What I Learned from Spending $500K to Sell to Gen Z

What's up, Marketers! This is Aazar.

This newsletter is about leveling up your paid growth marketing skills by analyzing the best brands' paid strategy, tactics, positioning, and value props.

This newsletter is divided into:

• Sharing what I've learned

• Sometimes sharing some other performance marketers’ lessons with you (this issue)

• And I analyze & compare the best ads on the internet

Even though millennials are the most valuable audience Meta sells to (in my opinion), I wanted to explore how to sell Gen Z.

For context, here are the generations defined:

Gen X (slackers): The people born from 1965 to 1980 are the kids of the baby boomers and the parents of Gen Y and Gen Z.

Gen Y (millennials): Individuals born between 1981 and 1996, known for their adaptability to technology and digital environments.

Gen Z (zoomers): A unique generation, born between 1997 and 2012, characterized by their native use of digital technology and social media.

Okay, so now let me tell you why & how selling to Gen Z is important.

Gen Z grew up with technology, making them smart and careful shoppers who do a lot of research before buying. To market to them, it's important to be genuine and trustworthy because they expect honesty and reliability.

And they’ll become the biggest addressable demographic to sell in a few years. 

We, as marketers, need to adapt our messaging and formats to this new generation. 

Note: If you don’t sell to Gen Z, then you can ignore this post. I’m writing this to those my 6-month younger self or those who are selling to Gen Z. 

Here’s what I learned after making 2000+ ads & spending $500K in ad budget for this demographic:

1/ CPMs are dirt cheap & CTRs are abysmal

Most advertisers aren’t targeting this valuable audience whom you could be educating now to become loyal fans. 

None of my ads had a CTR above 1% which is understandable because Gen Zs don’t click on ads. 

Ditto for hook and hold rates:

If you don’t get great numbers, don’t get discouraged. This is a brutal reality.

Alternatively, if you sell to boomers, these numbers will look crazy high by comparison.

2/ It’s true; they like ads that don’t look like ads 

All my winners have ads that wouldn’t be truly branded as ads or ad-like. Most of them are static ads, not videos. 

For example, I used this template from Creative OS and re-created it. 

It worked like a charm.

The template above is mine, but you can use Creative OS, to access all my templates in their library. They add 10+ ad templates every day.

3/ Meta works differently with Gen Z

Here are some new things I found out:

• With Advantage+, you can’t target to a 13+ audience but if you have a minimum of age of 18, they’ll show ads to those below 18 and show the ad group 18-13

• With an original audience (before adv+ audience option), you can still do it

• You can’t retarget with website visits or any other measures

• You can’t create a lookalike audience and create 13+ targeting 

Not sure how I feel about these limitations.

4/ Hi-fi ads will tank regardless of the compelling hook + story

This story and hook are really powerful (I spent $25K in production for the ads like below):

Yet my numbers were really low. 

This product has an AOV of $3,000. I thought compelling hi-fi ads would make a difference. 

They did, in terms of retargeting but not in terms of prospecting.

5/ Three different types of UGCs that work for this audience

At least, they worked for me.

1. Skit-type ads leaning into ambitions and desire:

2. Fast-transition ads:

3. Organic-looking with minimal editing but addressed to parents:

This was crazy, I thought targeting parents would work better but somehow Meta found the audience with teens.

Here’s where your creative does the targeting completely bounced back on me.

Side note: You may have noticed that all of these ads are for BETA Camp. So, if you know a teen who is ambitious enough to start their entrepreneurship journey, I highly recommend that they apply. It helps high schoolers stand out in college applications and gives them a 10-year head start. We’re closing our application round for Summer 2024 on June 22.

In short, Gen Zs still have me scratching my head but I am learning about this market and hopefully these insights will help.

One of my favorite accounts that has done well with Gen Zs is Opal (and you can check out my teardown with their ads, too.) 

That’s all from this week :) 

Please reply to this email if you sell to Gen Z and have any insights from your end. I would be happy to share them with the community here.

Happy Growing with Paid Social,

Aazar Shad

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