“Nobody under 25 objects to being sold to. They object to being talked to like a segment.”

Gen Z has been called marketing-proof for about a decade now, mostly by people who are not in it. This generation is not allergic to advertising. It is allergic to the specific sensation of being handled — of watching a company perform an understanding it clearly does not have.

We are a student-run insights firm founded in 2024. Our consultants come from 8 partner universities and our standing panel is 900+ high school and college students. We are not studying this audience from across a table. That is the whole methodological argument.

So what does being handled feel like?

It is slang used one season late. It is a cause mentioned in June and never again. It is a survey that asks which of five values resonates most when none of them do. It is communication built out of what a room of adults assumed, then tested only for whether it tested well.

Young audiences read intent faster than they read copy. If the intent is extraction, the copy does not matter.

What we watch go wrong:

• Research commissioned to confirm a strategy someone already wrote

• An age bracket standing in for an actual audience definition

• Questions phrased in the company’s language instead of the respondent’s

• Findings averaged across regions that do not behave alike

• A campaign that borrows the aesthetic without earning the position

None of that is a creative failure. It is a research failure that shows up later wearing a creative costume.

A blunter set of questions

Before the next campaign, ask your own team:

• Did anyone under 22 shape this, or only react to it once it existed?

• Could a respondent tell us we were wrong, or only pick from the options we wrote?

• Do we know how this reads outside our biggest market?

• Are we describing a behaviour we observed or one we hoped for?

• Would we run this past a room of them and stay in the room?

If more than one of those is uncomfortable to answer, the campaign is not the problem yet.

Why the panel is the method

We keep a standing panel of 900+ U.S. high school and college students and handpick from it per project, so the people answering match the audience the client actually wants to reach. More than 8,000 survey responses in, the pattern holds: the sharpest findings come from the tightest recruiting, not the longest questionnaire.

The same logic runs through the rest of it:

• Consultants from 8 partner universities → no single campus standing in for a generation

• Sayle, our own AI interviewer → depth at a volume surveys cannot reach

• Engagements from 3 weeks to 10 months → the method fits the question, not the invoice

None of that makes us objective. It makes us close enough to notice when an answer is polite rather than true.

What that looks like in practice

For Spotify in 2023 we built the go-to-market strategy for a scrollable, TikTok-style feed of podcast clips, Figma mockups included, and trialled it with students at UT Austin and UC Berkeley. Not a focus group flown in and fed lunch. Students using it where they would actually use it.

The difference?

You stop learning what people say about a feature and start learning what they do with it when nobody is presenting it to them.

Final thought

Treat Gen Z as a demographic to crack and you will get exactly the answers you paid for.

Treat them as people worth actually asking, and you will get something you can use.

Working on something for this audience? Tell us what you are trying to learn.

Start here: Get in touch with Koy Strategy.