Gen Z's declining social app and screen usage is showing up more and more in data. 

• Phone-free events jumped 567% globally between 2024 and 2025, according to Eventbrite, with US attendance up 913% YoY.
• Out-of-home (OOH) advertising has now posted 21 consecutive quarters of revenue growth. 

For Adam Singer, vice president of marketing at OOH advertising company AdQuick, those trends point to the same underlying story: after a period of societal over-reliance on screens, both consumers and the platforms serving them are recalibrating toward balance. 

The "touch grass" movement, in his view, isn't a youth culture trend but a measurable correction. For Singer, short-form video fatigue, dating-app burnout, and a renewed appetite for in-person connection are challenging how brands should think about reaching younger consumers. 

“There's also the wins in court against social media giants that found they do cause mental harm, validating what many have suspected and felt for years,” said our demographics analyst Paola Flores-Marquez.

Short-form video spreads beyond social media

Streaming giants like Netflix, Disney, and HBO have followed social platforms into short-form, vertical video, betting that endless scroll formats will boost engagement, even without direct ad monetization. However, Singer is skeptical of the vertical video strategy for premium content. 

"If I'm going to give attention to a full TV show or a full movie [platform], I want professionals making it," he said, describing the pull toward short-form as "inherently amateur" by comparison. 

He predicted the industry is approaching "peak short-form video," pointing to the success of large-format, shared-screen experiences like Christopher Nolan’s immersive film "The Odyssey" as recent evidence that audiences still crave communal, big-screen moments when they’re available.

Gen Z is pushing back on screens

Singer challenged the sentiment that Gen Z is disengaged or antisocial.

"There's a lot of doom and gloom narrative about how Gen Z doesn't go out or doesn't drink and doesn't do anything," he said. "But if you actually look at a lot of the numbers, they do go out and they do socialize."

Beyond the OOH growth streak, Singer cited record-breaking commercial air travel volumes this summer as proof that consumers as a whole are actively spending time and money in the physical world.

“It's becoming apparent that it's not that Gen Zers’ behaviors are drastically different from previous generations,” said Flores-Marquez. ”Dating apps offer another data point. Usage appears to be declining as more people opt for organic, in-person meetups instead.” 

• A 2025 Hims study found that 77% of Gen Z adults in relationships met their partners in person, not through dating apps, a trend Singer linked to app business models that reward re-engagement algorithms and subscriber retention over successful matchmaking. 

Budgets follow attention

Signs point to the broader "touch grass" shifts elsewhere, from phone-free events to Gen Z's own efforts to cut screen time while engaging in phone-free concerts and venues.

OOH’s advertising's sustained growth suggests marketers are already reallocating budgets toward channels that meet consumers in the real world. 

Singer was careful not to frame this as a wholesale rejection of technology or of Gen Z's work ethic, noting a wave of notable Gen Z-led creators and entrepreneurial projects, including films like “Backrooms” and “Obsession” and AI startups Pika, Olix, and Mercor, that counter the stereotype of a disengaged generation.

"I see a lot of young people doing work that makes me optimistic for the future," he said. If anything, he sees the current moment as evidence the correction is already underway, with consumers and platforms alike finding their way back to a more sustainable attention equilibrium.

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