In 2016, Ad Age published a story about a seemingly mundane retail trend: college students were no longer bringing televisions to their dorm rooms. The article noted that U.S. sales of TV sets during the back-to-school period had fallen 9% to $4.1 billion over three years, and that Target was responding by selling bedside tablet stands, laptop trays, and twin sheets with built-in media pockets — products designed for a generation that watched everything on devices they already owned.
Buried in the retail data was a quote from Matt Britton, then founder of the Millennial-focused agency MRY, that deserves to be read as something more than a comment about consumer electronics: "If you walk into a dorm room today, it will tell you everything you need to know about the future of TV and media consumption."
He was right. And a decade later, the dorm room has told us everything — not just about television, but about the entire architecture of how attention gets captured, how media gets monetized, how retail operates, and what consumers of any age expect from the brands that want their money. The students who arrived at college in 2016 without TVs and streamed shows on laptops while doing homework grew up to become the largest, highest-spending consumer generation in the market. The behaviors those dorm rooms encoded have become the default behaviors of American media consumption across every demographic.
When Britton made his observation in 2016, the college students he was describing were what the industry would soon call "cord-nevers" — a new consumer category distinct from "cord-cutters." Cord-cutters had experienced traditional cable and made a deliberate decision to leave it. These students had never signed up in the first place. Traditional pay television was simply not part of their media universe. They had grown up with Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, and streaming as the default state of video content, and they saw no reason to pay for a cable bundle that forced a schedule on viewing they had always controlled.
"They'll never watch a show at 9 p.m. on Thursday night — it just doesn't fit into their lifestyle," Britton said in the Ad Age article.
That observation, which might have seemed like an exaggeration about a narrow demographic in 2016, has proven to be a precise description of the direction American media consumption was heading. As of 2025, only 21% of Gen Z report having a cable or satellite subscription — the lowest rate of any generation — while 98% of Gen Z watch streaming services. The number of cord-cutting households has more than doubled since 2018, rising from 37.3 million to a projected 77.2 million by 2025, while traditional cable households have dropped from 90.3 million to 69 million over the same period. Comcast alone shed 1.15 million TV subscribers in the full year of 2025, losing roughly 3,500 customers every single day.
The media executives who read the Ad Age story in 2016 and concluded that Millennial viewing habits were a niche phenomenon limited to broke college students were making one of the most costly strategic misreads in the history of the television industry. What Britton was describing was not the behavior of a transitional demographic that would normalize into cable subscribers once they had stable incomes and families. It was the permanent architecture of how an entire generation — and the generations that followed — would consume video content for the rest of their lives.
The most important nuance in the Ad Age story — and the one most consistently missed by the executives and investors trying to make sense of the cord-cutting trend — came from Jeffrey Cole, director of USC's Annenberg Center for the Digital Future: "College students' lack of TV sets is not a lack of interest in television. They are more interested in television than any generation we have seen, they are just not watching on sets."
This distinction matters enormously because it separates two trends that are frequently conflated. The collapse of traditional cable television and the decline of physical TV set sales do not represent a decline in interest in video content. They represent a migration of that interest from one delivery system to another. The students who were not buying TVs in 2016 were spending, according to Forrester data cited in the Ad Age article, two hours a day streaming video. Many used parents' passwords for premium services. They were watching more television than any previous college-age generation, just entirely on their own terms and through entirely different channels.
This distinction carries direct implications for advertising strategy. A brand that concluded from cord-cutting data that young consumers were watching less television and therefore redirected budget away from video advertising was making exactly the wrong move. The correct move — which the brands and agencies that understood Britton's framework made — was to follow the audience from cable to streaming, from the primetime schedule to on-demand, from the living room television to the laptop and the phone. The audience was not leaving. The infrastructure was changing. Those are entirely different problems requiring entirely different responses.
Today, Gen Z spends approximately 1.3 hours daily on streaming services, and 59% of their TV screen time goes to streaming rather than cable or broadcast. Nielsen's December 2025 Gauge report noted that streaming's share of total TV viewing had reached "the largest share of TV ever reported," emphasizing that the shift is not cyclical or temporary but represents a fundamental restructuring of how television works as a medium. The dorm room of 2016, with its absent TV and open laptop, was the leading indicator of a media landscape that every brand and advertiser now operates inside whether they are ready for it or not.
Britton's second major observation in the Ad Age article addresses the retail side of the cord-cutting story, and it is if anything more consequential for brand strategy than the media observation.
"The high-frequency purchases are gone," he said. "Now it's just a hardware purchase, and who wants to lug it home from the store?"
He was describing the collapse of the recurring revenue model that had sustained electronics retailers for decades. For most of the history of consumer electronics retail, stores like Best Buy were anchored not just by the occasional TV purchase or computer upgrade but by a constant stream of smaller recurring transactions: CDs, DVDs, video games, accessories, cables, peripherals. These high-frequency purchases drove store traffic, generated repeat visits, created brand familiarity, and most importantly, funded the retail infrastructure that made the big-ticket hardware purchases possible.
Digital distribution eliminated those recurring purchases almost entirely. When music moved to streaming, CDs disappeared. When movies moved to streaming, DVD sales collapsed. When video games went digital, the physical disc business shrank toward obsolescence. GameStop, which the Ad Age article noted had cut its retail fleet by 125 locations, has since undergone multiple bankruptcy cycles as its core business model continued to deteriorate. The high-frequency electronics purchase that had defined the consumer electronics retail category simply stopped existing.
This left retailers like Best Buy facing a structural challenge that no amount of tactical innovation could fully solve: how do you drive traffic to physical locations when the products that used to bring customers in repeatedly no longer have a physical form? Best Buy's answer — investing heavily in Geek Squad services, embracing showrooming as a feature rather than a bug, and building expertise-led in-store experiences that Amazon's warehouse model cannot replicate — has been genuinely impressive. Amazon overtook Best Buy in consumer electronics market share in 2025, capturing roughly 31% of the category, but Best Buy has survived and even developed new profit centers including a growing retail media advertising business. The turnaround is real. But it operates in the shadow of a structural shift in how physical retail generates value that Britton identified clearly in 2016.
The showrooming phenomenon he described — store visits increasingly used to evaluate products before purchasing online at better prices — has become the default consumer behavior rather than a marginal one. This is not a problem that can be solved by matching Amazon's prices or improving in-store staff. It is a fundamental restructuring of what physical retail spaces are for, and the brands and retailers that have thrived are the ones that built their physical presence around the experiences and services that cannot be replicated by a delivery box, rather than trying to compete on the dimensions where e-commerce will always win.
The third observation Britton made in the Ad Age article cuts to the heart of why the consumer electronics category has been so structurally difficult for traditional brands to navigate: "The new generation is typically more price-dependent than brand loyal."
This is a statement with implications that extend far beyond electronics retail. The Millennial and Gen Z consumers who drove the cord-cutting trend and the collapse of high-frequency electronics purchases are not simply thriftier than their predecessors. They are more analytically sophisticated about price-to-value ratios and have more tools for evaluating those ratios than any previous generation of consumers. They grew up with price comparison as a natural part of the purchasing process, with review ecosystems that aggregated peer experience at scale, and with the ability to access competing offers instantly from the same device they were using to consider a purchase.
Brand loyalty in this environment means something different than it meant for Baby Boomers. It is not the reflexive preference for a familiar name formed through decades of television advertising. It is a rational judgment that a specific brand consistently delivers value — in quality, in service, in experience, in values alignment — that justifies a premium over alternatives. The brands that have built genuine Millennial and Gen Z loyalty, like Apple in consumer electronics and Nike in apparel, have done so by delivering on precisely these dimensions, consistently, across every touchpoint in the consumer relationship.
For most consumer electronics brands and retailers in 2016, this dynamic was a crisis. The consumers they most needed to reach were the least susceptible to the brand-building tools that had worked for previous generations. Today, it is simply the operating reality of the consumer market, fully extended across all demographics as Millennials have aged into their prime earning and spending years and Gen Z has entered the consumer economy behind them.
What makes Britton's 2016 observation about the dorm room so durable is the underlying methodology it represents. The dorm room is a laboratory — a concentrated, distilled environment that removes the moderating influences of established habits, financial obligations, and social inertia. When you strip away the constraints that bind adults to existing media, retail, and consumption behaviors, you see with unusual clarity what consumers would choose if they had genuine freedom to choose.
This is why studying young consumers at life transition moments — arriving at college, entering the workforce, establishing first households — has always been disproportionately valuable for understanding where consumer culture is heading. The behaviors that emerge in those moments of genuine choice are the behaviors that will define the mainstream consumer market in five to ten years, as this generation's preferences and habits influence the broader culture around them.
At Suzy, the consumer intelligence platform Britton now leads, this principle is operationalized in real time across Fortune 500 clients. The brands winning in today's market are the ones who are not just tracking what current mainstream consumers say they want, but building intelligence about what the next wave of consumers — currently in their late teens and early twenties — are already choosing when they have freedom to choose. Generation AI, the cohort Britton examines in his most recent book, is now passing through exactly the kind of formative consumer moments that the class of 2016 was navigating when they left their televisions at home and arrived at college with laptops and streaming accounts.
The question for any brand leader is the same one that the Ad Age story posed in 2016: what does the dorm room tell you? What are the spaces where the next generation has genuine freedom to choose — and what are they choosing? The brands that answer that question accurately, and build toward it rather than away from it, are the ones that will command market relevance when this generation reaches the apex of its economic power. The ones that wait for the mainstream market to validate what the dorm rooms are already showing will spend the next decade scrambling to catch up, just as the cable industry spent the decade after 2016 watching subscribers walk out the door one by one.
The dorm room is a uniquely revealing consumer laboratory because it represents a moment of genuine freedom from established habits. Students arriving at college make media, technology, and retail choices unconstrained by existing subscriptions, household norms, or sunk costs. The behaviors they choose in that environment — in 2016, notably streaming over cable and devices over TVs — reflect what consumers would choose broadly if given equivalent freedom. Studying those choices accurately predicted the direction of mainstream media consumption for the next decade.
Traditional cable television has experienced a decade of accelerating decline consistent with Britton's 2016 observations. The number of cord-cutting households has more than doubled since 2018, traditional cable has lost tens of millions of subscribers, and streaming's share of total TV viewing has reached historic highs. The cable industry has lost an estimated $17 billion in revenue over the past decade. Meanwhile, streaming services have proliferated and consolidated, gaming platforms have become significant video distribution channels, and social media has emerged as a direct competitor for video viewing time — all trajectories visible in the behaviors of the college students who arrived without televisions in 2016.
The loss of recurring physical media transactions — CDs, DVDs, video games, accessories — permanently changed the economics of electronics retail. The retailers that have navigated this most successfully are those that replaced transaction-based traffic with experience-based and service-based reasons to visit: expert consultation, hands-on product evaluation, installation and technical support, and services that require ongoing relationships rather than one-time purchases. Best Buy's investment in Geek Squad and its shift toward being a service and expertise hub rather than a product warehouse is the clearest example of this strategy executed at scale, though even that adaptation operates in the context of Amazon having captured roughly 31% of consumer electronics market share.
For advertisers, the most important implication of the cord-cutting data is that cable television is no longer a viable primary channel for reaching Millennial and Gen Z consumers. Only 21% of Gen Z have a cable or satellite subscription. Advertising budgets still weighted toward linear television are systematically missing the largest and most economically consequential consumer cohorts. Streaming and connected television, creator-platform partnerships, social video, and gaming represent where young consumer attention actually lives — and the advertising investment allocation of brands that want to reach those audiences needs to reflect the reality of where the audience went rather than the history of where it used to be.
A dorm room is a small space. A twin bed, a desk, a too-small closet. But the absence of a television in that room in 2016 was one of the most consequential consumer signals of the decade. It told you that a generation had made a permanent choice about how they would relate to video content, to retail, to brands, and to the entire infrastructure of traditional media. It told you that the behaviors those students were encoding in those first years of independent consumer life would follow them through their twenties and thirties and into the years when they would become the dominant force in the consumer economy.
Britton saw it. The brands and media companies and retailers that saw it with him, and built toward the world those dorm rooms were predicting, are the ones that look prescient today. The ones that didn't are still paying for that failure of imagination.
The next equivalent signal is already visible, in the behaviors of the generation now arriving at those same dorm rooms — Generation AI, the cohort that has grown up with artificial intelligence as a native feature of their digital environment. For more on what those behaviors are predicting, and what they mean for the brands and business leaders trying to stay ahead of the next decade of disruption, Generation AI is the essential guide. And for ongoing conversations with the brand leaders, CMOs, and media executives navigating these questions in real time, The Speed of Culture podcast is where those discussions happen.
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