Gen Z isn’t a demographic. It is a behaviour pattern that is rewriting the rules of commerce and it’s influencing how everyone shops, not just the under-25s.
When channel planning it’s key to research which channels and platforms your audience actually use. There’s a misconception that TikTok is only for Gen-Z. According to YouGov, over ¼ of 35-44 year olds consider themselves as medium-to-heavy TikTok users. Like Reddit, there are subsets of really engaged audiences on these platforms that spend hours consuming content, engaging with others and ultimately trusting the recommendations algorithm. Serving a shoppable link in a creator video which showcases the product use cases probably does a better job of ‘selling’ the product rather than a flat retailer page. For less considered FMCG-style purchases, native one-click checkouts present a high-intent audience with a frictionless translation, in perfect harmony. As we become more comfortable with native shopping I suspect we will see other ecosystems (see Meta), look to monetise audience intent and release commerce offerings.
43% of Gen Z consumers now start their product search on TikTok rather than Google. 64% use TikTok as a search engine. 68% say they are likely to purchase directly within the app. And live shopping on TikTok converts at between 8 and 12%, compared to 2 to 4% for traditional ecommerce. These are not niche numbers. TikTok Shop generated over $64 billion in gross merchandise value in 2025 alone. The purchase journey has been fundamentally restructured. Awareness, consideration and conversion now happen in a single scroll, often in under five minutes. And the brands that understand this are building media strategies around it. The ones that don’t are paying for awareness that never converts.
Discovery is the new search
The old model was straightforward. Someone had a need, they searched for it, they compared options, they bought. That linear journey is largely gone for the categories where Gen Z spends most, beauty, fashion, food, tech, fitness.
Today the journey starts with content, not intent. Someone sees a product in a video they were not looking for, feels something about it immediately, and either buys it in the moment or searches for it directly afterwards. 67% of TikTok users have bought a product after seeing it in a video when they were not planning to shop. 74% of active TikTok users now exhibit content-driven spontaneous purchase behaviour, with the average time between seeing a product and buying it sitting at just 4.2 minutes. Social media influences the shopping journey for 79% of Gen Z. It is no longer a channel for brand awareness. It is the shop floor.
What this means for paid media
The implication is not that you need to be on TikTok. It is that your paid media strategy needs to reflect how your buyers actually move from discovery to purchase, and build the path that matches their behaviour rather than the funnel you drew in a strategy deck two years ago.
For most brands targeting under-35s, that means a few things in practice. Creative needs to earn attention in the first two seconds or it does not exist. The creative conventions of traditional social advertising, polished production, brand-led messaging, call to action at the end, perform poorly in environments where the competition is organic creator content. The content that converts looks native because it is native. Branded creator collaborations have a 27% higher ad recall rate than traditional social advertising. Partnering with creators on TikTok can boost view-through rates by up to 193%.
The funnel needs to be shorter. If someone discovers your product in a video and has to navigate to a website, find the product, go through a five-step checkout and wait four days for delivery, a significant proportion of that impulse purchase disappears. Building shoppable content, in-app purchasing and frictionless checkout into your paid media infrastructure is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between capitalising on the intent you are creating and letting it evaporate.
Spend needs to follow the audience. By 2026, eMarketer projects that 50% of US social shoppers will buy on TikTok, making it the dominant social commerce destination ahead of Instagram and Facebook combined. UK adoption is running a couple of years behind but tracking the same curve. The brands allocating media budgets based on where audiences were two years ago are chasing a distribution that no longer reflects where attention and purchase intent actually live.
The brands getting it right
The common thread among brands winning with Gen Z is not platform or budget. It is integration. Their paid media, their creator partnerships and their commerce infrastructure are built to work together. A creator post drives awareness. A boosted version of that post reaches the right audience. The product is shoppable in the content. The checkout takes thirty seconds. The loop is closed.
The ones struggling are running paid media on platforms where their audience is, but with creative built for a different era and a purchase path with too many steps between intent and transaction. Gen Z has raised the bar for everyone. Meeting it is not about chasing trends. It is about building media and commerce infrastructure that reflects how people actually buy.
Want to understand how your paid media strategy maps to the way your buyers actually shop? Talk to the team at 26PMX.