NEW YORK — Marketers frequently flock to Advertising Week New York to hear about what’s coming down the pike in the industry, including emerging consumer trends. Gen Alpha remains a focus for those hoping to keep up with a digitally native generation that will help shape the future of areas like artificial intelligence and creator marketing.
Gen Alpha’s technological savvy is also translating into serious economic impact. Forecasts indicate the age group, which represents around 2 billion consumers globally, could be valued at $5.46 trillion by 2029. Marketing Dive dropped in on Gen Alpha-themed sessions at Advertising Week last week and below has assembled takeaways shared by brand marketers, agencies and media platforms with a finger on the pulse of what’s moving the needle with the demographic:
Think of Gen Alpha as household CMOs
Reaching rising generations of tweens and teens usually involves a hefty amount of marketing to parents, the people traditionally in charge of major financial decisions. Gen Alpha, which is typically viewed as consumers 14 to 16 and younger, could be shaking up that dynamic.
The demographic already commands over $100 billion in direct spending power and affects 42% of household purchases, according to findings from DKC. To avoid leaving money on the table, marketers should view Gen Alpha as more than a long-game opportunity.
“I think Gen Alpha have been deemed the household CMO because they have so much influence,” said Emma Witkowski, vice president of media solutions at WildBrain, the company that owns the Teletubbies brand, during an Advertising Week panel. “For brands that are thinking, ‘Oh, we’ll think about Gen Alpha in 10 years' time or when they’re teenagers,’ you’re missing the opportunity, which I really see as short-term and long-term.”
Understand Gen Alpha’s sense of identity
With Gen Alpha, marketers are also contending with a cohort that is likely to have its habits and brand preferences shaped by AI. Over one-fifth of Gen Alpha consumers are already using AI on a daily basis, according to research from GWI and the agency Razorfish. Despite signs of robust AI adoption, young consumers don’t want their identities hitched to the technology.
“What we’re finding is that Gen Alpha and Gen Z do not want to be labeled the AI generation,” said Donna Tuttle, vice president of marketing and communications at Whataburger, on a panel moderated by Razorfish. “They're irritated by that because they don't feel like we're giving them their individuality.”
Looking beyond broad, age-based customer segmentation and tapping into specific hobbies of Gen Alpha could strengthen marketing targeted at the demographic. Tuttle pointed to a social account from Whataburger that serves as a Museum of Art hub for showcasing fan art and other projects. Leveraging that type of community connection could also help brands differentiate and improve how they appear in AI answers, Tuttle suggested.
“AI is crawling for anything that’s human,” said Tuttle. “They're looking for those stories, they're looking for those authentic things that already live out there.”
Use creators to break through AI’s invisible layer
Marketers are rethinking their approach to content in other ways to strengthen AI visibility and connect with the 14% of Gen Alphas identified by Razorfish who use the tech to discover brands. Strategies need to speak the language of Gen Alpha and also the language of AI models, Channan Sawhney, associate vice president of digital, media and measurement at Church & Dwight, said during the Advertising Week panel with Whataburger.
“At least in my mind, it has almost come to a point where you're marketing to humans and then you're marketing to machines. Visibility becomes really critical,” said Sawhney. “How do you convince the invisible layer to let you go through to who's on the other side?”
Marketers should brush up on how different AI models operate — optimizing for Walmart’s Sparky is going to differ from doing so for Amazon’s Alexa — and where they draw information from. Increasingly, much of the information pertinent to Gen Alpha stems from content creators on platforms like Roblox and YouTube, Sawhney explained.
“This generation, Gen Alpha specifically, is so influencer-first,” said Sawhney. “Imagine the scale that an influencer today has because it's influencing the Gen Alpha [consumer], but it's also influencing the AI, which is influencing [consumers more generally].”
Avoid trend-hopping and prioritize IP
“Six-seven,” a nonsense phrase that started taking social media by storm in late 2024, was a beloved meme among Gen Alpha until parents and brands killed it. There are plenty of other avenues for brands to align around what’s buzzing online without lazily cribbing from existing culture they don’t understand and which doesn’t generate long-term value. The rise of microdramas, or short-form vertical video series, is part of a new wave of intellectual property that brands can support as once-fixture TV channels like Cartoon Network wane.
“There’s a tremendous opportunity to go license some of this really credible IP and maybe work with some creative voices that have permission that your brand does not — to reimagine what some of this really high-performing, really high-value IP can be on social for you as a one-of-one piece of content,” said Bryce Adams, U.S. influencer lead at WPP Media’s The Goat Agency, on the panel with Witkowski.
“As a brand, you may not have a studio to shoot the content, but you have budget and you have consumer data, and you have a POV on where you want to be,” Adams added.
Don’t overlook co-viewing occasions
Gathering around the TV set has traditionally been a unifying moment for families and a way for brands to appeal to parents around household shopping decisions. As cord-cutting has accelerated and media habits continue to splinter, marketers have potentially lost sight of the power of co-viewing occasions centered around Gen Alpha programming.
“I talk about co-viewing as the most undervalued audience segment in advertising right now,” said WildBrain’s Witkowski. “That audience isn’t on traditional TV anymore. It’s on YouTube, it's on streaming platforms and it’s still very much alive, but advertisers seem to have forgotten about it.”
Witkowski sees the pivot away from co-viewing as attributable to gaps in measurement. Whereas linear TV had a widely adopted — if flawed — ratings system, digital surfaces are too disparate to provide a unified view. There are some valid reasons why tracking is less applicable in Gen Alpha-oriented spaces, including children’s privacy and safety concerns. WildBrain for its part recently joined a taskforce for the nonprofit Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement to address measurement shortfalls in the industry and develop metrics around co-viewing, among other initiatives.
Despite the challenges, Advertising Week speakers still see an opportunity for children’s entertainment that provides substantive educational value versus the “empty calories” that are becoming more prevalent in the current landscape due to brain rot social content.
“The way that I would say it is you want opt-in environments,” said Adams, highlighting high-quality creators and podcasts as areas of interest for brands.
Sara Karlovitch contributed additional reporting to this story.
