Gen Z marketers reveal brand wins and fails of 2024—and their advice for 2025

Reaching Gen Z consumers remained a priority for many marketers in 2024—and some were more successful than others, according to three Gen Z marketers who participated in an Ad Age roundtable Wednesday to discuss some of the year’s biggest Gen Z marketing wins and failures. Morgan Batts, a brand executive for Nike at Wieden+Kennedy; Celine Chai, co-founder and CEO of Gen Z marketing agency NinetyEight; and Clay Lute, a member of Berns Communications Group’s The Z Suite, joined Ad Age News Editor E.J. Schultz to highlight their favorite (and least favorite) marketing strategies of the year. They also discussed how brands sought to connect with Gen Z in 2024, including a rise in “unhinged” social content and partnerships with Gen Z athletes, and shared advice for marketers eager to reach this elusive group—born between 1997 and 2012—in 2025. Below, we’ve rounded up five takeaways from the conversation. The best marketing of 2024—according to Gen Z Marc Jacobs, Duolingo and Liquid Death were among the brands the panelists identified as the best marketers of the year. Lute praised Marc Jacobs’ video collaborations with niche TikTok creators for the brand’s channel that maintained the creators’ signature content style, such as @Sylvaniandrama’s soap opera storylines told through animal figures. The comments across Marc Jacobs’ TikTok videos showed “true engagement” with its creator-centric strategy, including “people laughing [and] tagging their friends,” Lute said. “I think it fostered something [that] was really authentic that we haven’t seen from a major-label brand like that.” @marcjacobs Body bags, now available online and in selected stores 👜 @Sylvaniandrama ♬ original sound - marcjacobs Chai pointed to Duolingo’s entertaining social content and Liquid Death’s plethora of unexpected collaborations, such as its “Corpse Paint” makeup partnership with e.l.f. Beauty and its collaboration with Van Leeuwen on ice cream-flavored sparkling water, as some of her favorite marketing strategies of the year. She highlighted an exclusive rave Duolingo hosted in February in Germany, where attendees had to maintain a 30-day streak on the app to enter. “They’ve nailed attitudes, culture and just how Gen Zs approach the product and how to keep them engaged,” Chai said of Duolingo. Lute added: “The consumer is expecting a two-way street now. It’s not just the brands talking to us, we’re talking right back. And the best way to build that bridge is [with] something tangible.” Batts said the best marketing moments of the year came from music artists such as Doechii, Flyana Boss, and Tyler, The Creator. The artists’ campaigns promoting their rebrands or upcoming album releases were prime examples of the “authentic storytelling” Gen Z craves, she said. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Swamp Princess (@doechii) The year’s biggest marketing mistakes Lute pointed to Coca-Cola’s controversial AI-generated holiday ads as one of the biggest brand fumbles of 2024. Although he understood the company wanting to lean into generative AI—one of the buzziest topics of the year—he warned against marketers using the technology to target Gen Z consumers. Gen Zers often see AI as a way for brands to avoid paying artists or justify slashing their workforce, Lute said. “There’s no getting away from AI, and so it’s kind of silly for us to pretend it won't happen,” Lute said. “But I think brands have to understand that the consumer is a little bit sensitive on that topic, so how you have to approach it has to be sensitive, as well.” Also read: What Gen Zers think of AI in advertising The swift backlash against Bumble’s “celibacy billboards” was also a major marketing flop, Chai said, particularly among the Gen Zers the dating app was attempting to target with that campaign. “To just automatically assume that people are choosing celibacy—it just felt off,” she said. “They completely missed the context and the culture that Gen Zs are operating in … and it was insulting.” Watching Bumble become the thing it always said it wouldn’t be is a damn trip. Those celibacy billboards are crazy. pic.twitter.com/AxHCbeBZRT— MON 🍑🌈⚽️🖍 (@m_duwel) May 11, 2024 While Bumble quickly apologized for its ad, “social media travels at the speed of lightning, [and] it is really hard to undo ‘damage’” to a brand’s reputation when it gets mired in internet controversy, Chai said. Batts didn’t name a specific brand, but pointed to common themes behind many of these year’s marketing mishaps, such as “not listening to the consumer,” “inserting yourself into a space that the brand doesn't naturally belong in,” or excluding the “right people” from the team developing the campaign. Gen Z still loves “unhinged” marketing The three panelists all noticed an increase in unpolished and “unhinged” marketing content this year, fueled partially by the growth of “brain rot” content over the past several months. For “advertising-fatigued” Gen Zers, brands embracing slang terms and internet trends that are relevant to them not only makes “us connect with you as a brand, but we keep you in our ecosystem because we think you’re entertaining,” Lute said. Although so-called brain rot language and content “can be a little bit explicit and can be a little bit outside of the bounds”—such as Nutter Butter’s nightmarish TikTok videos or brands leveraging terms such as “gyatt,” which refers to a large butt—“that’s really connecting to a younger customer, because we’ve seen the polished stuff already,” he said. gyatt to do your lesson https://t.co/mk31LtV3WD— Duolingo (@duolingo) February 12, 2024 Brands also increasingly extended that unhinged approach to the comments section, where they adopted Gen Z slang in conversations on both the brand’s own content and on viral TikTok videos, Batts said. Regularly communicating with consumers via social media can help humanize the brand among Gen Z consumers, she said—and, as Lute mentioned, can make them stick around for longer. The impending U.S. TikTok ban, tentatively set for Jan. 19, could limit the spread of unhinged content if marketers shift to platforms such as Instagram. Chai, for instance, said her agency has “seen really good performance on Reels” and would hone in on Instagram if a TikTok ban were enacted in 2025. Batts, however, anticipates brands will increasingly take cues from creators next year and turn to them to help shape campaigns—regardless of the platform. “For sure, we will start to see more influencers with brand partnerships, because it just allows for that extra level of authenticity and unhinged-ness,” she said. NextGen Marketing Summit Join us for a crash course on Gen Z, DTC marketing and the creator economy Register today Sporting events and up-and-coming athletes are grabbing Gen Z’s attention Sports became a larger part of the Gen Z zeitgeist in 2024, from the surge of social media conversation around the Paris Olympics—which some dubbed the “TikTok Olympics” due to the flood of TikTok content that emerged from both athletes and influencers on the ground—to the age cohort’s growing interest in women’s sports. For Batts, some of the appeal comes from the rise of Gen Z athletes who are outspoken about their values and “aren’t afraid to be themselves and be in these spaces.” Unlike previous generations, the majority of these young athletes are “coming out of the gate” with a clear sense of who they are, what they do and what they stand for, making it easy to feel connected to Gen Z sports stars, she said. Sporting events now also serve as a “third space” for Gen Zers to socialize outside of work or home, Lute said. While he isn’t a huge fan of basketball, he’s attended several New York Liberty WNBA games to spend time with friends in the stands and enjoy the antics of the team’s mascot, Ellie the Elephant. @bigellieliberty There SHANT be a boring moment with me in the room‼️🐘🗽 #MOREENERGY #PUREENTERTAINMENT #FYP #ViralDanceVideos #WNBA #nyliberty #nylibertymascot #ellie #ellietheelephant #nyc #dancetok #funnyvideos #sports @nyliberty @WNBA @ESPN @The New York Times ♬ More Passion, More Energy - WasteLand But sports leagues and the streaming platforms they partner with will need to ensure sporting events remain accessible to Gen Z if they want to attract Gen Z viewers, Chai added. Gen Zers don’t want to—and often can’t afford—to subscribe to multiple streaming services to follow their favorite sport or players, and “sporting events and tickets are getting to be on the pricier side,” she said. Gen Z’s marketing tips for brands The three panelists wrapped up the roundtable by sharing advice for Gen Z-oriented marketers for 2025. Batts highlighted a lesson she took away from Ad Age’s Gen Z Summit in March, where a speaker compared Gen Z marketing to “going to someone’s house party,” she said. “You don’t come into somebody’s house and tell them what they need to do in their kitchen or in their living room,” she said. “You show up, you kick it, you get to know who’s there, you talk to people. And then you find what the connecting thread is, and use whatever you are as a brand that makes you unique to help elevate that space.” Chai urged marketers to “chase relevance, and not virality” in their social strategies. “If we’re just hopping on trends and just chasing viral moments, we're never going to figure out what this brand's identity really is,” she said. Instead, marketers should embrace trends that align with their brand rather than blindly throwing themselves into every viral moment, she said. Brands should also stop viewing Gen Z as as a monolithic, adolescent group, Lute said. The oldest Gen Zers, born in 1997, are turning 28 next year, while the youngest are only just reaching teenagehood. Crafting a marketing message that resonates with that entire group is impossible, so brands should instead “pick a consumer lane” to focus on, such as young professionals, young parents or high school or college students, he said. 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Gen Z marketers reveal brand wins and fails of 2024—and their advice for 2025

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