How have your kids informed your view on social media?
For many marketers, their kids were the first to pick up BeReal, and a few marketers reevaluated their brand’s Snapchat strategy after seeing their teens use it so much.
Robinson: “I would say the cemented purpose and value of the influencer community, but there is a twist on that. At least for my kids, influencers don’t change their perception of a product. It either reinforces their perception or makes them aware of a new product. But if they feel a way about a brand or product, and if an influencer has an opposite view, they ignore it.”
Brommers: “TikTok as a happy place for them to entertain and express themselves has informed our strategy. But Snapchat is their go-to for one-on-one communication or one to a few. I will say that the Snap team has said how hard it is to educate marketing teams on the platform, except for when the marketer has a teenager on the app at home.”
Chavez: “They have a deep understanding of what’s cool, funny, odd, what’s old and what’s new—and the fact that a lot of great social content can be all of those things. One of my favorite recent examples is Sunday Lunch on YouTube—Toyah Willcox and Robert Fripp covering all sorts of classic punk and progressive rock music. I recently discovered it and shared it with my son, but his response was to laugh and compliment me for discovering ‘deep cut’ content that he’s followed for a while!”
Brandt: “Years ago, some of our social data told us that Snapchat wouldn’t work for us. But we could see how much our own kids were using it, so we asked if it was the wrong creative, or length. We ended up taking a few weeks off in 2019 to shut off our other social channels to see how Snapchat did on its own, and lo and behold [it] performed better than expected.”
Felix: “My kids are a little young for social media, but on our drives to school they get to be the Spotify DJ. They’ll put a bunch of songs in the queue and tell me to listen to them. My daughter, not surprisingly, is all about Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo, and my son is more hip-hop—Lil Nas X, 24K Golden, and Post Malone.”
See how brands have scored in Ad Age’s quarterly Gen Z poll