Advertising and Culture: Why the Best Campaigns Borrow From Both

Advertising and culture have always been in conversation. The brands that win over time are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the sharpest targeting, they are the ones that understand the cultural moment well enough to say something that lands. That is harder than it sounds, and most advertisers underestimate how much craft it requires.

Culture shapes what people notice, what they remember, and what they are willing to share. Advertising that ignores this tends to perform mechanically at best and offend at worst. Advertising that reads culture well can do something performance data will never show you coming: it creates demand where none existed before.

Why Culture Is Not a Creative Luxury

There is a version of this conversation that gets dismissed quickly in performance-obsessed marketing teams. Culture sounds soft. It sounds like something the brand team talks about in workshops while the growth team is busy optimising click-through rates. I have sat in both rooms. The growth team is usually wrong about this.

Earlier in my career, I overvalued lower-funnel performance. Most people in digital marketing did. The data was clean, the attribution looked convincing, and it was easy to show a return. What I came to understand over time is that much of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. You are capturing intent that already exists. You are not building it. The person who walks into a clothes shop and tries something on is far more likely to buy than the one who never came through the door. Performance marketing is often just standing at the till. Culture-led advertising is what gets people through the door in the first place.

This is not an argument against performance marketing. It is an argument for understanding what each type of work actually does. And for recognising that growth, real growth, requires reaching new audiences rather than endlessly re-targeting the ones already in the funnel. Forrester’s work on intelligent growth models makes this point well: sustainable commercial growth depends on expanding your addressable market, not just converting the bottom of the existing one.

If you are thinking about where advertising sits within a broader commercial strategy, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the structural decisions that sit behind campaigns, including how to position advertising investment within a full growth architecture.

What Does It Mean for Advertising to Be Culturally Fluent?

Cultural fluency in advertising is not the same as being trendy. Brands that chase trends are usually six months behind them by the time a campaign goes live. Cultural fluency means understanding the values, tensions, humour, anxieties, and reference points of the audience you are trying to reach, and knowing which of those are relevant to your category and your brand.

I remember a brainstorm early in my agency career, working on Guinness. The founder had to leave for a client meeting mid-session and handed me the whiteboard pen. I was not the most senior person in the room by a long stretch. My first internal reaction was something close to panic. But the work still had to happen. What that experience taught me is that cultural insight does not come from seniority or hierarchy. It comes from genuine curiosity about people: what they value, what they laugh at, what makes them feel seen. The best creative work on that brief came from the people who understood what Guinness meant in the context of Irish and British pub culture, not from whoever had the most impressive job title.

Culturally fluent advertising tends to share a few characteristics. It reflects something true about the audience’s world without being patronising. It has a point of view rather than trying to please everyone. It earns attention rather than demanding it. And it understands that the brand is a guest in the cultural conversation, not the host.

The Difference Between Cultural Insight and Cultural Appropriation

This is where a lot of campaigns go wrong. There is a meaningful difference between a brand that genuinely belongs in a cultural conversation and one that is borrowing from it for commercial gain without any real connection. Audiences are increasingly good at detecting the difference, and the backlash when they do tends to be swift.

The question worth asking before any culturally adjacent campaign goes live is: does this brand have earned permission to be here? Permission is not granted by a creative brief or a marketing director’s enthusiasm. It is earned through consistent behaviour, authentic association, and genuine relevance to the community or cultural moment in question.

Brands that have built genuine cultural equity over years can take creative risks that newer or less connected brands cannot. This is one reason why the most effective culturally resonant campaigns tend to come from brands with long-standing relationships with their audiences, not from brands that have just discovered a cultural moment they want to associate with.

For brands operating in regulated or B2B categories, the calculus is different but the principle holds. A campaign that reads as culturally sharp in a consumer context can feel jarring or inappropriate in financial services or healthcare. I have worked across more than 30 industries, and the mistake I see most often is brands importing consumer advertising sensibilities into categories where the audience has very different expectations. B2B financial services marketing is a good example of a category where cultural tone-deafness can actively damage trust rather than build it.

How Platform Context Shapes Cultural Relevance

The same creative idea lands differently depending on where it appears. This is not just a media planning consideration. It is a cultural one. Each platform has its own norms, its own language, and its own unwritten rules about what belongs there. Advertising that ignores those norms tends to feel intrusive regardless of how good the creative is.

This is part of why endemic advertising works well in certain categories. When advertising appears in an environment that is directly relevant to the subject matter, it does not feel like an interruption. It feels like it belongs. That sense of belonging is a cultural signal as much as a media one.

Creator partnerships have become one of the more effective ways to achieve platform-native cultural relevance, particularly on social channels where audience trust in creators often exceeds trust in brands. The mechanics of going to market with creators has evolved significantly, and the brands doing it well are the ones treating creators as genuine collaborators rather than paid distribution channels. The cultural fluency of a good creator is not something you can brief into existence. You either work with people who already have it or you do not.

Platform context also matters for B2B. LinkedIn has its own cultural norms, and the advertising that performs there tends to reflect an understanding of professional identity and peer credibility rather than consumer emotion. The corporate and business unit marketing framework for B2B tech companies gets into the structural side of this, but the cultural dimension is equally important: what does it mean to be credible in this professional community, and what kind of advertising reinforces that rather than undermining it?

Long-Term Brand Building Versus Short-Term Cultural Moments

There is a tension in advertising between building something durable and responding to what is happening right now. Both have value. The mistake is treating them as the same thing or, more commonly, letting the urgency of short-term cultural moments crowd out the longer work of building a consistent brand identity.

I have judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically about advertising effectiveness rather than creative awards. What strikes you when you read through the winning entries is how often the most effective campaigns are not the ones that went viral or generated the most social conversation. They are the ones that built something consistent over time, that had a clear point of view, and that accumulated cultural meaning through repetition and coherence rather than through a single clever moment.

BCG’s research on commercial transformation and growth strategy makes a related point about the compounding value of consistent positioning. Brands that maintain a coherent identity over time build a kind of cultural capital that is very difficult for competitors to replicate quickly. It is not exciting to talk about in a quarterly review, but it is one of the most defensible competitive advantages available to a marketing team.

The short-term cultural moment has its place. A well-timed response to a cultural event can generate significant attention and goodwill. But it needs to be consistent with what the brand already stands for, or it reads as opportunistic. Audiences have long memories for brands that seem to be performing values they do not actually hold.

The Strategic Layer Behind Cultural Advertising

Good cultural advertising does not happen by accident. It is the output of a strategic process that most brands underinvest in. That process starts with genuine audience understanding, not just demographic data but the kind of qualitative insight that tells you what people actually care about, what language they use, what they find funny, and what they find offensive.

It also requires honest assessment of what the brand can credibly say and do. This is where a thorough analysis of your company’s existing marketing presence is useful. Before you build a culturally ambitious campaign, you need to know whether your current brand signals are consistent with the position you are trying to occupy. A brand that talks about community in its advertising but has a transactional, impersonal website is sending mixed signals that culturally aware audiences will notice.

The strategic layer also includes media planning decisions that are too often made in isolation from creative. Where an ad appears shapes how it is read culturally. A campaign that is perfectly calibrated for one platform can feel completely wrong on another. The brands that get this right tend to be the ones where media and creative strategy are developed together rather than sequentially.

For brands assessing where their marketing investment is actually going and what it is returning, digital marketing due diligence is a useful frame. It forces the kind of honest accounting that most marketing teams avoid, including the question of whether culturally oriented brand investment is being measured fairly against short-term performance channels.

When Cultural Advertising Fails

It is worth being direct about the failure modes, because they are common and they are instructive.

The first failure mode is inauthenticity. A brand that adopts a cultural position purely for commercial reasons, without any genuine connection to it, tends to be found out. The audience response is usually not anger but something worse: contempt. Once a brand is perceived as cynically exploiting a cultural moment, that perception is very hard to shift.

The second failure mode is mistiming. Cultural moments move fast, and the production and approval cycles of most large organisations move slowly. By the time a reactive campaign has been through legal, compliance, and three rounds of stakeholder review, the moment has passed. Brands that want to operate in real-time cultural space need to build the internal structures that allow for it, including pre-approved creative frameworks and faster decision-making chains.

The third failure mode is category confusion. Some categories simply do not have the cultural permission to operate in certain spaces. A financial services brand that tries to be edgy and irreverent in its advertising may find that the cultural positioning undermines the trust signals that the category depends on. Understanding the cultural norms of your category is as important as understanding the cultural norms of your audience. BCG’s analysis of financial services go-to-market strategy highlights how differently trust operates in regulated categories compared to consumer markets.

The fourth failure mode is internal. Some of the most culturally disconnected advertising I have seen came not from a lack of insight but from a lack of courage. The insight was there in the brief. The cultural understanding was evident in the research. But somewhere between the brief and the final execution, every sharp edge got rounded off by committee. The result was advertising that said nothing and was remembered by nobody.

Measuring the Unmeasurable

One of the persistent challenges with culture-led advertising is measurement. Performance marketing has clean numbers. Brand and culture work does not, and that asymmetry creates real problems in organisations where marketing decisions are driven primarily by what can be attributed in a dashboard.

The honest answer is that you cannot fully measure the impact of culturally resonant advertising in the same way you can measure a paid search campaign. What you can do is build a measurement framework that is honest about what each type of activity is supposed to do. Brand tracking, share of voice, qualitative research, and long-term sales trend analysis all contribute to a picture that no single metric can give you.

The mistake is demanding the same measurement standard from brand and culture work that you apply to performance channels. That leads to underinvestment in the upstream work that creates demand, and overinvestment in the downstream work that captures it. The result, over time, is a shrinking pool of capturable demand and declining returns on performance spend. I have watched this play out across multiple businesses. It is a slow burn but it is predictable.

For businesses where demand generation is tied to direct sales conversations, channels like pay per appointment lead generation can sit alongside brand investment as a way of capturing near-term demand while longer-term cultural work builds. The two are not in competition. They are doing different jobs at different stages of the funnel.

Vidyard’s analysis of why go-to-market feels harder now captures something real: the environment is noisier, audiences are more sceptical, and the cost of being ignored is higher than it used to be. Culturally resonant advertising is not a nice-to-have in that environment. It is one of the few ways to earn attention that performance spend alone cannot buy.

More on the strategic frameworks that sit behind these decisions is available in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub, including how to structure investment decisions across brand and performance channels in a way that is commercially defensible.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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