Meet the Gen Z brand whisperers: ‘I come in and I’m like: don’t make some weird old-ass campaign!’
J ust after April Fools’ Day in 2017, Pepsi debuted a short film that seemed to many like a bad joke. In the two-and-a-half-minute Live for Now advert, Kendall Jenner joined a protest against nothing in particular; the model marched with a laughing crowd who were waving signs bearing vague slogans like “Join the conversation”. At the climax, Jenner approached a stern police officer with a can of Pepsi, and a photographer captured the moment when she, apparently, achieved world peace.
The advert was pulled a day after its release. Viewers accused Pepsi of trivialising Black Lives Matter and minimising police brutality; Martin Luther King’s youngest child, Bernice King, tweeted, “If only Daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi.” The company issued an immediate apology: “Clearly we missed the mark … We did not intend to make light of any serious issue.”
Multiple people would have signed off on the scripting, production, filming and release of this advert – and it seems that no one, at any point, thought it was a bad idea. Luckily, five years on, there’s now an easy way for companies to avoid making this kind of internet-breaking faux pas: grab yourself a Z-level executive.
If the C-level are an organisation’s highest-ranking members – the chief executive officer (CEO), chief operating officer (COO) and chief financial officer (CFO), for example – the Z-level are their generation Z counterparts: young but not necessarily junior employees who advise companies on how to sell to their generation.
Gen Z, those born from the mid-90s to the early 2010s, are touted as a demographic cohort unlike any other: experts have found them to be the most diverse, well educated and confrontational yet. Businesses are nervous about
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