There is a right way and a wrong way for brands to show up in culture. It’s not about slapping a sponsorship on a cultural moment and hoping to bask in the halo effect. It’s about supporting and cultivating emerging subcultures and communities long before they blow up, said executives during the Brands Innovators Brands and Music event at Universal Music Group in London.
“If your culture stack works and people perceive you in a certain way, the culture selects you,” said Leila Fataar, Founder & ECD, EP, CSO, Platform13, who added that marketers should not simply look at demographics, but at cultural lenses of how politics, media and technological adoption impact a generation. “You can have a 90-year-old who’s more Gen Alpha than a 13-year-old,” she said. “It’s a mindset of different things.”
Fataar, who has worked on brands including Adidas, Dr. Martens, Guinness, Beats by Dre, House of St Barnabas, ECCO Leather, Squarespace, Under Armour, Pinterest, White Claw, Guinness, Polaroid, Vans and more said, “The World Cup’s not a cultural moment. It’s a calendar moment in football culture. There’s also other parts of football culture that’s bubbling stuff, that’s emerging, and then you get to the World Cup, which is around fans and audiences and spectacle. So yes, you’ve got to play there, but make sure you’re invested already in the culture, in the smaller areas, which are not smaller, by the way, they’re big enough. And then by the time you get to buy your way in, you’re actually part of the thing.”
David Robertson, senior vice president of global partner strategy at Universal Music Group, agreed. Obviously, if you really want to build cultural relevance, you’ve got to compound it over time, he said. “You’ve got to create participation. You’ve got to create fandom.” He cited Charli xcx as an example of an artist that knows how to cultivate a fandom who engaged deeply with listeners over Instagram, allowing them to participate, which rewarded them and compounded the fandom.
“Brat Summer is not a marketing campaign that pops out of nowhere,” he said. “It’s built organically over time. I think if you’re really wanting to build cultural relevance, you’ve got to think like an artist. You’ve got to build like an artist.”
He noted that on the flip side, brands can dip into music to do certain things “but don’t kid yourself you’re building cultural relevance,” he stressed. “If you’re hiring an artist to give your product meaning at a certain moment, sometimes that’s okay, but you’re not creating cultural relevance.”
“We know it’s not enough to put our logo on something and say YouTube is partnering with X brand,” said Kat Keen, global social & influencer lead at YouTube, on another panel. “From a social perspective, we’ve really actually changed our tactics. We used to specifically only focus on things that happened on YouTube so it would be YouTube content, YouTube creators but more and more now across YouTube, YouTube Music, YouTube Creators social presence, we’re really thinking about actually what is culture to our target demographics.
During a fireside chat with Brand Innovators’ Alex Semenato, music producer Tunde Babalola, director of Future Cut Productions, pointed out that even artists themselves have to earn their cultural relevance and build relationships with fans directly. “Nowadays, you’re one part artist, you’re one part content creator,” he said. “The best artists have been able to communicate to their fans through lyric and songs, but it’s almost like that’s not good enough now. They’ve got to be able to communicate to their fans through 30 second clips on your phone for those fans to fall in love with that artist, to go and stream their songs again and again.”
Left to right: Ashley Goldie, senior media & content lead, personal care UK/Ireland, Unilever; Chris Moran, vice president of digital, director ecommerce and omnichannel, EMEA, Pandora; Shakira Payne, director global communications, Back Market; Nicole Williams, director, brand partnerships, Universal Music Group; Oli Bello, head of go to market, Outra Credit: Stuart Bailey
Nicole Williams, director of brand partnerships at Universal Music Group noted that “a good partnership needs to be a partnership. It is two audiences coming together and making themselves bigger and there’s mutual gain. They get to tap into each other’s audiences and brand equity.”
She cited a recent partnership between Gap and the girl group Katseye as a great example of this type of beneficial partnership. The brand launched an exclusive hoodie with Gap and made content with the band that Williams said looked like a music video. The retailer promoted the content on their own channels, as well as in new markets for the band.
“It needs to have that shared benefit, that authenticity,” she said. “They’re on this huge upper trajectory with so much cultural relevance, so much Gen Z centric cultural capital. And then you of course have Gap. Everybody knows Gap, it’s such a legacy brand. But they were able to come together at this moment where they both had something to gain from that partnership.”
For Samsung, working with athletes is key to its wearables marketing. The brand did a lot during the Olympics. “The athletes were a big part of who we worked with during the Olympics and it wasn’t just as Samsung as a brand, we used our creators that we worked with to really amplify their voices,” said Maria Ogundeji, MX social & influencer marketing lead, EU at Samsung.
For more than 20 years at Unilever brand Dirt Is Good has advocated for children to get dirty through outdoor unstructured play, focusing on unleashing human potential. Football club Arsenal shares a similar belief with the mantra “always forward.” The brand signed with the team in 2023 for collaborations around the idea that getting dirty on the pitch leads to personal growth and joy. Recently, the two hosted the Varzenal Cup, which brought grassroots teams – who had named themselves Arsenal – together with players from the actual Arsenal to compete in the “It’s Part of the Game” effort.
“We look first and foremost at shared values, shared vision,” said Saffron Inkster, global masterbrand director at Dirt is Good on stage at the event.
Victor Bengtsson, chief executive officer of Sidemen Entertainment, a YouTube group with over 138 million subscribers takes a different approach when he works with brands. He referred to “the death of the millennial marketing” in which the brand is integrated into the content and talked about being explicit about an ad that is an ad when making ads for clients from including Lego.
“The creatives today realize that most young people were lied to for a very long period of time,” he said. “It’s like, oh, I’m watching this show. But in reality, this is an Adidas commercial, or whatever it may be. Instead, we started off by saying, hi, this is blatantly a commercial for Lego, which you hopefully like.”
The brand is known for partnering with various IP such as Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, etc. The call-to-action on the video asked viewers to share their opinions on which IP Lego should partner with next. “It turned out to be one of the most successful things Lego did online,” said Bengtsson, who noted that the videos generated feedback from 68,000 who answered 55 questions, which gave Lego the consumer insights on which products to make.
“Did we integrate naturally? Maybe not. It was more literally, ‘Hi everyone, Would you like to collab with us?’ Now, people don’t want to hide, but want to be open about and proud, in a way, of their brand,” he added.
