Advertisers Want to Be More Than Just Advertisers: They Want to Be Part of Culture

By Kristina Monllos •  January 3, 2024  •  5 min read  •

Advertisers Transforming into Cultural Participators from Interruptive Advertisers

If you talk to advertisers about the strategy behind whatever it is they’re doing now, you’ll often hear that they want their brands to be a part of culture and what they’re doing will help them get there. How they plan to get their brands to be a part of culture will vary, of course, but the gist is usually something like, they can’t rely on the tried and true tactics that worked for the traditional advertising models given consumption habits have changed. Instead, they need to break through the noise and truly connect with consumers.

It makes sense. Consumption habits are changing. Getting people to pay attention to traditional advertising is getting more difficult. Marketers are having to spend more time determining how to talk to consumers, especially younger consumers, who don’t want to hear from brands. So major marketers like Coca-Cola have transformed their advertising strategies to move away from “the interruption model to experience and engagement,” Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s senior director of generative AI, previously told Digiday.

It seems that advertisers don’t want to be advertisers at all anymore. Or maybe it’s not that they don’t want to — apologies for the double negative, roll with it — but that they recognize they can’t simply be advertisers anymore. And rather than have their brand content peppered around something that people want to engage with only to have people be annoyed by the brand for interrupting that engagement, marketers want their brands to be producing the thing that people want to engage with now.

“We are often briefed by clients with things like ‘crashing culture’ as the goal,” said Trina Roffino, CEO of The Marketing Arm. “It’s not that clients are walking away from advertising entirely, it’s just become so much more difficult to have efficient ways to reach prospective consumers at the top of the funnel through the fragmented channels. Brands that are top of mind because of their role in culture, not just huge budgets, are the ones growing.”

Finding ways for brands to connect with culture in a real way requires a different kind of thinking than that for traditional advertising campaigns, according to agency execs, who say that working with influencers, creating user-generated content and keeping tabs on social conversations where it would make sense for the brand to get involved are all table stakes. Experiential — whether in-person at events like Formula 1, Coachella or Stagecoach, among others or via mixed reality efforts — is only becoming more important. It goes beyond those efforts, too.

“For brands to be a part of culture, they need to listen more,” said Kaylen McNamara, chief business officer, VaynerX. “The concept of a consumer journey is no longer predictable. » …
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