Cross-Current: Gen Z’s Digital Behavior Is Shifting Toward Bicultural Norms

Trend

Gen Z is the most Hispanic youth cohort in U.S. history and the most bicultural.

Their cultural signals are already mainstreaming: multilingual meme formats, Spanglish micro-humor, creators who switch registers mid-video, and platform-native hybrid genres. Marketing and product teams optimized for millennial-era, single-language creative will fail to capture attention from this cohort. Executives should stop asking whether to “translate” creative and start asking how product affordances, UX copy, and content taxonomies perform when language and cultural codes shift mid-session.

The Problem for BusinessesCreative and UX debt is product debt. If your discovery algorithms, ad copy testing, or creative optimization ignore bilingual signals, your CPMs and paid conversion metrics will silently degrade as Gen Z attention moves to creators and platforms that code-switch naturally.

Strategic Questions

• Are your creative test cells and UX A/B tests including bilingual, bicultural cohorts as a primary segment rather than an afterthought?

Sources

1. 1. Coca-Cola Lens   2. Horowitz