by. Nicole Gomez
Gen Z a growing audience, has the opportunity to sway the 2024 presidential election, but advertisers have to be strategic to reach them in an effective way.
By November 40.8 million members of Gen Z will be eligible to vote, but as of Spring ’24 less than half of Adults 18-29 said they will “definitely vote” this year. This is down from 57% of young adults who said they would be voting in the 2020 election. However, in the first 72 hours after President Biden stepped aside over 100,000 people registered to vote and of the 100,000 18 year old’s alone made up 18%.
Studies show that this young audience turns to social media, especially TikTok, for updates on current events. A 2023 Axios survey found that one-third of adults under 30 regularly scroll TikTok for news, up 255% since 2020. According to another poll by Her Campus, 76% of Gen Z adults prefer to use TikTok over other platforms and more than half of Gen Z adults prefer to use TikTok over Google as a search engine.
Knowing that Gen Z is very heavy on social media & TikTok specifically, politicians had to ensure to make an online presence there. Despite widespread criticism about TikTok from both sides, Democratic and Republican candidates know that the app is critical to reaching voters, especially Gen Z ahead of November. “2024 will be the TikTok election,” president and CEO of strategic communications firm PRCG, told Newsweek. “It may be banned in 2025, but for the 2024 election TikTok [isn’t] going [any] where.”
President Biden and former President Trump have both called for a ban on TikTok, yet both men now have accounts on the platform and Vice President Harris has joined them. In June, former President Trump, who once tried to ban TikTok in the U.S. with an executive order, created a personal account. In less than 24 hours, he amassed over 2 million followers on the app and now has over 10 million followers. President Biden gave in and joined the platform earlier this year posting his first TikTok during this year’s Super Bowl. Even after President Biden signed a law in April that would ban TikTok nationwide if it’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t sell it by January 2025, his camp said they planned to keep using it until Election Day. Vice President Kamala Harris reinforced that decision, joining TikTok following her candidacy announcement and already has over 4 million followers. She’s been staying on top of some TikTok trends and raking in a lot of views doing so, with her first post garnering 4.8MM total likes.
But is TikTok a reliable news source and how does misinformation on the platform affect the presidential election? According to the BBC, in addition to funny posts young people on TikTok are also being exposed to misleading and divisive content. In the UK during spring 2024, fake political content was shared on TikTok by many users including students, influencers & celebrities, and even anonymous robot spam accounts garnering hundreds of thousands of views.
TikTok has promised to combat misinformation. In Spring ’24 they told the BBC how they were countering misinformation for the UK general election, including adding a fact-checking expert to existing resources and employing AI-labelling technology. On February 6, Meta also announced its own labels for AI-generated content shared to Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. TikTok also launched an in-app Election Center to mitigate the spread of online misinformation during the 2024 European Parliament elections. And in June 2024 TikTok told Vox, “During elections, we focus on protecting the integrity of our platform to maintain a creative, safe, and positive place for people to enjoy a diverse range of content.”
Despite so much being uncertain with TikTok, one thing is for sure— advertisers have to tailor their approach to reach Gen Z and that is no different for politicians. To effectively reach Gen Z brands should:
- Be Authentic
- Gen Z appreciates authenticity, unlike Millennials who prefer curated content, Gen Z can easily see through brands’ performative gestures. When something is authentic, it means it is genuine, honest, and true. And it’s critical that brands communicate with Gen Z in an authentic and consistent manner. This is also why user generated content resonates so highly among this group.
- Share in their values
- Gen Z is big on values and they expect brands to share that. Gen Z looks to brands to show support for mental health, the environment/climate change, racial/gender equality, ethical labor practices among others (eMarketer).
- Utilize visuals
- Gen Z favors visual content, preferring to search for topics on their favorite social platforms like TikTok that show thumbnails rather than on Google’s Search engine which displays mostly text based results.
Still politicians need to do more than the above to win over Gen Z’s votes for presidency. Debra Cleaver, founder/CEO of VoteAmerica, cautioned against underestimating the youth vote in 2024 (Yahoo! News). “Young people care deeply about the issues on the table this election, and they’re anything but apathetic about the stakes,” she told The Wrap. The importance of this young audience even has some calling this year’s presidential election the TikTok Ticket. For now we’ll hang tight until November arrives and we find out who wins at the polls!
Works Cited
Flynn, Kerry. “How Gen Z Gets Its News.” Axios, Winter 2AD
Fung Senior, Katherine . “How TikTok Could Decide the 2024 Election.” Newsweek, 3 June 2024
Paz, Christian. “Is TikTok Breaking Young Voters’ Brains?” Vox, 6 May 2024
Syed, Armani. “TikTok Fights Misinformation ahead of European Elections.” TIME, 14 Feb. 2024
