I have been a member of the Marketing Society For nearly 40 years and I am now an Honorary Fellow. This week I was invited by the Society as their guest to attend their Annual Lecture which was held in the prestigious premises of Grade 1 listed the Royal College of Physicians. The speaker was Dr Alex Mahon who is the first female CEO of Channel 4 in its 42 years’ history.  Channel 4 is probably a unique television channel in that is it is owned by the state but is run commercially with most of its funding coming from advertising and none from subscription. One might expect that something owned by the state would be influenced by its political masters but there is no evidence of this at all and Channel 4 is widely respected for the independence of its journalism, something that you cannot always say about the BBC.

Alex, who has a PhD in Physics, explained that she had commissioned some wide research into young people asking questions about how they spend their time, in particular screen time. It was found that while older adults watch some five hours of screen time per day but 2/3 of that is on television, those in Generation Z. i.e. people who were born between 1997 in 2012 also spend some five hours a day looking at screens but 2/3 of their time is on social media and YouTube. They find the actions of industry and regulation very concerning. They tend to be gloomier than their parents, less happy and more lonely.

 The research identified six distinct groups:

Their patterns of trust are very different from older generations. Gen Z doesn't follow the traditional hierarchy of trust in information sources. Instead they trust friends, influencers, brands and advertisers roughly equally to professional sources. This therefore makes them vulnerable to unregulated polarising content despite being media literate.

50% of Gen Z believe that democracy has not worked out. Instead they want a strong leader without election. It seems to me that part of the problem here is that they have been so badly taught in our schools where history is barely touched on and when it is they concentrate on 1-2 themes like the Nazis rather than demonstrate how dictators always fail and always cause problems.

The risk here is the loss of social cohesion. Content is polarising. They watch violent lessons online. They watch things on their own without getting helpful comment from family and friends. They become radicalised and their opinions move further than the norm. Alex said that we must think through Gen Z. We must be truthful and we must show that you can have free speech and truth. The outlook is grim if we cannot coalesce Gen Z. But we must all help in this respect. For Gen Z the concept of trust is peer based as they trust their friends rather than hierarchical as they don't trust institutions.

Alex said “My challenge is, at the end of this is for all of us to think about what we can do, what we can do in our businesses, what we can do to make things easier for them, what we can do to keep society together and they feel that's a positive force in a democratic society. Because if we're not doing it as people who have the media, who have the power to advertise to people when they come to our businesses, just who is going to do it?”