LOS ANGELES, CA — Culture Hive Media Group, a cultural intelligence and activation company built to address the industry’s longstanding inability to measure cultural relevance at scale, today announced its launch and the formation of an advisory board comprising senior executives from across programmatic advertising, media, and data.
Brands have always been able to optimize for reach and intent, but cultural fit has always come down to gut instinct. A sneakerhead and a vintage collector may share the same demographic profile, but they expect entirely different brand experiences. That kind of nuance has historically been flattened into broad audience categories, leaving a missed opportunity to connect.
Culture Hive is built to change that, giving brands a score that measures how culturally relevant their ads are and whether the media placements they are buying are the right fit for that specific audience.
“Every group of people has a shared language, shared values, shared symbols and habits. A sneakerhead and a yogi each have distinct characteristics that make them unique. Culture Hive is built to understand those collective values and help advertisers ensure their ads appear in the right environments and resonate with that audience,” said Joe Ligé, CEO and Co-Founder of Culture Hive Media Group. “As an industry we’ve gotten very good at finding people. The next evolution is helping brands measure and connect with consumers on a deeper, more nuanced level.”
Culture Hive’s platform is built around the Cultural Relevance Score (CRS™), a proprietary metric that tells brands how well their creative and media align with the cultural values, identity, and communities of the audience they are trying to reach. Using the company’s AI tool, the platform analyzes a brand’s brief, builds culturally grounded audience personas, and scores publisher inventory to match creative to the best placements across display, video, CTV, and social.
From there, campaigns can then be activated through Culture Hive’s DSP or integrated into a brand’s existing media stack, allowing cultural intelligence to inform planning, buying, and optimization across channels.
For marketers, getting culture wrong does not just mean a campaign underperforms. It can actively damage trust with the very communities a brand is trying to reach. CRS™ turns cultural alignment from a gut call into a measurable input, driving stronger engagement and reducing the risk of costly missteps.
The platform is already delivering results. Culture Hive helped gaming hardware leader MSI identify culturally precise audiences, delivering a 94% increase in ROAS and a 68% lift in ad recall and brand trust. For beauty brand TIRTIR, culturally aligned media environments drove 500% sales growth and a 450% increase in net sales.
To accelerate that mission, Culture Hive has assembled an advisory board with deep roots in the systems that define modern advertising:
Kirk McDonald, CEO of Sundial Media and Technology Group: “Our identities are shaped by our interests, our mindset, our needs — and those same forces define what feels culturally relevant to us. That’s ultimately what determines whether an ad connects or gets ignored. For decades, brands have relied on instinct to answer one question: will this resonate? Now, for the first time, we’re able to measure an authentic Cultural Relevance Score. That has the potential to change everything.”
Jeff Hirsch, CEO of QuantumPath: “We got remarkably good at targeting consumers based on things like category inclusion, and there remains a gap between finding someone and reaching them in a way that truly resonates. Culture Hive’s Cultural Relevance Scoring framework is the first real technology I have seen that makes cultural alignment measurable and actionable at scale. This is a hard problem and they are solving it the right way.”
Jason White, Co-Founder and CEO of Mula: “People are not their zip code or income bracket. They are skiers, musicians, parents, and skateboarders, and each of those identities comes with its own language and its own ecosystem. Culture Hive is giving brands the technology to understand where and how to reach those groups in ways that actually resonate. This is the next era of personalization in advertising. Couldn’t be more excited to be part of what Joe is building.”
Max Aggrey, Founder of MANË: “Aligning culturally relevant marketing messages to the right audiences is hard. In over a decade of dedicated martech experience, I’ve yet to see a solution that leads to incremental ROAS in digital marketing based on cultural relevance quite like what the Culture Hive team has created. Excited about joining this board and the future of this business to enhance our industry!”
Collectively, the board brings leadership experience across some of the most influential organizations in the industry, including GroupM, PubMatic, Xandr, AT&T Advertising, LiveRamp, CBS/Paramount, OpenX, News Corp, CNET, Oracle, Google, NBCUniversal, Criteo, and The Trade Desk.
“The people on this board have seen every major shift in advertising over the past two decades. The fact that they are here is a statement. The formation of this board reflects a shared conviction that cultural relevance is the next frontier the industry has to solve, and that the tools to do it do not yet exist at scale. Cultural intelligence is not a niche conversation anymore. It is where the industry is heading,” said Ligé.
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