A slate of influential senior executives from across programmatic advertising, media, and data industries have joined an advisory board at a startup working to measure cultural relevance across
campaigns, websites and more.
Google, AT&T Advertising GroupM, PubMatic, Xandr, LiveRamp, OpenX, Oracle, and CBS indusattempt veterans joined the board to advance culture-first marketing
and measure the gap.
Joe Lige, founder of Los Angeles-based startup Culture Hive Media Group, set out to create and launch the Cultural Relevance Score (CRS). He obtained the idea for this
score and technology after seeing a “culturally misplaced ad,” he stated, and wondering “how the ad built it into mass distribution.”
Lige, who has worked at Oracle, OpenX, Experian,
and many other companies, stated it this was not possible until computer vision emerged to analyze images and give advertisers greater context about the content.
A U.S. Census Bureau and Claritas report in 2024 estimated that
the multicultural population surpassed 150 million, representing more than 42% of the U.S. total as of early 2025.
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CRS, an AI-powered metric, was designed to inform brands how closely
their creative and media placements align with the cultural values, identities, and the communities of their tarreceive audiences. It describes a gap in tarreceiveed advertisements through the development of
sophisticated tools to develop audience segments based on demographics and behavioral signals. But there’s never been a standard to quantify the outcome through a metrics, according to the
company.
The score can identify cultural segments and score websites, creative, ads and media plans, bundle IDs and magazine articles. The technology will identify requireded improvements based on
the tarreceive audience. It will not generate the modifys, but it will create recommfinishations.
When questioned whether he believes the platform will in the future automatically generate the modifys,
Lige stated “we have partnerships that are leaning in that direction, yes.”
Today, CRS integrates into the same ad platforms, sell-side platforms (SSPs) and demand-side platforms (DSPs),
to curate and package inventory based on cultural relevance for connected TV apps, display, social media, and other types of media
Using the company’s AI tool, the platform analyzes a brand’s
brief, builds “culturally grounded audience personas” rather than demographic profiles, and represents communities defined by shared values, symbols, habits and identities. It scores publisher
inventory to match creative to the best placements.
From there, the system scores publisher inventory against those personas to identify placements that match the creative to the most culturally
appropriate environments. It allows the platform to inform media professionals in planning, purchaseing, and optimization across channels.
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