Gen Z Spending & Leaf Peepers
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #175 ❤️
This week we’re getting an insight into the chaotic world of Gen Z through their spending habits, lamenting the anti-social behaviour of autumn obsessed influencers, and questioning the energy use of AI.
Plus, the Nobel prize in economics finally brings us the “why” of the gender pay gap – and hopefully eventual solutions – and we ask are Ring cameras funny or dangerous?
Let's get into it.
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#1 - Gen Z Decoded
This week, Piper Sandler published their semi-annual consumer report on the youngest generation of consumers, catchily named “ Taking Stock With Teens”. Maybe they should ask one of them to rewrite that…
Anyway, jibes aside, what do we learn about this most chaotic consumer generation?
The biggest takeaway for a lot of people seems to be their commitment to the iPhone. Despite a resurgence of everything “y2K” (low rise jeans and butterfly clips included) it doesn’t seem like any of them are actually going to buy Samsung’s blast from the past flip-phones anytime soon.
Now, this makes Gen Z’s commitment to Spotify over Apple Music even more interesting, and proves the strength of Spotify’s product and their great marketing (which we talked about last Spotify Wrapped season).
Not only are 70% of teens regularly using Spotify, but almost 50% of them pay for Spotify Premium. When you consider that they mostly don’t have full time jobs, and they all have Apple phones in their pocket, Spotify getting them to shell out for a monthly subscription is a truly impressive feat.
Another surprising choice is Gen Z’s preference of YouTube over Netflix. Well, surprising unless you actually know many Gen Z, in which case it’s easy to understand why shorter-form videos that you can get directly on your phone and which take a lot less commitment to watch than a twelve-episode series have the edge in matters of entertainment.
The interactive nature of YouTube, where you can comment and interact in real-time with creators, is also potentially more appealing to the TikTok generation than a film that you just watch, what, without talking to the director?
Ribbing of the youngest consumer generation aside, the information in the report is key for anyone who wants to market to, hire, or simply understand them, because as the great Whitney Houston once said, the children are our future.
#2 - Pumpkin Spice Antisocial Behaviour
Picture this – Pomfret, a sleepy little 900-person town in Vermont with just one street and a handful of shops, surrounded by gorgeous autumn foliage. Now picture it again, with literal bus-loads of tourists causing car to car traffic.
And not just any tourists, these tourists are called “leaf-peepers”, and they’re here because of a viral location that never should have gone viral in the first place.
A private property (marked with “Private Property - No Trespassing” signs that could have saved all this trouble if they’d been respected in the first place) named Sleepy Hollow Farm has become one of the most photographed places in the state.
It makes sense when you see the photos. Like something out of a painting, there’s a winding road lined by vibrant autumn maple trees with a beautiful stately farmhouse in the distance. In fact, one of the thousands of Instagram photos was captioned “living in a painting, not looking to leave”.
The town’s residents, however, really wish she would – no matter how much her autumnal coloured outfit matches the backdrop.
Residents blame social media for “ruining” this oh-so instagrammable town, writing on their GoFundMe page that an “unprecedented surge in Instagram and TikTok-fueled tourist influencers” has become “untenable” for the small town since the images of Sleepy Hollow Farm first went viral.
Not only are these influencers not respectful of the town, from setting up changing booths on the side of the road for outfit changes and climbing over gates with “No Trespassing” signs on, to accusations of verbal abuse and public defecation… there also simply isn’t room for them.
A local sheriff noted that the tiny road on the way into the town is just not designed to have multiple vehicles on it, and for the last few years the lines of traffic and the parked cars by the side of the road - not to mention one car with a Florida license place that came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the road to take an autumnal photo of a farm – are actually dangerous.
It's not that Vermont don’t want tourists, they absolutely do. The neighbouring town, Woodstock, is designed to cater to tourists – chocked full of cute shops and restaurants, and probably as many autumn leaves and picturesque backdrops.
But, that town isn’t the one that went viral, Pomfret is. And, as we all know, when it comes to going viral, the internet is a fickle mistress.
Pomfret residents will just have to wait til the next random location goes viral, and until then, hopefully they can get the road closed to get some peace from the hashtagging hordes…
#3 - The Intense Energy Use of AI
Remember when we all suddenly realised that emails had a carbon footprint? And then when we all suddenly realised that mining bitcoin had a huge carbon footprint. Well, this time we’ve all just realised that AI is creating a huge carbon footprint.
Crazy, isn’t it, how we just can’t seem to remember how that works…
A new study published by a PHD candidate from the VI Amsterdam school of Business and Economics warns that the AI industry could consume as much energy as a small country, i.e. the Netherlands, by 2027.
This is because AI-powered services – which pretty much everyone is scrambling to integrate into their products – use a LOT more power than conventional applications - making going online much more energy-intensive.
Some experts, including the author of the paper himself, say that this kind of research is speculative as tech firms don’t actually disclose enough data for accurate predictions to be made. The report is also working on the assumption that AI consumption continues at the break-neck speed at which it’s going.
To give you an idea of the kind of energy used by AI processors, while a rack containing standard servers will use about 4 kilowatts of power, the equivalent of a family home, an AI kit rack would use about 20 times that amount. You’re going from one house to a whole street – it’s a pretty big leap.
We’re passionate about climate friendly solutions to being online, which you may know if you read our article on how to cut down your emissions by targeting ‘dark data’ – that stored data you have which is serving no purpose aside from pollution, and the advent of AI might send our online emissions through the roof.
The author says that his paper should be used as proof that AI should be used sparingly going forwards. And maybe to ask ourselves, do we really need to use the energy equivalent of a small country to chat to an AI version of Kendall Jenner on Facebook?
#4 - The Nobel Prize In Economics Goes To…
Claudia Goldin, for her work on women’s employment and pay. Goldin is the third woman to be awarded the prize, and the first to win it alone.
Describing her as a “detective”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science’s said that her work examining 200 years of data on the US workforce has “advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes” by showing how and why gender differences in earnings and employment rates changed over time, and is the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and employment through the centuries.
Her research found that married women’s employment decreased after industrialisation began in the 1800s, but picked up again in the 1900s with the growth of the service economy. Although higher educational levels for women and the contraceptive pill then accelerated change, the gender pay gap still remained.
Professor Goldin came to the conclusion that the current earnings gap is now largely due o the impact of having children. A member of the committee who awarded her the prize noted that her discoveries have vast societal implications, and will provide a foundation for policymakers across the world.
We can only hope so, as while the advent of remote and flexible working has helped many women get back into the workplace even while raising young children, corporate companies calling us back into the office may collapse that house of cards.
As we reported in our newsletter a few weeks ago, women with children under five are currently experiencing the highest upward trajectory in terms of workforce participation – but remote and flexible work is essential to keeping them there, and Prof. Goldin may have just given policymakers the proof – let’s hope they use it.
#5 - Close Encounters Of The Ring Camera Kind
The Amazon-owned surveillance camera company Ring have decided to do something really weird this spooky season. They’ve launched a competition, which, depending on how much you like the X Files, is probably impossible to win.
Yes, that’s right, Ring are offering us a hefty one million dollars if we can provide them video AND audio proof, via ring camera footage, of extra-terrestrial life. So, if you get a video of an alien, but he doesn’t make any noise – close but no cigar.
Recently in the headlines for breaking up celebrity marriages and (deservedly) destroying the reputation of a conservative politician in the US, Ring cameras are a pretty controversial topic for those clued up on tech and privacy issues.
The product review on Wired goes as far as not recommending the product as they deem it to be a danger to “the public and society at large”, and advocacy groups petitioned to have the cameras banned in the US in 2021 but failed (obviously).
The main issue US consumers have (this doesn’t happen in the UK and Europe) with the cameras is the information they give to the police force without any consent needed from the individual who owns the camera.
Vice magazine, always one for hot takes, has lambasted the competition as an attempt to lighten the tone on a product that spreads misinformation and paranoia.
Looking at it from a UK perspective, it seems like a fun contest, especially considering they added a caveat that anyone who dresses up as an alien and sends in a joke video to the competition may still have a chance at winning a $500 prize. However, when you have the US context in the background, it does give a darker tone to what could be a light-hearted publicity stunt.
Brave & Heart over and out.
Bonus
Murderous Chatbots
We’ve probably all seen the headlines, the man who plotted to kill Queen Elizabeth in 2021 has been jailed.
Why are we interested? Well, he was egged on by a chatbot companion he’d created on the Replika app… We hope they’ve rejigged their chatbot responses since then.
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