As marketers invest more heavily in short-form and social video platforms, understanding how Gen Z allocates attention has become increasingly important. This literature review examines what current research reveals about Gen Z’s attention across social feeds, short-form video, creator content, streaming and emerging formats. The evidence suggests that Gen Z attention is not necessarily shorter, but faster, more selective and highly dependent on platform context, creative execution and brand familiarity.
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Generative AI makes it possible to tailor an ad to every individual exposed to it. But does extreme personalization work? And is there a point where it backfires? On May 20, the ARF Cognition Council held an event where industry leaders from VML, Screenvision Media, RMT, and Iris Flex discussed the implications of personalization in advertising. The discussion emphasized the complexities of personalization and highlighted the importance of balance between individual targeting and broader, shared motivations or experiences. The speakers – all members of the Cognition Council — highlighted several research studies and practical insights to convey how personalized advertising can be successful and where impact may be limited.
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On March 4th, The ARF Creative Council hosted its “Brand Meets Game: Navigating Creative Strategy in High-Profile Sports Sponsorship” panel, a conversation about how brands develop creative strategies and measurement frameworks for major sports partnerships. Moderated by Creative Council member Jillian Rice (Ipsos), the panel featured Matthew Gottlieb (NBCUniversal), Kristen Rumble (The Coca‑Cola Company), and Trey Ballard (Bank of America). Panelists shared perspectives on how companies activate around major sporting events, maintaining authentic connections with fans while delivering measurable business outcomes for their brands. Kristen and Trey showed ads for their brands that had appeared in sports broadcasts to illustrate how their brand messages aligned with the spirits of the events.
The discussion explored how successful sports marketing requires a balance of cultural relevance, strong creative strategy, and disciplined measurement. Speakers highlighted the importance of planning well in advance of major sporting moments, leveraging audience insights to shape storytelling, and ensuring that brand activations feel natural within the broader sports experience.
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As generative AI tools become embedded in advertising and marketing research workflows, questions about bias increasingly extend beyond outputs to the interaction itself. This experiment, the first phase of the sixth study in the Psychology of Gen AI series, examines whether gendered patterns can enter AI through subtle differences in how prompts are phrased. By systematically varying linguistic styles using psychologically grounded traits, the research shows that implicit, style-based, gender cues shape AI prompt construction more strongly than explicit, gender labels, with important implications for how bias may propagate upstream in AI-assisted marketing and research applications.
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