When the New York Times reported that Hollywood’s summer box office slumped to its lowest point since 1981, one culprit stood out: media fragmentation. Studios cannot reach mass audiences with ads the way they once did.
At Elevate, we analyzed exclusive audience intelligence through our EPIC platform, which builds rich consumer personas to uncover who fans are, how they stream, and how they spend. The data reveals that Gen Z combines three critical traits: cross-category breadth, music-driven engagement, and merchandise readiness. This makes them the audience that marketers and studios must understand if they want to predict and fuel the next breakout franchise.
No Single TV Path Reaches Gen Z at Scale
Gen Z, one of the most coveted audiences for big-budget films, is highly fragmented. Deloitte’s 2025 Digital Media Trends notes that younger generations engage more evenly across SVOD, social video, gaming, and audio, and that 23% of Gen Z cable subscribers plan to cancel within the next 12 months, underscoring why studios prioritize them.
Our data shows TV is 14.0% of Gen Z’s overall media attention. Inside TV, there is no dominant path to reach: no single network exceeds 1.2% (FOX 1.15% leads), no single genre exceeds 3% (Comedy 2.95% tops), and individual streaming services are single digits (Netflix 8.75%, Prime Video 7.70%, Paramount+ 6.30%). Practically, a single TV buy will not deliver scale with this cohort; you need coordinated packaging across platforms, genres, and networks.
Consumer Interests Are Broad With Distinct Hot Spots
Fragmentation shows up in interests, too. Our data indicates that the largest category, music, accounts for only 11.3% of the share for the Gen Z cohort. The top three interests together reach ~29.0% (music 11.3%, sports 9.3%, arts & entertainment 8.4%), and the top five total just ~44.0%. In other words, a majority of attention (~56%) sits outside the top five. To even clear a majority of the “interests” pie, you need to span about eight distinct interest lanes (top 8 = ~59.8%); covering the top 10 still leaves ~32% in the long tail (top 10 = ~67.9%).
This is why mass breakthrough is hard. A single film, or a single creative concept, rarely maps to eight or more interests at once. The practical approach is to treat reach as an interest bundle: select three to five adjacent clusters that align with the title and audience, then layer additional clusters for incremental, unduplicated reach.
This fragmentation doesn’t just shape what Gen Z cares about. It also determines how and where they consume content.
Media Consumption Is Multi-Platform, So What?
Gen Z, no single channel surpasses 20 percent, so “mass reach” no longer comes from any one pipe. Today’s Gen Z audiences divide attention across media platforms:
• Websites: 16.1%
• YouTube: 15.5%
• TV: 14.0%
• Music: 12.2%
• Podcasts: 10.4%
What This Means For Marketers / Distributors
A single TV or single-platform buy cannot recreate the old “mass audience.” Our own data shows us we need Websites + YouTube + TV + Music to even reach ~57.8%. Adding Podcasts takes us to ~68.2%. Planning should start with a four-to-five channel baseline that mirrors how Gen Z really spends time, then layer interest clusters on top for relevance. Creative must be modular and channel-native so each lane pulls its weight, and success should be judged on incremental, unduplicated reach, not frequency inside one channel. This is the practical definition of media fragmentation for studios and marketers: scale now comes from coordinated packaging across multiple channels that align with how audiences actually divide their attention.
From Channels to Voices: Influencer Marketing Is Atomized
Channels get you in the right places, but creators get you into the right conversations. Our data shows even marquee celebrities hold single-digit Gen Z share — for example, Taylor Swift 5.10% and LeBron James 4.56% — and the median share per influencer is under 0.01% across major lists.
By contrast, most individual creators sit well below 1%: the median share per name is about 0.009% in Singers/Songwriters, 0.0068% in Hip Hop and Rap, and 0.0057% in Basketball. Only a small fraction of names clear 1.0% in these lists (roughly ~2.0% of singers, ~0.6% of hip hop, ~1.3% of basketball entries).
There is no single cultural icon for Gen Z. Influence is distributed across hundreds of micro-communities. Gen Z connects with creators in sports, music, gaming, fashion, and lifestyle, with no single category holding more than a fraction of attention. This makes micro-influencers and niche voices more powerful than a single celebrity. Fragmentation is evident not only in channels but also in influence. That’s why the lessons for Hollywood apply equally to marketers.
What Marketers Can Learn From Hollywood’s Struggle
Mass audiences still exist, however, they are distributed. You cannot reach everyone in one place, and you cannot move them with one message. Fragmentation can become an advantage rather than a barrier. For marketers, the solution lies in orchestration. Orchestration means aligning channels, interest clusters, and voices so each plays a clear role in discovery, consideration, and conversion. It favors modular creativity that adapts to context while maintaining a coherent narrative. It rewards measuring unduplicated reach and compounding lift, rather than chasing a single big moment. It connects culture to commerce, turning attention into trailers watched, tickets sold, and merchandise moved. For Hollywood, that means opening weekends no longer hinge on one blockbuster ad push, but on orchestrated engagement that builds before release and compounds after. For marketers, the same principle applies: sustained orchestration is the only path to mass impact in a fragmented world.
This post expands on a recent MediaPost article by Elevate's Chief Innovation Officer, Jim Caruso, offering a deeper dive into the data and implications for marketers.
References
Data from this article comes from Elevate’s EPIC (Elevate Performance and Insights Cloud) platform, which leverages insights on the observable behavior of over 250 million consumers.
Zhang C, Barnes B. Behind the Numbers: How Hollywood Missed Its Mark This Summer. The New York Times. Published September 3, 2025. Accessed September 3, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/09/03/business/media/summer-box-office-movie-tickets-2025.html
Deloitte Center for Technology, Media & Telecommunications. 2025 Digital Media Trends: Social platforms are becoming a dominant force in media and entertainment. Deloitte Insights. Published March 25, 2025. Accessed September 3, 2025. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/digital-media-trends-consumption-habits-survey/2025.html
