If you were in the room with people playing TikTok on loud, you would hear the Jess Glynne song pop off every now and again because it was permeating the feed that much, it got to a point of national awareness.

The video you’re seeing here is someone going up to people in the street, singing the initial ad, the song, and then having people off the top of the dome recite the ad read back to them, not even sing the song, they would actually say that Jet2 holidays ad read. This would then find its way into real life where you’d even find the lady who delivered the original ad read speaking at events and doing the ad read in live time for people to enjoy. Jess Glynne would be on stage singing the song and people would be in the audience holding up the Jet2 holidays ad read, and we even found that despite Jet2 not having a presence outside of the UK as far as I know, the trend made its way all over to the other side of the Atlantic with people from the US joining in on the fun and taking it in various directions, before finally Jet2 themselves adopted it as part of their strategy.

Now this is a specific example, it’s quite large scale, and I’m not saying brands need to start replicating this or spin up a global sensation overnight. What I am saying is that this is a prime example of how there’s this dialogue in media now, and the expectation that audiences should be able to play a part in that story is quite entrenched, and more so with younger audiences, nearly one and a half million videos were created of the Jet2 holidays song, so it’s crazy how much people adopted it and ran with it.

Let’s look at how you can participate maybe in a slightly scaled-back way. The comment section is arguably now becoming one of the main reasons to go to something like TikTok or Instagram, sometimes the comments are even better than the content. I follow an agency called Okay Cool who recently did this amazing study on comments, and as part of their survey, respondents said that 29% of users regularly comment but over 90% of people are here for the comments, they’re there to read and enjoy the commentary and will spend more time flicking through comments and laughing at the witticisms of random strangers. And you’d even have creators leaning into this, you’ll see examples here on the screen where they’ve posted some content and they’re saying “make the comment section look like X, Y, and Z.”

So it’s become again this two-way street of communication. And I love this quote they said, that the comment section is the audience’s revenge for being underestimated by brands for years before, and I think that’s so true. Before maybe the advent of TikTok, social media in particular was just very one-way, very much like consume this, we don’t want to take your input, and now it’s basically been proven that the general public are probably funnier than most marketers think they are, and so leaning into it is the best way to move forward. I’d really encourage you to check out this Okay Cool study, it’s called Let Them Eat Lore, there’s this great graph where they talk about unintended platforms versus intended platforms and the intersection of those two things.

But let’s talk specifically about how we can harness all of this. The concept here is that media is participatory, that the feed is a playing field. These are examples of that idea, but I’m not saying you should go and replicate them, I’m not saying we now all overnight need to become witty commenters in the feeds of every piece of content you see, or that you need to spin up a viral Jet2 holidays campaign overnight, or become the Duolingo owl. There are more small-scale ways of adopting this new language of social, and I’ll take you through a couple of my favorite practical applications.

I want to go through an example of a creator I love called Veronika Slowikowska. Anyone into comedy might be aware of her now because I think she’s just been announced as one of the latest members of the Saturday Night Live cast. Her brand of TikTok comedy, which got her to that position, is very esoteric, very specific, it’s like a blend of The Office meets It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia with some musical theater thrown in there and just chronically online Gen Z kind of brain rot. I won’t explain any of the jokes and that’s almost one of the jokes, her comment section is filled with people saying “I have no one to share this with because it’s so specific and no one’s going to get it,” and yet the irony is every one of those comments has about 5,000 likes of people thinking the same thing.

Not only does she have a very specific style and comedic tone, there is lore behind her channel, there’s a story, a backstory, and there’s nothing audiences love these days more than some lore. The conceit with Veronika’s page is that she’s the central character, Kyle is like the straight man who plays straight to her weirdness, and then there’s Michael, the cameraman. And throughout all of the comments there’s always this back and forth with the audience of like, is there something between Veronika and Kyle or is there not, people consistently comment on that. My favorite piece of branded content I recently saw, to be fair this was last year but it stayed with me, was Veronika’s partnership with H&M. The way they’ve done this is so Gen Z forward, it’s so “the feed is a playing field,” it’s perfect.

The video is effectively Veronika showing off a new outfit she has from H&M and pretending like she’s got a date, which she then cancels so Kyle might ask her out. So immediately the video is playing into what the audience love about her feed, which is this element of lore, it’s also incredibly funny, but it also features the outfit pretty front and center, she mentions H&M by name, but it’s really her having free rein. You look in the comment section, not only are people shouting out the fact that her and Kyle are finally going out on a date, there’s so many comments of people saying “this is the first ad that I’ve watched all the way through, I’m coming back to watch this ad, the person from H&M needs a raise.” And all H&M did in this situation is just find the right creator, let them run with it, and have the confidence to let them run.

So when I’m talking about having this participatory approach to social media, it doesn’t always mean you being the one to drive that, it just means finding the right partners and showing that you know the culture. I have this phrase I like to use, which is “participate before you create.” You don’t need to be starting a TikTok dance or a craze, just absorb what is going on in TikTok, what your audiences are responding to, and find the right partners to lean into. There’s some great examples recently of brands that have done this in many different ways. Severance, this is a branded ad where they took a user song where they’re singing along to the theme tune and then got the cast to sing along with it, so again using user-generated content and building upon that. Amazon ads from last year where Adam Driver is reading reviews in a very earnest tone of voice, this is very high-level ad stuff, but there’s still an element where it feels connected to the culture and what people are saying.

One of my most inventive ones is Loewe, who’s a luxury fashion house, someone tweeted that a tomato they had looked like one of the designs that Loewe would typically come out with, and what did they do, they brought out a whole tomato-based range of products. Sorry for the trigger, I should have trigger-warned on this one because it’s a bit abrupt, but one of my favorite creators has this whole bit where he’s a sleep paralysis demon, he partnered up with CeraVe and the skit is hilarious and is so clearly an ad at the same time, it’s brilliant. And big shout out to Bus Auntie in the UK as well who has become a phenomenon by videoing herself in precarious positions as a bus comes past. We don’t have time to get into it, but again that’s an example of this culture that brands are tapping into.

Now the thing I would think about if I was in the audience listening to this is, that’s great, this is all great brand-building stuff, but where’s the commerce, where’s the commercial element? That’s where the 70/30 rule comes in. Of course the examples I’ve spoken about are very much aligned to leaning into culture, building that top of funnel, building that brand, they aren’t necessarily closing sales. So how would you construct a campaign that does both? The answer is that you don’t create one piece of content and expect it to do all things.

The 70/30 rule is where you construct your campaign around having a small amount of content from your creators that are tapped into culture, that you’re going to give free rein to, that are going to build your brand and show Gen Z that you know their culture. That’s going to be 30% of your content, it’s probably going to be 70% of your budget because these creators will come at a high cost, and that is the way it should be, but you should be making astute decisions on who you work with. Now where does the commerce come from? To me the best way to activate commerce underneath that brand building is with UGC, it’s with gifting, and it’s with nano, micro, and mid-tier creators. This is where 70% of your content is going to come from, but at 30% of the cost, because you’re tapping into economies of scale by working with lower-reach creators. The final piece of the puzzle is adding an accelerator, either adding an affiliate commission for creators so they’re incentivized to keep driving people to click the link and check out, or to boost that content with paid media.

Now there’s so many different things we can go on, and I’m conscious that I’ve rattled through so much, I thought I was going to have more time but I like to yap. So let’s wrap things up with some takeaways and then I’ll happily take some questions. My takeaways, if you could take anything away, would be that Gen Z is still a growing consumer base, I don’t think we can say they’ve fully formed into what they’re going to be in terms of their spending power, but the thing to keep in mind is that their behaviors are set. They’re going to grow to be a much more influential holder of budget strings in years to come, but the behaviors they have now in terms of content consumption are pretty much set, and Gen Alpha is just behind them, who are going to be further down the track in terms of participation and content.

The other thing I would say is that Gen Z are not passive consumers, there’s an expectation that content comes with a two-way communication, the feed is a playing field, and if you want to work with them, you need to show that you understand it, you need to prove it, so participate before you create. And finally, don’t forget the 70/30 rule, don’t expect this one piece of content that really taps into Gen Z culture to be driving tons of sales, you need to construct a campaign that does both, that’s how you combine culture and commerce and ultimately reach Gen Z. Guys, thanks so much for listening, I feel like that was a lot, I just really appreciate you taking the time, if there are any questions I’m more than happy to answer them, but also feel free to reach out with the email as well.

Moeez: This was amazing, Grant, one of the most interesting sessions we’ve had in this Prepathon, and we rightly saved it for the last. So thank you so much, Grant, for that insightful and interesting presentation. We do have a few questions I wanted to take on stage. First one, let me put it on screen, it says, what underused channel or format is quietly working for Gen Z right now?

Grant McAngus: Oh, that’s a great question. I think underused channels would probably be channels like Snapchat. That might sound like an obvious one to some people, but Snapchat has this really unique position in the social ecosystem where it’s been the, I don’t want to say the stepchild, because they haven’t grown to become an Instagram or a TikTok, it gets largely ignored by brand managers, but at the same time it consistently shows in its user numbers that it is a place where younger audiences engage. So I would definitely look at places like Snapchat, and I would also, I didn’t include too much of it because it’s a topic all of its own, but I think gaming is definitely an area to investigate as well.

Moeez: Awesome, so Snapchat is one underused platform right now. Another question is, what do you look for in a creator brief to ensure that the content feels like their feed and not an ad, so it resonates with the rest of their videos and doesn’t look like an ad suddenly popping up in the middle of their content?

Grant McAngus: That’s a great one actually. Do you know what, I’ve seen a phenomenon a few times now when I’ve worked with brands that are very big, that sometimes creators will actually change their style because they’re so excited to be working with the brand, so that’s actually something to look out for in the process. I would say have a brief that makes clear you’re looking to tap into their style, always come with examples, always say, I want to work with you because I’ve seen this piece of content and this piece and this piece and we love it for these reasons, and so they understand, and have a dialogue. Don’t just have a brief, send it out, and expect to get the content back, get their concept and workshop that with them as well.

Moeez: Awesome, let’s just take one last question and then we can wrap this session up. What content format most reliably moves Gen Z from an interested phase to the phase where they will try the product, and also why?

Grant McAngus: I’m going to answer this question and immediately answer one other because it caught my eye in the chat and I think it’s really important. Moving people from awareness into the conversion piece, for me it’s about frequency, and that’s why I talk about constructing a campaign that involves those big heavy cultural hitters and then smaller creators that are a bit more relatable. And this dovetails into what I was going to say, someone asked, does it always have to be humor, or what if the brand doesn’t align to humor? The same principle applies in different industries, and the better way to think about it maybe is aspirational versus relatable.

So a good example is I’ve worked with a sportswear brand before, and I would say 30% of their creators should be really highly aspirational, like maybe borderline athletes or semi-pro, and then you distill that down to people that are a bit more relatable. So if you’re talking about running, you’ve got an ultramarathon runner as your aspirational, they’re in your 30%, and then you’ve got someone just going and doing their first 5k or 10k as part of the 70%, and those are your relatable people. So it’s this idea of reaching in that 30% and then bringing it down to ground level, and that answers the first question about how you move people from the interested to the conversion phase.

Moeez: Awesome, with that we will wrap up this session. Grant, thank you so much for being here, it was an absolute pleasure having you with us, and thank you for the amazing presentation as well, I think a lot of people in the comments section related with what you talked about, especially with the trends on Instagram and TikTok, so that was amazing. Thank you so much, Grant, it was lovely to have you. As for the rest of you folks, this was the last session for Prepathon 2025, but don’t go anywhere because up next we are going to be announcing the winners of this year’s giveaways, so if you’ve participated in any of the quizzes or activities and think you’re topping the leaderboard, make sure to stick around because the winner announcement is next, stay tuned.