23 Gen Zers to know in advertising and marketing

Gen Z continues to be one of the most sought-after consumer demographics, but the age cohort remains something of an enigma for many of the marketers looking to reach them. Now, though, those marketers have a new weapon in their arsenal—the growing wave of Gen Zers entering the advertising industry themselves. As more of Gen Z—those born between 1997 and 2012—reach their early and mid-twenties and hunt for marketing and advertising roles, many brands and agencies are snapping them up, looking to leverage their familiarity with the nuances of internet culture and firsthand experience with Gen Z’s values and behaviors to help shape their Gen-Z-focused marketing strategies. Some Gen Zers have forged their own paths in the industry, creating agencies that specialize in connecting brands with the generation, while others have launched their own brands aimed at their fellow Gen Zers. Below are 23 members of Gen Z already making waves across the advertising and marketing landscape. Ad Age Gen Z Contributor Column We welcome Gen Zers to submit fresh takes exploring Gen Z within the ad industry Learn more here Ziad Ahmed and Shaina Zafar Head of Next Gen at UTA Marketing and Executive at Next Gen at UTA Marketing (formerly JUV Consulting) Most college students spend their summer breaks resting and relaxing after a grueling semester, or taking on an internship if they’re a bit more ambitious. Ziad Ahmed and Shaina Zafar, however, spent the summer after their freshman year building out Gen Z marketing and research firm JUV Consulting—which is now Next Gen, a practice of UTA Entertainment Marketing, after being acquired by the company at the end of February. Ahmed started JUV Consulting as a junior in high school, but honed in on expanding the firm with Zafar and a handful of other Gen Zers in the summer of 2018. The duo grew JUV into a Gen Z marketing juggernaut, working to help brands from Spotify and Lionsgate to Coach and Levi’s develop social content, pop-up experiences and marketing initiatives that appealed to Gen Z values and sensibilities. With Coach, for example, JUV helped create “Coachtopia,” a product line focused on sustainable fashion practices, and recruited over 100 Gen Z creators and activists to help promote the new sub-brand. Much of JUV’s work comes from repeat clients, Zafar added. @coachtopia Once upon a single scrap of leather... 🪽♻️👜. Welcome to #Coachtopia—a new world of circular craft from @coach. #sustainability ♬ original sound - Coachtopia Last year, Ahmed and Zafar also launched ZCon, a marketing conference whose entire speaker lineup was exclusively made up of Gen Zers. “It has always been my theory of change that the world looks better when diverse young voices have a seat at the table,” Ahmed wrote in a recent LinkedIn post about JUV’s acquisition. “We, a scrappy group of presumptuous kids with an affinity for coloring outside the lines, did it. And we are still only just getting started.” Victoria Batista Director and editor TBWA\Chiat\Day New York For Victoria Batista, a self-described “creative Swiss Army knife,” directing and editing ads for brands such as Coca-Cola, Bose and Nissan is about more than brand messaging. It’s an opportunity for her to craft compelling stories informed by her identity as both a Hispanic woman and member of Gen Z. “I think our authenticity as a generation of people is the thing that people want us to bring to our work, and so I really bring my whole self to everything that I do,” Batista said. “I’m a Hispanic woman–that’s something I just can’t divorce from my work … And I’m really grateful that my age has been something that hasn’t inhibited me in my career. It’s been the thing that’s pushed my career forward.” Though her main role at TBWA is as a director and editor, Batista also regularly contributes to the social content and strategies of clients such as Nissan and Hilton. “Victoria has a deep understanding of the social space and is one of the first creatives I’ve seen that can truly make things at pace,” wrote Amy Ferguson, the agency’s chief creative officer, in an email. “She makes things incredibly fast and yet the quality doesn’t suffer. Because she’s doing that, it’s making the entire agency understand and value social-first thinking.” Batista also helms TBWA’s Latin employee resource group, Oaxe, and has spearheaded efforts to encourage the agency’s employees to “be sensitive to cultural differences and very comfortable discussing them” and how to authentically integrate Hispanic and Latino culture into TBWA’s work, she said. Jimon Boadi Junior copywriter Joan Creative Jimon Boadi was prepared to “sell [his] soul to the tech industry” and spend his career working as a data center technician—but, just in the nick of time, one of his friends working at Joan encouraged Boadi to apply to a junior strategist role. In that role, Boadi discovered a passion for translating internet trends into Gen Z insights for the agency’s clients—or, in his words, “taking what the algorithm was already giving to me and just distilling it for my bosses to understand.” In 2022, Boadi helped shape the campaign strategy for Joan’s “Substitute Dealers” PSA campaign with the Ad Council that recruited former drug dealers to warn teens about the dangers of fentanyl. He dove into TikTok hashtags and scrolled through relevant communities on Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, for insights into how teenagers today are acquiring and using drugs, he said. That campaign made him realize the true power of advertising, Boadi said, and he’s excited to turn new Gen Z insights his colleagues uncover into compelling copy in his new role. Bianca Brown Account manager Edelman Gen Zers are often referred to as “digital natives” due to having grown up alongside the emergence of smartphones and social media. And Bianca Brown, an account manager on Edelman’s digital team who spent her teenage years writing Wattpad stories and immersing herself in social media content, is perhaps the epitome of a digital native. “Growing up in that sort of age [where] you’re on Tumblr and you're on Instagram and Twitter—when you really shouldn't be—I was consuming a lot of media and culture, and kind of witnessing the rise of influencer marketing,” she said. “And my interest in communication started with that.” At Edelman, Brown leverages her deep familiarity with internet culture to inform the Gen Z marketing strategies of clients such as Starbucks and Knorr. She does much of that youth-oriented work as part of the PR and marketing firm’s “Gen Z Lab,” an advisory group of nearly 300 of Edelman’s Gen Z employees established in 2022. As the U.K. ambassador for the Gen Z Lab, Brown encourages her U.K. colleagues to join the group and help run workshops for Edelman clients looking to reach Gen Z or gut check clients’ campaign ideas to ensure they’ll actually land with Gen Z consumers and not be considered “cringe.” Clare Coey Writer 72andSunny Most agency employees likely wouldn’t point to writing decks or creative briefs as their favorite aspect of working in the industry—but Clare Coey enjoys that internal work far more than consumer-facing projects. “It’s writing the brief to our directors and giving them an idea of how we want the spot to look, or writing the brief for our music house and determining with what sounds will work best for a spot,” she said. “I just enjoy how the writing aspect is integrated into every single stage of the creative process. And no matter if it’s client-facing or consumer-facing, writing consistently and effectively is always required for good work. At any stage.” Coey first joined 72andSunny as part of its residency program, and sought to improve her chances of staying at the agency by throwing herself into her work and treating every project she worked on as if it were going to be pitched. Her strategy worked—and since then, she’s helped shape campaigns for clients such as Comcast and Google, helping to highlight the people behind Comcast and displaying new real-life use cases for Google search, she said. For the latter, she helped identify about four dozen influencers and briefed them on new Google search features such as identifying an object through a photo scan, she said. “I think in the past, being in the know about cultural things was a ‘nice to have,’ but now, it’s a complete requirement if you want to create effective campaigns,” she said. “And I feel like when you’re looking at internet culture or Gen Z culture just from the surface and as like this one monolithic group, you’ll come across campaigns that feel kind of shallow or just use stupid buzzwords to get attention. And it has the complete opposite effect.” Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Stephanie Collins Brand strategist GSD&M Stephanie Collins considers her work as a brand strategist “a bit of a superpower,” as she is one of the main conduits for identifying and explaining internet culture insights that matter for GSD&M clients such as Pizza Hut, Dodge, Tyson and Goodyear. “It’s a superpower, but like they say, ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ to not misrepresent Gen Z,” she said. “I think people can do that easily, and there’s always these questions of what we care about and what we’re interested in, and I kind of have an opportunity to help set that straight.” One of those recent insights was helping Pizza Hut identify rap duo Flyana Boss as popular creators among Gen Z and putting them at the center of a campaign promoting the brand’s “Melts” menu item. Because Melts are meant to serve only one person, as opposed to Pizza Hut’s larger menu items that serve a group, the social push also leaned into Gen Z trends such as “girl math” and “little treat culture,” she said. @flyanaboss Not us making a commercial for @Pizza Hut, who’s getting melts #ad #flyanaboss ♬ Pizza Hut Melts - Flyana Boss Sofia Crnkovich Brand marketing associate manager PepsiCo Last year, Pepsi celebrated its 125th anniversary, and Sofia Crnkovich played a pivotal role in turning that historic milestone into an extravagant 125-day marketing push. She spearheaded the company’s collaboration with Shaquille O’Neal, part of Pepsi’s larger anniversary celebration, to promote Pepsi Mini Cans, which leveraged 1990s nostalgia with a play on Skee-Lo’s 1995 song, “I Wish.” And she helped create Pepsi’s pop-up diner in New York in October that immersed attendees in Pepsi’s decades of classic commercials and highlighted the evolution of the brand’s logo. View this post on Instagram A post shared by DR. SHAQUILLE O'NEAL Ed.D. (@shaq) Crnkovich also contributed to the soda giant’s logo redesign last year, which aimed to better reflect Pepsi’s connection to pop culture and what she called the energy of Pepsi’s “unapologetic enthusiasts.” Revamping the company’s logo to include more motion “allows [Pepsi] to better show up in different contexts” such as music festivals and other pop culture tentpoles across sports, music and entertainment, Crnkovich said at the 2023 Clio Creative Summit, helping ensure Pepsi will continue to show up in pop culture for another 125 years. Michael Dewberry Social media community manager R/GA When Michael Dewberry responded to an X user’s AI-generated images of a neon pink Verizon building designed to fit into Nicki Minaj’s “Gag City,” he didn’t anticipate his X post would become “one of [Verizon’s] top-performing social posts in years.” we're usually red but will go pink for the barbz #GAGCITY https://t.co/GaHooqBuyD— Verizon (@Verizon) December 7, 2023 “You don't typically see or think of Nicki Minaj and Verizon in the same ballpark,” he said. “But I was able to make it work.” That post was made in December—and just two months later, its success was blown out of the water by the social content surrounding Verizon’s Super Bowl ad starring Beyoncé. But Dewberry, a community manager on R/GA’s Verizon account, was also behind a number of the posts the company made around the Big Game ad. Weaving the company into these internet culture moments—including Elmo’s recent social media wellness check—has helped nudge Verizon closer to Gen Z consumers across social media. “I'm introducing Verizon into niches of the internet that perhaps it wouldn't have organically found itself in, and working with influencers and brand partners and communicating with them from the brand account” Dewberry said. His guidance on how Verizon should incorporate social content into its work with brand partners such as the NFL boosted Verizon’s social engagements by more than 900% in six months, according to Dewberry. Chris Do Associate Weber Shandwick Chris Do wields Gen Z slang such as “rizz” and “pookie” like he breathes air. That rapid absorption of new internet language into his vocabulary reflects Do’s ability to quickly grasp emerging social media trends and think up ways for clients such as McDonald’s, Jameson Irish Whiskey, Huggies and Vitaminwater to fit seamlessly into them. For example, when male self-care started trending in October, Do leveraged the online buzz to launch Vitaminwater’s collaboration with press-on nail brand Chillhouse, a “collection made for men, women and non-binary baddies.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by @vitaminwater “Gen Z is such an important aspect of agency life, I think,” Do said. “We keep a pulse on pop culture and keep things moving across the agency, and that’s a very important part of my role—making sure we’re exposed to what’s relevant and timely and making sure we connect [clients] to those intersections of culture and relevancy.” Read more: Ad Age’s Gen Z glossary for brands Aliya Gilmore Cultural strategist CPB London When Aliya Gilmore’s friend invited her to a luncheon being hosted by her employer—Singaporean marketing agency Culture Group—Gilmore didn’t anticipate she’d leave the event with a new job. She was even more bewildered by the fact that the agency wanted to hire her based on a 20-minute rant about Josh Hutcherson fanfiction she had made in response to one of the agency’s employees asking her what she found most interesting about Gen Z. That rant secured her a job as Culture Group’s “resident Gen Z translator,” where she reworked the traditional briefs the agency received to include Gen Z vocabulary and trends, she said. And now, she’s fulfilling a similar role at CPB London and helping weave Gen Z language and interests into the creative agency’s social content and creative strategies, she said. She also keeps the agency’s clients abreast of emerging social trends and “everything that’s been cool online” in her monthly “What’s New on Social?” roundups posted on the CPB website. “I think a good strategist should approach everything as though it's a fandom,” Gilmore said. “If you can speak to your audience in their own voice, that's what makes them the happiest.” Erifili Gounari CEO and founder The Z Link Almost as soon as she began her freshman year of college, Erifili Gounari was also taking on freelance social media management work. By her junior year, Gounari had founded The Z Link—a global social media agency that connects companies such as Hearst, Ikea, Deloitte and the United Nations to Gen Z consumers—after discovering several of the brands she was freelancing for needed guidance on how to engage with Gen Z on social media. “Brands were hiring me because I was like 18 or 19, and that's when Gen Z generational research really started emerging and [marketers] started really being like, ‘What does Gen Z want to see? How do we market to them?’” she said. “And I realized there was no agency that was fully Gen-Z-led or had a full team of Gen Z social media specialists to help brands with exactly that.” Though Gounari ran The Z Link entirely on her own for its first six months, she’s since expanded the agency across more than 10 countries and over two dozen employees. And on top of creating social content, developing social media and influencer marketing strategies and developing Gen-Z-oriented branding for clients, The Z Link also conducts market research about what Gen Z is looking for from their careers for companies eager to attract Gen Z talent. @thezlink #duet with @Emirates #emirates gen z really said IT’S NOT THAT SERIOUSSSSSSSS #genz #genzmarketing #genzagency #marketingagency ♬ original sound - Ciarán “I've gotten this question a lot: ‘What's it like being a Gen Z company? Do people take you guys seriously?’ And it's like, they only take us seriously because we're a Gen Z company in this industry. That's literally our selling point,” Gounari said. Reid Litman Global director Ogilvy Consulting Gen Z has been interacting with brands on social media since childhood, and that closeness has made the age cohort unafraid to call out the brands that they disagree with—and eager to praise the ones whose social content or campaigns they enjoy. So, for Reid Litman, the next step for brands wanting to engage with those outspoken consumers was to invite Gen Zers to help directly shape brands’ business strategies. Enter Ogilvy Consulting’s “Gen Z Pulse” offering—helmed by Litman—which gives Gen Z consumers the opportunity to “co-create the direction of the business and the impact that it has in the world” by participating in client workshops or joining bespoke co-creation boards or councils. The agency recently leveraged Gen Z Pulse to evaluate young consumers’ spending habits and turn their findings into guidance for financial services brands looking to reach Gen Z. “In a world where Gen Z sort of trusts businesses more than they do governments, there's a really cool opportunity to use brands as sort of a vehicle for good and to help Gen Z accomplish some of some of our goals, whether it be initiatives related to climate change or societal messages around gender,” Litman said. “Not only does Gen Z want to see brands make statements or take a position on issues, but they want brands to invite them in and help them co-create solutions.” Nadya Okamoto CEO and co-founder August Gen Z consumers have a reputation for wanting the brands they support to align with their beliefs—so, it’s only natural that August, a period care brand founded by two Gen Zers, would work values such as sustainability and inclusivity into its business model. Nadya Okamoto, co-founder and CEO of August, has been focused on destigmatizing menstruation and democratizing access to period products since high school. She founded Period, a nonprofit that works to eliminate “period poverty,” or a lack of access to period supplies, at age 16, and served as its executive director for five years before launching August with co-founder Nick Jain in 2020. Since then, the brand has brought its organic cotton pads and tampons to shelves at hundreds of retailers, including more than 400 Target stores. And through its marketing, August has sought to uplift people not commonly included in discussions about menstruation, such as transgender men, and encourage open conversations about the less glamorous aspects of periods. In its latest campaign, for example, Okamoto chatted with August’s new “period fairy” brand ambassador—comedy creator and reproductive health advocate Morgan Presley—about everything from vagina cramps to having to resort to makeshift toilet paper pads. @itsaugustco Anyone else ever had a vagina cramp? August’s new #PeriodFairy @Morgan Presley defffinitely has 🩸🧚 #OnMyPeriod #ItsAugust #IWD #InternationalWomensDay ♬ Wes Anderson-esque Cute Acoustic - Kenji Ueda Zaria Parvez Senior global social media manager Duolingo There’s a reason why marketers routinely bring up Duolingo in discussions about engaging Gen Z consumers. In just under four years, the language learning platform has completely overhauled its social media presence to center around the zany antics of its owl mascot, Duo, developing the “unhinged” TikTok strategy that dozens of brands have since sought to emulate. Those efforts have been spearheaded by Zaria Parvez, who joined Duolingo’s social media team fresh out of college in 2020. Parvez has since rocketed the brand’s TikTok audience from about 50,000 to nearly 11 million by leaning into the absurd humor appreciated by Gen Z, from having Duo give birth to Scrub Daddy sponges shaped like the green owl to taking Duo to collaborating with TikTok-famous plastic surgeon Dr. Miami to give Duo a Brazilian butt lift, or BBL. She’s also behind Duo’s ongoing efforts to woo the similarly-named pop star Dua Lipa, a storyline she’s been documenting across Duolingo’s social media for roughly two years. @duolingo twerking through the pain #Duolingo #Dulapeep #DuaLipa #futurenostalgiatour #madisonsquaregarden ♬ الصوت الأصلي - فهد ابن الموصل The wild success of Duolingo’s unhinged, playfully menacing social content drove the brand to orient its entire marketing strategy around a social-first approach, wrote Duolingo CEO and Co-Founder Luis von Ahn in a 2023 shareholder letter. Prioritizing social media and tying Duolingo to pop culture moments—such as Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour,” the “Barbie” movie and the Super Bowl—fueled a 150% surge in the number of social media impressions Duolingo amassed between 2022 and 2023, according to von Ahn. “The biggest thing for me is just the importance of having more Gen Z voices in the room,” Parvez said. “I think I was able to find success because I was given a seat at the table to actually pitch ideas … and felt empowered to speak about them and own them. And we talk about diversity and inclusion a lot within advertising and marketing … but if you’re not actually empowering [diverse talent] to do anything, it’s kind of fruitless.” AJ Pulvirenti Senior strategist Movers+Shakers Clients such as Amazon, Netflix and Hasbro often turn to Movers+Shakers for help attracting Gen Z consumers on social media, and AJ Pulvirenti has spent his nearly four years at the creative agency augmenting its ability to provide that youth culture connection to its clients. In 2022, he launched Movers+Shakers’ “Culture Squad,” an internal team of internet-culture-savvy employees that monitor social media for the creators, trends and memes bubbling up on their feeds and convert them into insights for clients. For example, in January, Pulvirenti helped put together a glossary breaking down the meanings behind different emoji combinations marketers may stumble across on social media. Pulvirenti also recently launched Movers+Shakers’ “Gen Z on Gen Z” podcast with fellow senior strategist Lilia Souri, where the duo share insights into Gen Z’s opinions on everything from social shopping to the gig economy. Nicole Rechtszaid Co-founder Ghost Agency Nicole Rechtszaid began her career as a creator hosting livestreams and blending brand partners such as Coca-Cola and Casio into her content. But now, as co-founder of Ghost Agency, a social commerce consultancy and TikTok Shop partner, she’s on the other side of the camera and helping brands break into livestream shopping and with the help of creators. Before launching Ghost Agency with her co-founder Jenny Woo, Rechtszaid was working as the head of social at live commerce platform Buywith, driving online audiences of brands such as Walmart, Ulta Beauty and Steve Madden to join the brands’ livestream shopping events. But when TikTok approached her in late 2022 saying they were seeking livestreaming experts to help get TikTok Shop off the ground in the U.S., she and Woo jumped at the chance. The duo created Ghost Agency to formalize their work in guiding brands on how to leverage TikTok Shop and its liveshopping component, along with other livestream shopping platforms such as Twitch and Amazon Live. For example, Rechtszaid and Woo helped energy drink brand GFuel launch on TikTok and develop the brand’s strategy for TikTok Live events, infusing engaging, gamified elements such as orders made during the stream triggering the hosts to complete a specific workout, she said. @gfuelenergy 🚀35% OFF TUBS, CANS, SHAKERS, & MORE! #tiktokshop #gfuel #gfuelenergy ♬ Sinister - MEJKO Despite having worked in livestreaming and social commerce for years, a number of potential clients have told her she “doesn’t look old enough to have that much experience” during pitches, Rechtszaid said, often leading the brand to go with a different agency. That age discrimination drove her to purchase “old lady glasses” in hopes they’d make her appear older and more knowledgeable when pitching clients, but “it’s still a challenge” to be taken seriously, she said. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Bri Reynolds Social media manager Lyft Like many of her Gen Z peers, Bri Reynolds has been absorbed in social media and the evolution of internet culture since her early teens. And that intimacy with the nuances of social platforms and what it’s like to be on the receiving end of brands’ social media ads for at least a decade is something she believes is “worth shouting from the rooftops” for Gen Zers looking to break into the industry. Reynolds has leveraged her deep familiarity with the intricacies of internet culture in a number of social media roles, including one as a social media specialist at Adobe. In that position, she launched and ran Adobe’s TikTok account, securing more than 200,000 followers and amassing 1 million collective likes in the company’s first three months on the platform. And in her current role as Lyft’s social media manager, Reynolds connects the brand to viral trends (including a sped-up version of the song “Tell Me Ma” by Sham Rock circulating TikTok ahead of St. Patrick’s Day) and spearheads the social and influencer elements of larger marketing pushes, such as a recent campaign around Lyft’s “Women+ Connect” feature. Earlier this month, for example, she and her team identified a popular TikTok comedian who was sharing videos for women to play out loud in their rideshares if they felt unsafe and recruited him to promote Women+ Connect. @lyft your driver patrick is arriving now #stpatricksday #stpaddysday #lyft ♬ original sound - speed songs 🩷 Reynolds also spotlights other social media managers in her podcast “How I Posted This,” which she launched last month, and by pointing out other brands’ successful social posts on her LinkedIn—where she also proudly displays a comment Lyft received on an Instagram post: “The social media manager of Lyft is doing the damn thing.” Varshini Satish Emerging partnerships lead Snapchat Varshini Satish spent much of 2023 traveling the world and establishing new communities of Snapchat creators in cities from Mumbai, India to Sydney, Australia. She focused her travels on identifying promising content creators around the globe and encouraging them to begin posting on Snapchat by educating them about the platform, with the goal of “bringing more language diversity and content diversity” to Snapchat—and to the advertisers looking to partner with creators on the platform. “We feel strongly about paying creators and about making sure that diverse creator voices are represented,” Satish said. “It’s about connecting with talent and telling them, ‘Hey, we care about you, and we want you to build a sustainable livelihood on the platform, as well.” That approach to recruiting new creators with diverse perspectives also inspired Satish and her team to launch Snapchat’s “523 for Black Creators” program, a career accelerator that helps connect 25 emerging Black content creators with brand partners such as Google Pixel and Westbrook, Will Smith’s media company. The yearlong initiative also provides those creators with a $10,000 monthly stipend to help fund their ambitions to become full-time creators. Geno Schellenberger Associate director of growth & communications Havas Chicago Just a couple of weeks after the COVID-19 pandemic forced much of the world into a lockdown, Geno Schellenberger was elbow-deep in a podcasting project designed to help him maintain connections with his friends and peers in the ad industry through a more effective medium than awkward Zoom happy hours. Schellenberger released the first episode of his podcast, called “Breaking and Entering,” in mid-April of 2020, focusing on helping young advertising hopefuls break into the industry (hence the name). But the show quickly snowballed from conversations with fellow college students studying advertising to interviews of high-profile marketing executives. Guests across the more than 200 episodes of “Breaking and Entering” range from Greg Hahn, co-founder and chief creative officer of Mischief, to Myra Nussbaum, president and chief creative officer of Havas Chicago—the latter of whom helped connect Schellenberger to a role at the agency. Schellenberger recently pivoted his position at the agency from purely overseeing communications to include a new focus on growth and attracting new clients to Havas Chicago, he said. He’s also currently teaching a college class on AI and creative advertising at the University of Illinois. Remille (Kaleb) Sindac Senior graphic designer Bakery Agency Kaleb Sindac’s work in graphic design technically began in elementary school, when she learned how to forge celebrities’ signatures to sell to her classmates for a quick buck. Now, though, her work is far more honest and her designs more sophisticated. As a senior graphic designer, Sindac oversees the Texas-based creative and culture agency’s work on packaging, design and product innovation for brands such as Shiner Beer. She and her team are helping the brand “evolve to better cater to the diverse and multifaceted demographic landscape of Texas” with bold, vibrant packaging and can designs, she said. Their award-winning design for Shiner’s “TexHex Bruja Brew” IPA, for example, features a witchy cowgirl with glowing yellow eyes, while the packaging for the brand’s “¡Órale!” Mexican-style beer comes in a turquoise cardboard box with two colorful jaguars, a common symbol in Mexican culture. “You would imagine that age would be a hindrance whenever you're talking to clients, but I think it puts us in a really unique position where we just know the audience because we are part of the audience,” Sindac said. “So there really hasn't been that feeling like you're being underestimated, but, rather, your opinions are a lot more valued because it's just something that you really understand.” Cayley Stonehouse Social media manager Glow Cayley Stonehouse specializes in connecting entertainment companies and their films and TV series to Gen Z audiences, a task easier said than done in today’s saturated media landscape. For shows such as TBS’s “American Dad,” she helps produce a steady drumbeat of social content tapping into pop culture trends and leaning into humor. And for The Roku Channel, she focuses on building brand awareness and affinity by weaving the platform into online conversations among Gen Zers. She’s also leveraged Instagram and TikTok to promote the releases of films such as “Finestkind” from Paramount+ and Universal Pictures’ animated movie “Sing 2.” The Instagram account she and her team launched for “Finestkind” amassed over 10,000 followers and helped drive the film to be streamed by over 2 million households by leveraging Gen Z’s love of Jenna Ortega, one of the film’s stars, Stonehouse said. For “Sing 2,” Stonehouse helped with the launch of a wide-ranging TikTok campaign that mirrored the movie with a real-life singing competition. The entire campaign garnered more than 21 billion views, she said. @singmovie We think you’re ready to be the next STAR ⭐ Join the #Sing2gether challenge. Link in bio for official rules to enter. #Sing2 ♬ original sound - Sing “I think there is this kind of stigma of being young in the industry, but … there’s never really been a moment where I feel like I don’t belong or my POV doesn’t matter,” Stonehouse said. “I think it’s actually the opposite, because many times I’m working with these brands that want to target Gen Z—which is me—so it’s beneficial just to have that new, fresh perspective on knowing what that audience will like and gravitate towards.” Eli Williams Director of creative strategy Day One Agency Eli Williams has built his career on scouring social media for trends or buzzy conversations and turning them into social content or larger campaigns for Day One Agency’s clients. Or, to use Gen Z slang, Williams has turned being “chronically online” into a role helping brands such as Chipotle, Converse and e.l.f. Beauty keep up with social media’s increasingly rapid trend cycle and contribute to relevant pop culture phenomena. Williams oversees Day One Agency’s internal trend-spotting group that meets weekly to highlight rising trends cropping up in their respective social media feeds and discusses how the agency can leverage those trending creators or topics for clients. He also helms the agency’s annual “Predictionary” report, which spotlights cultural shifts and trends Williams and his team anticipate will take off in the year ahead, and writes a weekly newsletter that rounds up relevant pop culture and social media news for Day One Agency’s clients. Williams also hosts the agency’s “Day One FM” podcast, interviewing creators, trendspotters, entrepreneurs and others in the realm of Gen Z marketing.

23 Gen Zers to know in advertising and marketing

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