Hello everyone and welcome to our newsletter on all things Gen Z.

🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

We’ve been knee deep in our second AI Hackathon with our team in London, following one we held last month with our team in New York. If you haven’t done so already, experimenting with the ever growing number of machine learning tools is not only important for your business - it is a lovely way of bringing teams together and having some fun.

Our Chief Product Officer, Dion Bailey, asked colleagues to create images and titles using prompts they fished out of a bowl (on old school bits of paper) and the Midjourney AI platform. Here’s our favourite - Preserving Timeless Moments, One Click at a Time:

There is a significant cultural upside to hackathons which, for many Gen Z employees, is an important part of worklife. Provide Pringles and fresh fruit to create superior good vibes (we can hear the laughter from the hackathon room next door as we toil away on this BRILLIANT newsletter).

Fail to focus on the “feel” of your workplace and the data says that your colleagues, particularly those towards the start of their career, will soon lose interest. This remarkable analysis from Storyful proves the point.

#RageApply anyone?

P.S. Scroll to the bottom for some summer hols news…

2024… It’s coming

As a news organisation, you won’t be surprised that we spend a lot of time thinking about the 2024 US Election. For an authentic voice on where Gen Z stands in the debate, look no further than Rachel Janfaza and her excellent newsletter, The Up and Up. Each week, she shares an insightful bit of analysis relating to the youth vote - whether that’s how Gen Z receive their news, the impact of Roe v Wade on young voters or on the ground dispatches from youth civic events, like this one in Florida. The difference between Rachel’s insight and most of the other content produced on youth politics is her lack of generalised statements - she dives into the detail, unpacks the data and shows that leaders on both sides of the debate need to treat young people as complex, not, as we keep saying, a homogenous blob.

Brands on the up with Gen Z

The Ad Age-Harris Poll tracks brands making significant progress in gaining attention from Gen Z. The Q2 results are in, and White Claw tops the list - making them the brand that’s gained most favourability among Gen Z. Are we surprised? Not at all! If you head to places where young people are - music festivals, bars, parks - it won’t take you long to spot a can of White Claw. And while Gen Z are being more mindful about drinking alcohol than previous generations, when they do opt for a drink, having a pleasantly designed, low-calorie, portable can is the way to go.

‘God bless the future of work’

You may have seen a viral tweet where a recruiter shares that a Gen Z candidate for a role asked for suitable work-life balance, a 5-hour working day and a $600 payment upfront. Chaos ensues - Twitter users argue over whether Gen Z are asking for too much and make sweeping statements about an entire generation (we’ve been here before…). It’s a one off, buzzy moment (well unpacked here) that reminds us of a few common themes: it’s tempting to tar a whole demographic with the same brush, some young people may be more vocal about what they’d like from work, but ultimately, this isn’t necessarily the norm.

Speaking of salaries…

Gen Z finance expert Hannah Williams encourages everyone to talk more openly about their salaries via her TikTok channel, Salary Transparent Street. Her videos consistently rack up hundreds of thousands of views, showing clearly how huge the appetite is for this kind of content. Young people want more clarity on work and money, and asking the question directly is emerging as the best way to get to the answers.

And finally…

23%

Second quarter decline in Buy Now Pay Later app downloads compared with the same period last year. Sweden-based Klarna saw the largest drop in global daily downloads for the quarter, with a 38.1% year-on-year fall. But, despite the drop (and rising interest rates), the number of active monthly users for BNPL is still rising, which could be linked to the rising cost of living making that pay check a little harder to stretch.

Have a lovely weekend everyone. We’ll be taking a short summer break for the next two weeks (not together, natch), so looking forward to being back on the Get to Know Bandwagon of Fun in three weeks.

How can we help?

In my many travels and conversations, I’m increasingly talking to CEOs, executives and civil society leaders wanting to better understand the next generation of consumers and the next generation of employees. Gen Z is putting pressure on us all to transform in fascinating ways, and many of us are asking questions about how to cater for younger workers and future proof our organisations.

If this sounds like you, we’d be keen to have a chat and see if TNM can help. From our own content production to work we have done, for example, with The Oliver Wyman Forum, we have a raft of insights and data which can support you. We work closely with a number of global organisations – helping with high-impact story-telling, digital media, internal communications, through to employee benefits, HR and working structures.

Email me direct and all of us at TNM look forward to speaking further.

Kamal Ahmed
Editor-in-Chief and Co-founder
The News Movement