How to reach Gen Z when they skip every ad

Ask planners which audience is hardest to reach and most will name Gen Z, roughly the people born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s. They grew up with the skip button, they are fluent in avoiding ads, and they have more tools for it than any generation before them.

This guide is for brands and agencies who still need to reach them. It looks at why the usual channels struggle, what tends to work, and where out-of-home, and street-level media in particular, fits in.

Why Gen Z are hard to reach

They have opted out of a lot of paid media

Younger audiences are heavy users of ad-free streaming tiers, ad-blockers and platforms where the feed moves faster than any ad can land. Linear TV viewing among younger people has fallen steadily for years, as Ofcom’s media reports have tracked. The screens they do watch are often ones where advertising is optional, skippable or easy to ignore.

They spot advertising instantly

This audience has seen sponsored content, influencer deals and retargeting since childhood. They can tell when something is trying to sell to them, and they scroll accordingly. A glossy ad that interrupts what they were doing is the easiest thing in the world to dismiss.

Their attention is fragmented

Gen Z will happily watch a long video essay, or a full season in a weekend, if it holds them. They also filter very fast. Content gets a moment to earn their attention, and most of it does not.

What tends to work

Gen Z do still pay attention to brands, and they are often enthusiastic about the ones that feel relevant to their lives. The same few principles keep coming up.

Show up where they already are, physically

A lot of Gen Z life still happens in the real world. They commute, go to lectures, meet friends, queue for food, go to gigs and football, and walk the same few streets many times a week. Physical space is one of the few places where an ad cannot be skipped or blocked.

That is why out-of-home has held up with younger audiences when other channels have not. It is part of the environment, and nobody pays a subscription to remove a poster.

Be specific to the place and the moment

Generic national creative is easy to ignore. It is much harder to ignore creative that knows where you are and what you are doing, whether that is a late-night food message at 11pm in Shoreditch, a match-day line outside the stadium or a lunch offer on the street where you are deciding what to eat.

This is where digital, location-aware formats earn their keep. One campaign can say slightly different things in different places without turning into a production nightmare. Our geo-fencing guide covers how to plan this for London.

Respect their time

An audience that filters quickly responds better to short, clear, confident creative. Stick to one idea, use type people can actually read, and make the brand obvious without shouting it. If an ad needs a paragraph of explanation, it probably needs rethinking.

Leave room for them to find you

Gen Z tend to respond to brands they discover more than to brands that chase them. Out-of-home works well here because it does not follow anyone around the internet. It sits in the world and lets people notice it, look it up and share it on their own terms.

Where street-level media fits

Street-level media is advertising on screens carried by delivery riders. It is a form of mobile digital out-of-home, and it happens to line up well with how Gen Z move through a city. If the format is new to you, start with What is street-level media?.

It goes to the streets they use

Delivery riders spend their day in the places where younger Londoners spend their free time: food streets, student areas, nightlife districts, market lanes, the pavements outside venues and the residential side roads where they live. Many of these places carry no fixed advertising at all.

It sits at eye level

Screens on a rider’s bag are at head height and a few metres away, moving through the crowd at street level. At that distance the ad becomes part of the street scene in a way a billboard high above the road does not.

It changes with the moment

Every screen is connected and knows where it is, so creative can shift by area and time of day. The same campaign can run a daytime message near universities, an evening message around nightlife and a different line on match day. Live data streams can switch creative when conditions change, such as the weather turning or kick-off approaching.

It looks good up close

Gen Z are used to high-quality screens, and a pixelated dot-matrix display reads as cheap. Curb uses full-HD LCD panels so video, photography and fine type look the way the brand intended, even at arm’s length. We explain the difference in LCD vs LED screens for mobile advertising.

Creative tips for reaching Gen Z on the street

Out-of-home creative has its own rules, and moving screens add a few more. This is what we suggest to brands planning for younger audiences.

1. Lead with one idea. A viewer may only see the screen for a few seconds, so make the point in the first frame.
2. Use real type sizes. If a line is too small to read across a pavement, cut it.
3. Make it local. Naming the neighbourhood, the time or the event shows that the brand is paying attention.
4. Plan variants for different zones and dayparts. A handful of versions will do more than one universal ad.
5. Give them a reason to look it up. A distinctive line or visual they might search for or screenshot works harder than a QR code they will never scan from a moving bag.
6. Keep it honest. This audience rewards brands that do not overclaim, so say what the product does.

Measuring whether it worked

Reaching Gen Z is only useful if you can show it happened. With mobile DOOH that starts with proof of play, which records every time your creative ran, where and when. On top of that sit impression estimates, which model how many people were likely to see each play based on location and time. Curb’s bags have no cameras, so none of this involves filming the people walking past.

Brands often pair this with their own signals, such as branded search, footfall to a store or promo code redemptions in the areas where the campaign ran. Comparing active zones with similar zones that did not run the campaign gives a cleaner read. For more on the mechanics, see Proof of play: how to measure mobile DOOH campaigns.

A summary for planners

• Gen Z avoid a lot of paid media, but they still live much of their lives in physical space.
• Out-of-home cannot be skipped, and location-aware digital formats let it feel specific to the place.
• Street-level media reaches the streets, venues and neighbourhoods younger Londoners use, at eye level and at the right moment.
• Keep creative short, local and honest, and plan measurement from the start.

Next steps

If Gen Z are a priority audience for your next London campaign, the advertisers page sets out how Curb works. For zones, dayparts and founding-partner terms, you can request the media pack.