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March 20, 2026
It was September 2015, and The New York Times was running a front-page business story about a generation that had broken advertising. The headline captured the industry's exasperation perfectly: brands were wooing Millennials with winks, emojis, and "whatever it takes." The "whatever it takes" part was telling. It suggested an industry that had run out of ideas, that was improvising frantically in front of an audience that had already decided it wasn't interested.
The story quoted Matt Britton, then CEO of MRY, the digital marketing agency he had built into one of the premier youth-focused shops in the industry, working with Visa, P&G, Microsoft, and Coca-Cola. His diagnosis was surgical: "Brands need to re-engineer how they reach millennials. Brands need to figure out how to add value to a consumer's life. And if they do that, consumers will seek brands out."
That sentence — brands need to add value, or consumers will not seek them out — sounds simple. But it contained a complete dismantling of the logic that had governed advertising for the better part of a century. For most of the twentieth century, advertising worked by interruption. You were watching television, and a commercial appeared. You were reading a magazine, and an ad took up half the page. You were listening to the radio, and a brand bought sixty seconds of your attention. The model assumed a captive audience, a consumer who would absorb commercial messages because they had no choice but to do so.
Millennials destroyed that assumption. And a decade later, the destruction Britton identified in 2015 has only become more complete — extending now to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, reshaping the entire economics of attention in ways that the advertising industry is still struggling to fully absorb.
The Times profile opened with a young man who embodied the Millennial media condition perfectly. He watched almost no traditional television, had little tolerance for advertising, and was frankly dismissive about the ads on his phone: "The ads that don't appeal to me are a waste of my time. I feel like the ads on my phone aren't that useful."
This was not an outlier attitude. It was the median Millennial position toward advertising, and the numbers behind it were alarming to an industry built on the assumption that audiences could be purchased in bulk. According to comScore research from that period, Millennials spent 41 percent of their media time on mobile devices — far more than older cohorts — and that mobile time was increasingly concentrated in apps, many of which were entirely ad-free. Younger Millennials, those between 18 and 24, spent an average of 91 hours a month in smartphone apps, about 33 hours more per month than people over 55.
The problem for advertisers was structural, not tactical. It was not that Millennials were seeing bad ads. It was that they had built their media lives in environments specifically designed to be ad-free, or had developed the behavioral reflexes to skip, scroll past, or block commercial messages the moment they appeared. Traditional banner ads looked terrible on mobile screens. Typing and clicking on phone images was awkward, making it hard to steer consumers from ad exposure to purchase. And the apps where Millennials spent the most time — messaging platforms, music services, social networks just beginning to open to advertisers — had not yet figured out how to monetize without alienating their core users.
The advertising industry's response to this challenge, as the Times story documented, was simultaneously creative and desperate. Emojis. Pop-up concerts. Brand-sponsored festivals. Elaborate stunts. Experiential activations. "Ad agencies seem willing to try anything," the story noted — a sentence that reads as much as an indictment as an observation.
Laura Desmond, then CEO of Starcom MediaVest Group, one of the world's largest media agencies, offered the quote that deserved to be on every advertising conference room wall for the next decade: "Everything you know about advertising — chuck it. It's a completely different world and game with millennials."
It was the kind of statement that sounds provocative when delivered at a conference but reads as straightforwardly accurate in retrospect. The entire logic of mass-market broadcast advertising — reach the most people, as many times as possible, with a compelling enough message to move them toward purchase — was not merely less effective with Millennials. It was actively counterproductive. The more aggressively brands pursued Millennial attention through traditional channels, the more clearly they signaled that they did not understand the generation they were pursuing.
Britton understood what the industry needed to hear: the model had to be rebuilt from the value proposition upward. Not "how do we reach Millennials?" but "what would make Millennials want to find us?" That distinction is not semantic. It represents a fundamentally different theory of how the brand-consumer relationship should work — one in which the brand earns its place in a consumer's life by genuinely improving it, rather than renting the consumer's attention through paid media.
The brands that figured this out early, that genuinely re-engineered their approach rather than simply adding a Snapchat account to an unchanged media strategy, built durable advantages. Vitaminwater's music event strategy — built around creating memories rather than selling product — is one example the Times highlighted. According to the Cassandra Report data cited in the original story, 73 percent of Millennials said it was important that a brand not just be trying to sell them something. That is not an attitude that can be addressed with better creative. It requires a fundamentally different operating philosophy.
If the 2015 Times story captured Millennials at a moment of transition — beginning to block ads at scale, spending increasing hours in ad-free app environments — the trajectory since has dramatically exceeded even the most pessimistic advertiser projections.
Ad blocking has gone from a concerning trend to a structural feature of the digital media landscape. As of 2025, the global ad blocking rate has reached 42 percent, with over 1.3 billion people using ad blocking software worldwide. Among Millennials and Gen Z — the 18-to-34 cohort that Britton was being asked to help brands reach in 2015 — 63 percent employ ad blocking software. Ad blocking cost the digital advertising industry an estimated $42 billion in lost revenue in 2025 alone, and global ad blocking rates are projected to surpass 50 percent by 2026.
The implications of these numbers are staggering if you allow yourself to think through them fully. More than half of all internet users will soon be actively preventing brands from reaching them through traditional digital advertising. The "spray and pray" model — buy enough impressions, reach enough people, and enough will convert — does not function when the people you are trying to reach have systematically opted out of being reached.
Mobile has added an additional dimension to the problem that Britton was already identifying in 2015. The apps where Millennials spend the most time — the messaging platforms, the music services, the social feeds — have monetization models that range from ad-free to ad-light. Mobile ad spend reached $514 billion globally in 2025, representing 58 percent of all global ad spend, yet mobile ad blocker adoption continues to climb. The economics of attention in the mobile environment are nothing like the economics of television or print, and brands that are still allocating media budgets using broadcast-era logic are buying reach that increasingly does not exist.
The brands that have thrived in the post-Millennial media environment have done so by following the logic Britton articulated in 2015, even when that logic seemed impractical to CMOs still wedded to traditional media models.
The core principle is value before message. Before a brand asks for a Millennial consumer's attention, it needs to have done something — created something, supported something, enabled something — that makes attention feel like a fair exchange rather than an unwanted imposition. This is what Vitaminwater's concert series was attempting. It is what Red Bull's media operation, which produces content Millennials actually seek out, has executed at massive scale. It is what the brands that have built genuine creator partnerships rather than just buying influencer placements have figured out about the creator economy, which is now a $37-billion advertising sector growing four times faster than the industry overall.
The brand co-creation insight captured in the 72andSunny quote from the original Times story — "Our strategy is pretty consistent across the board. It's 'Let them help build this brand with us'" — has become even more operative in the decade since. User-generated content, community building, and participatory brand experiences are not tactics layered on top of a traditional advertising strategy. For the brands winning with Millennials and Gen Z, they are the strategy. Roughly 43 percent of Millennials now discover new products on social media, and 34 percent say social media is where they discover new products more often than any other channel. The brands that appear in that discovery environment are the ones that have earned their presence through content and community, not the ones that bought their way in through traditional media placements.
Experiential marketing, which felt like an experimental tactic when brands were trying "whatever it takes" in 2015, has become a core discipline with its own significant budget allocations at major brands. The logic Britton identified — that adding genuine value to a consumer's life creates a relationship that advertising cannot buy — has been validated by a decade of brand-building evidence. Brands that sponsor meaningful experiences, that create programming worth attending, that build communities worth belonging to, consistently outperform brands that rely on impression-based media buying to drive awareness and consideration.
The emojis in the Times headline now read as charmingly dated — a symbol of an industry that was grasping for any cultural signal that might help it connect with a generation that had checked out of traditional advertising. But the underlying dynamic that made emojis feel like a strategy in 2015 has not resolved. It has intensified.
Gen Z, the generation that followed Millennials into the consumer economy, has carried Millennial ad avoidance behaviors further — and added new ones. Ninety-nine percent of Gen Z consumers will hit "skip" on an ad if given the option. Gen Z users are 2.1 times more likely than Millennials to report skipping or swiping past ads within two seconds. Where Millennials broke advertising by moving their attention to mobile apps and building the reflexes to ignore commercial messages, Gen Z has done so with even greater efficiency and even less patience for brand intrusion.
The generation coming of age now — Generation AI, the subject of Matt Britton's most recent book — is growing up in an environment where AI-powered personalization and content recommendation make irrelevant advertising feel even more jarring than it did to Millennials navigating the early smartphone era. When your entire digital environment is calibrated to your specific interests and preferences, an interruption that feels generic or misaligned registers as a category error, not just an annoyance.
This escalating sequence of disruption — Millennials broke broadcast advertising, Gen Z broke digital display, Generation AI will break whatever persists from the current model — is the thread that connects Britton's 2015 Times appearance to the work he does today at Suzy, where Fortune 500 brands use real-time consumer intelligence to stay ahead of exactly these shifts. The brands that are still trying to figure out what worked with Millennials are a generation behind. The brands investing in understanding what Generation AI wants, before that generation fully enters the consumer economy, are the ones building the advantages that will matter in ten years.
Amid all the tactical improvisation that the Times documented in 2015 — the emojis, the festivals, the stunts — Britton's core principle was the one that has proven durable across every subsequent wave of consumer disruption: add value, and consumers will seek you out.
This is not a media strategy. It is a brand philosophy. It asks companies to start from genuine consumer need rather than brand message, to think about what role they want to play in a consumer's life before thinking about how to deliver that message, and to earn attention rather than buy it. In an environment where ad blocking has reached nearly half of all internet users, where the most desirable consumer audiences have more tools than ever to curate their media environments and filter out commercial intrusion, earning attention is not just a nice principle. It is the only sustainable business model for brand marketing.
The brands that understood this in 2015 when Britton said it are the ones that built lasting Millennial loyalty. The brands that understand it now are the ones that will build lasting relationships with Gen Z and Generation AI. And the brands that are still asking "how do we reach them?" instead of "what would make them want to find us?" are the ones that will spend the next decade improvising with whatever the next equivalent of the emoji turns out to be.
The core reasons are relevance and intrusion. Millennials and Gen Z grew up in digital environments that gave them unprecedented control over their media experience. When advertising violated that experience — appearing at the wrong time, on the wrong platform, with the wrong message, or without any regard for what the consumer actually cared about — they developed the tools and reflexes to eliminate it. The irrelevance problem is compounded by scale: most advertising reaches consumers who are not in the market for what is being advertised, which makes the interruption feel purely wasteful. Brands that solve the relevance problem, that appear with genuinely useful or entertaining messages at moments when consumers are receptive, face much lower avoidance rates.
Britton was arguing that the brand-consumer relationship needed to be fundamentally rebalanced — from one in which brands interrupted consumers to demand attention, to one in which brands earned attention by genuinely improving consumers' lives. This means creating content worth consuming, enabling experiences worth attending, building communities worth belonging to, or solving problems worth solving. The brands that have executed this most successfully — Red Bull with its media and events operation, Nike with its running communities, Spotify with its personalized experience — do not feel like advertisers to their most engaged consumers. They feel like valued contributors to those consumers' lives.
The mobile advertising challenge that Britton identified in 2015 has intensified dramatically. Mobile now represents 58% of all global ad spend, yet mobile ad blocker adoption continues to rise and consumer attention in the mobile environment remains highly fractured and easily redirected. The app economy — which concentrates Millennial and Gen Z attention in environments that range from ad-free to ad-light — has continued to grow. The brands that have figured out mobile are the ones that have built native experiences within app environments, partnered with creators whose audiences follow them into mobile contexts, and created content that functions with or without sound and works in the vertical format that mobile audiences prefer.
Generation AI, the cohort growing up with artificial intelligence as a native technology, is likely to carry the ad-avoidance behaviors of Millennials and Gen Z further still. AI-powered personalization has raised consumer expectations for relevance so dramatically that generic, interruptive advertising will feel even more jarring to this generation than it did to Millennials encountering banner ads on early mobile browsers. Brands building intelligence about Generation AI's values, behaviors, and expectations now — before this generation fully enters the consumer economy — are making the same forward-looking investment that the brands which understood Millennial behavior in 2015 made. The ones that waited are still catching up.
A decade after The New York Times ran its story about brands scrambling to reach a generation that had effectively opted out of being reached, the underlying dynamic has not changed — it has simply moved downstream to the next generation and intensified with each iteration.
The question that Britton posed in 2015 remains the only one worth asking: how does a brand add genuine value to a consumer's life? Not how does it reach them. Not what emoji should it use. Not what stunt can it pull off to generate attention for a news cycle. How does it become something that a consumer, living their actual life, would genuinely want to encounter?
The brands that answer that question well do not have an advertising problem. The ones that continue to ask how to overcome consumer resistance to their commercial messages will find that resistance growing more sophisticated, more entrenched, and more expensive to fight with every passing year.
For more on how the consumer landscape is evolving — and how the generation being shaped by AI will redefine the rules all over again — Matt Britton's nationally bestselling book Generation AI is the essential guide. And for ongoing conversations with brand leaders, CMOs, and cultural architects navigating these shifts in real time, The Speed of Culture podcast is where the thinking continues.