How to Reach Under-25s When TV, Paid Social and Retail Media No Longer Build Brands

Key takeaways

Under-25 viewership of broadcast TV has been declining for a decade. In 2024, weekly reach among 16-24s was 45%, against 94% for over-65s. Adults 16-24 now average 55 minutes of broadcast TV viewing a day. Less than a quarter of their in-home video viewing goes to broadcaster content¹. That part is old news.

The newer problem is that the channels meant to replace broadcast TV for this cohort are not delivering brand-building either. Paid social has declining organic reach and fragmenting measurement². Retail media stays lower-funnel despite efforts to extend it³. The middle of the funnel has thinned across all channels for under-25s. And that's where broad reach used to build significant mental availability for brands.

What each channel actually does for under-25s

Recent US data tracks the same pattern. Dentsu's April 2026 consumer panel shows TV shows and movies engagement down 7% year-on-year, while Gen Z (18-27 in this study) over-indexes 42% on video games against the average⁹.

This shows up the same way across most consumer brand categories. FMCG and CPG. Financial services. Automotive. Telco. Retail. Food service. Each plays out over long brand-relationship cycles, builds value through repeat consideration and uses measurement systems organised around current buyers.

We (LFG) work mostly with brand directors in the first two, but the pattern is the same in the others. Gen Z global spending power is projected to reach $12 trillion by 2030, with per-capita spend growing at roughly twice the rate of previous generations⁴. The next decade of category buyers is forming brand associations now.

Mental availability is the speed and ease with which a brand comes to mind when a buyer enters a category⁵. It is the foundation of long-term brand growth and accumulates or decays across years, not quarters.

Under-25 voluntary attention concentrates in a small number of environments. Roblox and Fortnite for play (and social), Twitch and YouTube gaming for watching, Discord for social. Gaming is the single largest slot in Gen Z leisure time at 25%, ahead of social media (18%) and streaming video (17%)⁶. Players spent over 10 billion hours in Roblox each month in 2025, more than Steam, PlayStation and Fortnite combined⁷. These are not four separate channels; the cohort moves between them through the day.

The metric: duration of engagement, not reach.

Campaigns, with start and end dates, are not sufficient for this work. The work required is a portfolio of integrations, owned worlds and organic participation in those environments, sustained across the brand's calendar.

Kantar's 20-year BrandZ data makes the long-term case in numbers. Their Strong Brands Portfolio - brands that score high on three measured pillars (meaningful, different, easy to call to mind) - grew share prices 83 percentage points more than the S&P 500 between 2006 and 2025⁸. "Easy to call to mind" is the same construct Ehrenberg-Bass calls mental availability. The brands that show up in those rankings in 2035 are taking the long-view and doing the work now.

Edition 4 in two weeks looks at what the data says about branded gaming that actually lasts. Before that, I'll be writing about what under-25s mean when they call themselves gamers, which is not what most brand briefs assume.

If this is a problem you're working on, reply to this edition or book 20 minutes with me.

Daniel O'Sullivan, LFG Studio

How do brands reach under-25s now they have left TV? Under-25s spend their attention in gaming and video feeds. Paid social and retail media reach them but drive performance, not brand building. Gaming, where they spend hours a week, is where mental availability for the next cohort is being built.

Does paid social build brands? It is strong for short-term performance and conversion, but it is not building the long-term mental availability that broadcast TV used to. That is the gap for under-25 brand building.

What is mental availability and why does it matter for young audiences? Mental availability is how readily a brand comes to mind in a buying moment. Building it with under-25s now happens where they spend sustained time and attention, increasingly in gaming rather than the performance channels that replaced TV.

Where should brands build awareness with Gen Z? Where Gen Z spends sustained, engaged time. On Roblox that is hours a week, which supports brand building in a way short-form performance channels do not.