They’re not distracted. They’re filtering you out.

An updated version of an article first published in WARC.

The industry has a story about Gen Z and attention. Eight-second goldfish. Broken focus. Thumbs moving faster than brains.

We asked them. The story is wrong, and the real one is worse news for most brands.

In July 2025 we ran a study of 258 UK university students. We designed it, fielded it and analysed it inside 24 hours, because student behaviour doesn’t move by quarter. It moves by trend cycle and platform update. Quarterly research tells you what was true.

The contradiction that isn’t one

Two numbers from that study sit side by side:

• 89.7% of students worry about what digital media is doing to their brains in the long term.

• 88.1% regularly doomscroll anyway.

That looks like a contradiction. It’s a negotiation. They know exactly what the feed is doing to them, and they’re fighting it:

• 64.2% actively want to cut their screen time.

• 58.4% say they feel “digitally hungover”.

• 46.9% have deleted apps more than once.

• 46.1% have searched for how to focus better.

This is a generation that didn’t encounter the attention economy as adults. They were born into it, through what Jonathan Haidt calls the great rewiring of childhood. They have built defences most of us never needed. They are bouncers on the door of their own attention, deciding what gets in.

If your brand can’t earn its place, it gets filtered out. Not ignored. Filtered.

Same audience, different words

We asked students to describe how different kinds of marketing made them feel.

Digital marketing got words like “spam”, “fake”, “invasive” and “manipulative”.

Physical sampling got “exciting”, “grateful”, “welcomed” and “generous”. (More on why in why sampling works.)

Same students. Same age. Same week. The only thing that changed was how the brand turned up.

That isn’t nostalgia for the physical. It is a verdict on respect. A sample in your hand is something given. An ad in your feed is something taken, usually your time.

Who is building the strongest defences

The female students in our sample were more active about protecting their attention than the male students. They were more likely to delete apps, look for ways to concentrate and report concerns about their digital wellbeing. The male students were more accepting of their current habits.

If your brand relies on interrupting people, a large part of your audience is getting better at shutting you out every year.

Why it reaches beyond students

Gen Z habits don’t stay with Gen Z. The oat milk in the fridge, the streaming service, the brand someone’s mum tried last month: there’s a decent chance a young person in the house started it.

And students are at the point where loyalties form. The brands they choose in their first year away from home are the ones they carry into their own households. Miss them now and you are not just missing a segment. You are handing a competitor the next decade of that customer.

Three shifts worth making

1. Research at their speed. If your insight on young people is a year old, it describes someone else. Build the ability to ask a question on Monday and act on the answer by Wednesday.

2. Measure value, not time stolen. Impressions and time spent reward the brands that interrupt hardest. Ask what the student got from the contact and what they did next.

3. Build relationships that don’t run through an algorithm. As algorithmic reach gets dearer and less trusted, direct, physical and peer-to-peer channels get rarer and more valuable.

Herbert Simon saw this coming in 1971: a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Gen Z is the first generation to live entirely inside that sentence.

They aren’t the casualties of the attention economy. They’re the resistance. Stop mining their attention and start earning it.

Source: Dig In Attention Study, July 2025. 258 UK university students; 67.9% female.

More from our student surveys: Dig In research.