Special Feature - SuperAwesome

2025 Youth marketing strategies: we can do better

Ben Zagorski is the chief Revenue officer and general manager of Ad Products at SuperAwesome, where he oversees global revenue strategy and the growth of the company’s award-winning ad solutions. Here, he looks at how important – and how scarce - reliable data on youth audiences is to marketers.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, brands face persistent challenges in connecting meaningfully and responsibly with youth audiences. Despite advancements in data privacy, a deeper understanding of youth behaviours and a wealth of opportunities brought on by platform diversity, effective youth marketing remains fraught with complexity. Three key challenges stand in the way of breakthrough progress: data scarcity, the inability to plan effectively across fragmented channels - especially within the creator ecosystem - and ensuring safe, scalable advertising in an open marketplace.

The importance of Gen Alpha and Gen Z, who represent half of the world’s population and trillions in spending power, makes their influence on global consumption impossible to ignore. To truly unlock the potential of youth marketing in 2025, we must tackle these challenges, embracing innovation and new approaches. We can do better, and now is the time to do it.

Data scarcity in a hyper-fragmented digital ecosystem

Youth audiences, especially those under 18, are notoriously difficult to understand. They move fluidly across multiple platforms, from YouTube to Roblox to emerging social spaces, making it difficult for brands to capture consistent, actionable data, while broad demographics fall short of an audience as nuanced as Gen Alpha and Gen Z. Without clear insights into what motivates younger audiences, brands risk missing the mark. The scarcity of reliable, privacy-compliant data on youth audiences makes planning and targeting harder than ever. Brands need more than simple metrics; they need a comprehensive understanding of how these young people interact with their digital worlds. This is especially true in the age of the creator economy, where large swathes of young audiences are spending their time in environments built by influencers and game developers.

However, current approaches to data gathering often come up short, especially when working within the constraints of global privacy laws like COPPA and GDPR-K. To move forward, the industry must focus on developing data solutions that respect privacy, while also providing brands with the insights they need to engage responsibly and effectively.

Planning across fragmented channels—especially gaming

The rise of hyper-fragmentation in digital behavior is arguably the defining characteristic of Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s media consumption. These audiences are no longer tied to a single content destination like TV. Instead, they are distributed across a patchwork of platforms: gaming ecosystems, social media, OTT channels and more. In particular, gaming has emerged as a primary social and entertainment hub for young people, with platforms like Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft enabling deep brand engagement opportunities. Yet, despite the proliferation of platforms, brands struggle to plan and execute campaigns that seamlessly span multiple touchpoints. How do you activate a campaign that reaches a child watching their favourite YouTube creator, playing an immersive game, or streaming content with their family — sometimes all at once — while ensuring consistency and effectiveness?

Planning suffers when it operates in siloes. What's needed is a cross-channel strategy that views youth audiences holistically. Understanding the content and platform preference of a kid across gaming and social platforms, viewing influencers and watching streaming, is one critical piece of knowledge. The other is about the ability to activate upon that knowledge to be most effective in your reach and frequency, and ultimately, in your outcomes.

Making open supply safe at scale

As brands increasingly look to scale their reach across multiple platforms, ensuring safety in the supply chain has never been more crucial. But this is far from simple. Trying to solve safety issues through exclusive relationships, or AI-reliant technology leaves big gaps. The push toward open supply -a system that allows brands to access inventory across a wide array of digital platforms - offers greater scale, flexibility and efficiency. But it also comes with inherent risks, especially when it comes to youth audiences. Ensuring that ads are contextually appropriate, comply with privacy regulations and are safe for kids requires a delicate balance of technology and human oversight.

New technologies like AI are often touted as a solution for verification on platforms like YouTube, but AI alone isn’t enough. While it can help flag inappropriate content, relying too heavily on automation opens the door to errors; mistargeted ads, unsuitable content placements, or worse, data leakage. What’s needed is a layered approach to safety, where AI works in conjunction with human moderation to ensure that content is continuously re-evaluated for safety and relevance. This human oversight is critical in making sure that platforms deliver on their promises of safety, especially in environments that are constantly evolving, such as YouTube or gaming platforms.

Brands must also demand greater transparency from their partners, whether they are video marketplaces, tech vendors, or platforms. Understanding how content is vetted, classified and moderated is essential to ensuring compliance with global privacy regulations and delivering safe, responsible advertising to young audiences.

Moving forward: a call for innovation and responsibility

The future of youth marketing depends on addressing these critical challenges. Data insights must be more comprehensive and privacy compliant. Cross-channel planning needs to embrace the fragmented behaviors of youth audiences, particularly in gaming and creator ecosystems. And safety at scale requires a combination of AI, human oversight and transparent partnerships to ensure that brands can reach young people responsibly. At SuperAwesome, we take this responsibility seriously, as we strongly believe it is essential in shaping the future of youth marketing. That’s why we’ve developed solutions that go beyond the industry standard to address these challenges.

‘Awesome Intelligence’ offers brands unparalleled insights into the fragmented digital behaviors of young audiences, effectively mapping the digital universe of their audiences. Our cross-platform solutions - from ‘AwesomeAds’ to ‘SuperAwesome Gaming’ - are designed to activate campaigns across multiple channels seamlessly, enabling brands to meet kids across video, social video, CTV, In-Game and ceator content alike.

As we look to 2025, it’s clear that we can do better. By facing these challenges head-on and embracing innovative solutions, brands have the opportunity to not only connect with Alpha/Z but to shape the digital experiences that will define their generation.