Cultural relevance is a discipline, not a tactic
The phrase gets thrown around in pitch decks. The reality is harder. Here is what actually distinguishes work that lasts from work that merely lands.
The buzzword problem
Every creative brief eventually invokes cultural relevance. It has become marketing's most exhausted phrase, used to mean everything from chasing a trending sound on TikTok to commissioning a Vogue cover. The bar is so low it has stopped being a useful idea. If everyone claims cultural relevance, nobody has it.
What I mean by it is more specific. Cultural relevance is the property of work that contributes to the conversation rather than just appearing in it. Work that says something other people will quote, reference, build on. Most marketing does not pass that bar, and most clients will tell you they want it without actually being willing to do what it takes.
Three disciplines
The first discipline is editorial direction. Before a campaign exists, before a film is shot, before a podcast is recorded, there should be a one-page document that defines tone, voice, what the work argues, and what it refuses to do. Most teams skip this step because it feels like overhead. It is the opposite. Without it, every creative decision is relitigated from scratch, and the work drifts toward the mean.
The second is taste in collaborators. Cultural work is made by people, and the people you choose determine the ceiling. A director who has shot for Loewe will bring a different ceiling than one who has shot a thousand product videos. The difference is not always cost. It is reading the room, knowing whose work you want to be in conversation with.
The third is patience. Cultural moments compound. The first campaign rarely lands the way you hoped. The third or the seventh starts to. Most brands stop before the work has time to earn its place in the conversation. The marketers who treat cultural relevance as a quarterly metric will never have it.
What it costs
There is no version of this that is cheap, fast, or measurable in the conventional sense. The ROI on cultural relevance shows up two years later in the kind of inbound that arrives without you knowing how. It shows up in the talent that wants to work with you. It shows up in the press that arrives without a media plan. None of that is forecastable in a Q1 deck.
If you cannot tolerate that asymmetry, do not chase cultural relevance. There are perfectly good marketing strategies that move numbers on a quarterly cadence. They are not what I do, and they are not what the work I have written about here is for. The question is which game you are playing, and whether you can be honest with yourself about that.
1 of 4
