Holiday campaigns start earlier every year. Back-to-school displays now share shelf space with holiday promotions, streaming platforms release gift guides before Halloween, and the seasonal calendar keeps stretching in both directions. What hasn’t kept pace is how brands define their audience within that longer window.
Gen Z, generally understood as people born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, is still often marketed to as a single audience. That framing made sense a few years ago, when most of the generation was still in high school or college. It doesn’t hold up anymore.
Gen Z today spans everyone from high schoolers who depend on their parents’ wallets to twenty-somethings navigating their first job and the financial decisions that come with it. Grouping a 16-year-old with someone who just started their first full-time role is more than a minor oversight; it’s a gap in how the audience is understood. Heading into the busiest sales season of the year, that gap is costing brands reach and relevance.
Where Gen Z Actually Discovers Products
Part of the problem starts before a single ad even runs. Platform habits within Gen Z split sharply by gender, not just age. For example, teen boys are more likely than girls to say they’re on YouTube “almost constantly” (20% vs. 13%), while girls are more likely to report near-constant use of TikTok and Instagram, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey. And for this generation, those platforms are where discovery happens, largely through the creators they follow. According to research from YouGov, 40% of Gen Z adults say they discover new products through influencers, compared with 26% of non-Gen Z adults. A media plan built around one dominant platform for Gen Z as a whole is missing a large share of that audience.
This split has significant implications for channel strategy heading into the holidays. Creative built for short-form, trend-driven TikTok content doesn’t necessarily translate to YouTube’s longer-form, search-driven environment, and vice versa. Brands treating platform selection as a single decision for the entire Gen Z audience are working from an incomplete picture of where that audience actually spends its attention, and they’re paying for reach that never converts.
Why Life Stage, Not Age, Predicts Behavior
Age marks when someone was born. Life stage explains why they spend the way they do, and it maps to real milestones: starting high school, enrolling in college, moving into a dorm, graduating, landing that first job. Two 22-year-olds can have very different financial lives depending on whether one is still in school and the other is six months into a full-time job. Age doesn’t capture that, but life stage does.
That distinction matters most when timing and financial readiness intersect, and the holidays are exactly that kind of moment. A high school junior researching colleges in November has a different relationship to spending and gifting than someone managing a paycheck and rent for the first time. Both fall under the Gen Z label. Neither should receive the same campaign, the same offer structure, or the same call to action.
Viewed through a life-stage lens, the cohort breaks into at least three distinct holiday audiences. High schoolers discover products on their own but rarely pay for them, so their holiday role is influence: they build the wish list, and a parent completes the purchase. College students are managing their own money and building credit for the first time, and they weigh every holiday purchase against a tight budget that makes value, timing, and payment flexibility decisive. Recent graduates and early-career adults are spending a steady paycheck for the first time. For many, this is the first holiday season they’re buying gifts with their own money, which makes it the first real chance for brands to earn their loyalty as independent customers.
Parents and families run through every stage, and for high schoolers, they’re often the ones making the purchase. None of this variation shows up when targeting stops at a single age range, and none of it gets acted on when a media plan treats all of these groups as one line item.
The Enrollment Cliff Is Reshaping the Holiday Funnel
Compounding the life-stage problem is a structural shift happening underneath it. The traditional college-age population is in a well-documented decline, and fewer young people are following a straight line from high school to a four-year degree. This “enrollment cliff” means the pipeline of young consumers moving from high school to college to their first job is no longer as predictable as it once was.
The holidays are where that shift shows up most clearly. Brands have long treated the season as a set of familiar milestones for young consumers: high school seniors finishing college applications, freshmen home for their first winter break, recent grads shopping with their first paychecks. That calendar assumes most 18-year-olds are heading to a four-year college, and increasingly, they aren’t. Some are entering the workforce directly, some are pursuing shorter credential programs, and some are delaying enrollment altogether.
The “home for winter break” moment is arriving for a smaller, less predictable share of 18-year-olds each year, while the “first paycheck” holiday is arriving earlier and across a wider range of ages than it used to. An 18-year-old in a trade apprenticeship and an 18-year-old in a dorm may be shopping for the same gifts in December, but they’re doing it with very different budgets and financial pressures. Holiday campaigns anchored to the old college timeline reach a narrower slice of Gen Z every year, and they miss the young earners who never fit that path.
What Brands Should Do Differently This Holiday Season
The fix starts with rebuilding holiday plans around the moments that actually shape how young consumers spend.
Build the holiday calendar around transitions, not just dates. Early college decisions, the first winter break home, December graduations, January job starts, and first apartments all fall within the holiday window. Each one changes what young consumers need and what they can afford.
- Match the offer to the stage, not the age. High schoolers need shareable wish lists, since a parent usually makes the purchase. College students need value and payment flexibility. First-time earners need a sense of arrival: a first premium purchase or a gift they’re proud to give.
- Look beyond the college funnel. Apprentices, trade students, and young people who went straight to work have income and independence, but few brands speak to them directly. Verified life-stage signals, not age or campus affiliation, are how brands find them.
- Plan teen and household campaigns together. Creator content sparks the teen’s interest, and retargeting and email give parents a reason to buy. Running them separately breaks the path to purchase.
Where This Is Headed
The push to launch holiday campaigns earlier shows no sign of slowing, and that only raises the cost of imprecise targeting. The range within the cohort, from high schoolers building wish lists to young adults spending their first paychecks, grows more pronounced each year.
As the enrollment cliff continues to reshape how young people move from school to work, brands still planning holiday strategy around a fixed generational timeline are optimizing for a version of Gen Z that stopped existing years ago.
Munif Jaafar serves as Senior Director of Strategy & Revenue for Backpack Media, Sallie Mae’s media network. He leads strategy, commercialization, and audience intelligence initiatives focused on helping brands reach Gen Z through predictive life-stage intelligence powered by the nation’s #1 private student loan lender. Munif works with agencies, brands, and technology partners to unlock new approaches to audience targeting, customer acquisition, and commerce media growth. Prior to Sallie Mae, Munif spent six years on the founding leadership team of Macy’s Media Network, where he held leadership roles spanning sales and analytics and also served as Interim General Manager. Across retail media, ad tech, and digital advertising, he brings more than 14 years of experience helping organizations transform first-party data into measurable business growth.
