Okay, so …
A decade or two ago, the only reason you’d use subtitles on your TV, aside from accessibility issues, is if you were watching a foreign film. But now, the majority of Gen Z and Gen Alpha use them all the time.
To understand why, we have to look at their video consumption patterns and habits.
TV captions began as an accessibility measure as early as the 1970s and started ramping up in social media with the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010, created to make sure that accessibility laws enacted in the ’80s and ’90s were brought up to date with 21st century technologies. Captions became ubiquitous when TikTok and Instagram introduced auto-captioning in 2021, and as more people have gotten used to seeing them — especially younger people, who consume the most social media — they’ve grown to rely on them. Now, already-fast-paced social content can be consumed even faster, by reading the captions before the speaker has finished speaking. The same is true for TV.
Our job is to notice the trend early and fold it into our marketing efforts.
Social media’s influence on TV-viewing behavior is more complicated than captions. If anything, the use of captions supports the already-different viewing patterns the younger generations have adopted. Having grown accustomed to shorter-form, mobile content, they don’t watch TV the same way their elders do. Rather than sitting down and focusing on a show or movie, they watch while they do other things. This includes while out in public, making captions a necessity for watching without sound. It can also mean watching more than one screen at a time, which captions make more convenient. A survey revealed that 80% of gen Z and millennials “double-screen” when they watch. “The subtitles allow us to go on our phone but still absorb the content and gist of the TV show,” says Isabel Brooks of The Guardian.
So what is the takeaway for marketers?
When we craft our ads and our messaging, we have to factor in what the user is expecting on each platform and then watch closely as those behaviors expand to other areas. A style might start on TikTok but quickly expand to other social platforms and even off the screen and into the general zeitgeist. Our job is to notice the trend early and fold it into our marketing efforts.
Consider vertical video.
Before the 2010s, most everything was horizontal. But the launch of Snapchat in 2011 started popularizing the vertical format. In 2016, Instagram and Facebook shifted from a 1:1 square ratio to 2:3 and introduced Stories to rival Snapchat. TikTok was born in 2017, and the rest is history. A 2018 study by Mediabrix found that vertical videos had a 90% higher completion rate than horizontal ones. So, as a marketer, if you were paying close attention in 2011, you’d be ahead of the curve.
Our friend Tyler Murray at VML predicts that, very soon, people will be able to delegate their shopping to AI — a shift that could have huge ramifications for marketers, as, for the first time in history, our target audience could be non-human.
These are examples of big changes, but there are smaller things, too, that can make a big difference.
If you’re a content creator with a personal brand, you already know better than to use the millennial pause in your selfie videos (waiting a second before you start talking, a trait of millennial video-making that Gen Z loves to ridicule). Now you need to start talking before you even set your phone on the table (the Gen Z shake), or grab attention at the top of a video by applying lip gloss or by saying “Okay, so …” (Let us know if our intro caught your attention; maybe it works in printed media as well?)
And now, as the members of Gen Alpha are getting their first social media accounts and posting content that causes even Gen Z to scratch their heads, it’s especially important to remain alert. Watch closely for what’s coming next; will it be humor that’s totally random and weird (see: skibidi toilet) or a phrase based on someone’s specific delivery that happened to make someone laugh (see: 6-7)? (6-7 is also arguably random and weird, and yet it’s Dictionary.com’s 2025 word of the year, by the way). Or will there be a new sea change, maybe as a result of AI, that affects our habits in ways we can’t even imagine?
From the way we consume video content to the language we use, technology changes our behavior in big and small ways. And now, as we’re all connected in real time, these changes spread across the globe at lightning speed. As marketers, it’s always a balance: we want our content to stay true to brand tone and guidelines, keep the audience in mind, and also feel native to the platform on which it lives. And the more tuned in we are, the easier it is to sense when to embrace a trend and when to flush it down the proverbial skibidi toilet.