When there are social media channels dedicated to mocking brands that are shoehorning terms like "bae" and "on fleek" or co-opting the latest trends into marketing efforts, you know you'd better be careful when reaching out to the college audience. And if your team is diving into Google to search slang terms to find out what they mean in the first place, a word of advice: don't.

With lower attention spans and higher media exposure, brands will need to cut through the clutter to draw Gen Z's to their ads. (Generation Z, also known as "post-Millennials," commonly refers to the cohort of individuals born after 1996.) Marketers might need to refresh their ads more frequently for this group than any other generation. To get their attention, marketers can also attach their ads to exclusive content preview clips for new movies or game highlights from major sporting events.

Just when advertisers felt they'd mastered the Millennial generation, along came a new challenge. Gen Z - people born in the late 1990s and now roughly ages 13 to 17 - is the new holy grail for marketers.

What if we hired 10,000 people to run through malls and city streets, screaming our brand names in teenagers' faces?

What's a side hustle? As a Millennial, I'm no stranger to peers who focus their energies on passions beyond their day jobs. Playing or writing music, making videos, baking cupcakes or blogging have become popular Millennial side hustles, which offer creative outlets aside from today's insecure "traditional career paths" in an underwhelming job market.

The first iPhone was announced and hit shelves way back in 2007-before the term "Gen Z" had taken hold-launching the world into an era of always-on digital connectivity. Fast-forward nearly a decade and the iPhone is still the gold standard of smartphones, despite vastly increased competition in the industry.

What do Frank Ocean, Louis CK and Beyonce have in common? This year, they all surprised their young fans with major new releases. Last month, Frank Ocean ended a four-year wait by casually dropping two albums, one visual (Endless) and the other musical (Blonde). In January, Louis CK stunned fans by debuting a new TV series online, "Horace and Pete." And Beyonce is definitely the queen of surprise, dropping two unannounced visual albums (Beyonce in December 2013, and Lemonade this April), before doing a hush-hush, extended performance at the MTV VMA's last month, which brought down the house.

When we think about how teens spend their time, a lot of us imagine them face down in their devices, vegging out on the couch, or, increasingly, a little bit of both. That image isn't totally askew; after all, recent research shows that teens 13-18 spend almost 9 hours a day consuming media.