It’s Not Gen Z. It’s the Culture.

You must have read the Fastcompany article on the revelations that can come forward from bringing in a Gen Z marketer. Surely someone on your team sighed during the past month and said, “Those Gen Z’ers, they’re just… different.”

And sure, if by “different” you mean they don’t use Facebook, don’t respond to your display ad, and don’t care about your clever headline that took four rounds of copywriting revisions because the boardroom couldn’t agree on one and decided to ask the agency to merge two options… then yes. They are absolutely different.

But also? Not really.

Because Gen Z isn’t some alien tribe with new emotional wiring. They’re just young. Like we were once. And being young in 2025 is not the same as being young in 1996. Or 2006. The world changed. The media changed. The pace, the tone, the trust, the distribution. It all changed.

So of course your old playbook doesn’t land.

Stop blaming the generation. Start reading the room.

It’s easy to pin the blame on Gen Z when your marketing isn’t landing. They scroll past your ads, they ghost your brand, they don’t seem to care. But the real shift isn’t generational. It’s cultural.

Teenagers have always wanted to get away from where their parents are. That’s not a Gen Z quirk, that’s basic adolescence. Just like people have always tuned out anything that feels like a sales pitch. The difference now? The interface does the work for the user. A single swipe and you’re gone.

And that craving for unfiltered, immediate, less-than-perfect content? That didn’t start with Gen Z either. It’s been creeping into the culture for years. We’ve all grown allergic to the overly polished, the overexplained, the overdesigned.

So no, the issue isn’t that your team is too old. It’s that your marketing still acts like the world hasn’t changed. And it has. Not in age but in attitude.

Don’t act younger. Act current.

There’s a line in the Fast Company piece that says: “I can’t speak to younger audiences the way fellow Gen Zers can.” Yes, you can. You just need to stop trying to be younger than you are and start being more in tune.

That junior on your team didn’t bring some secret Gen Z sauce. They brought relevance. They stopped explaining every feature. They dropped the polished look. They treated content like a story not a brochure.

None of that is exclusive to young people. It’s just good marketing. For this moment.

So what do we do now?

We stop projecting difference and start practicing empathy. We stop chasing youth and start chasing relevance. We stop talking to a generation and start listening to the culture.

Because marketing today isn’t about decoding Gen Z. It’s about showing up in a world where everyone has learned to skip, scroll, and scrutinise faster than ever. The rules didn’t change because of a generation. They changed because the medium did. Because the mood did. Because time moves forward and culture doesn’t wait.

So no, it’s not about Gen Z. It’s about you. And whether you’re ready to speak in the language of now.