The culture question
Trends come and go, but truly popular culture is remarkably sticky
Long-time readers and anyone I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the past ten years will know that one of my go-to arguments is to mention phrases that are so overused they’re now essentially meaningless.
First on the list, given my role, is obviously ‘digital’.
‘Content’ is right up there. (I really enjoyed the line in the Black Mirror episode Hotel Reverie when someone says of a movie, “Please don’t call it content”).
Another example: a former colleague at Teneo who once allegedly ended up in a heated discussion with a client over what exactly constitutes a ‘narrative’.
Right now, the C word appears to be on the agenda for discussion. ‘Culture’ is back in the spotlight - I’ve mentioned culture in the title of four posts in the past 12 months.
Culture looms large across the interwined worlds of advertising, PR and marketing. Every campaign or piece of work from any discipline strives for cultural relevance. Particularly when it comes to securing coverage in earned media, our ideas need to have at least some root in what’s happening right now in the world.
But just as any discussion regarding “insight” inevitably involves someone asking, “What is an insight?”, any discussion about cultural trends or cultural relevance involves at least some consideration of the nature of those things.
That discussion will primarily focus on the ‘what’ of culture - what can we include in our campaign to make our work feel culturally relevant? In PR, we take significant cues from what journalists cover, what they discuss and write about. We might also gravitate towards some search listening, mining the great Google data trove to see what people search for.
Trending topics and videos on the major video platforms also provide cues to help keep your cultural radar up to date. There are also a number of commentators doing the cultural curation job, so you don’t have to - for TikTok round-ups, I particularly recommend
.That said, I don’t envy curators like Casey Lewis: people have a never-ending desire to hear about something new. And while TikTok’s well of drama and trends never seems to dry up, other sources can sometimes feel stale and homogenous if you visit them frequently. Sometimes there isn’t much new, or the new is just boring. Filling the void must be tough.
But examining culture in this way, solely through the media and video-sharing lens, only ever provides a narrow definition of what culture really is. It’s even more narrow if we consider the type of people who pay attention to the newest, freshest takes and trending topics.
As YouGov found last summer, the idea that Brat Girl Summer was inescapable was way off the mark: 64% of a representative sample of British adults hadn’t even heard of it. Most of the cultural trends that get noticed beyond the worlds of PR and advertising are slow-moving and less noticeable when looked at up close.
brought this duality to life last month with her post titled “The power of ordinary culture” (which I discovered via James Whatley’s ever excellent Five Things on Friday). Lujani focuses primarily on advertising, but the main tenets of her argument apply across comms as well.For Lujani, that narrow definition of culture as “niche and emergent trends” or a slightly broader definition of culture as “the arts” is unhelpful. Thinking about culture on a more substantive level leads us to a much broader definition:
“Culture is all the small but telling habits that structure our daily interactions: it’s the way we greet each other, how we prepare for a date or night out, the brands we choose, how we name our Whatsapp group chats, the rituals around work and leisure, and more.”
I also find Lujani’s argument compelling, as it chimes completely with one of my all-time favourite posts by Martin Weigel. In this long read, Weigel dissects the concept of culture (”The C-Word”) through the lens of Succession, highlighting the difference between our cultural “subcultures” (accepted truths that allow us to function as a society) and “superstructures” (the “intangible reservoir of meaning substantiated - made real, visible, concrete, lived, and experienced”).
Lujani suggests three compelling ways that creative campaigns and comms ideas can celebrate “ordinary culture”:
Start with what people are doing
Don’t be afraid of the familiar
Look for emotional weight in ordinary moments
One of the most effective ways to uncover these nuggets of behaviour and emotion is to watch stand-up comedy. Comedians are the masters of identifying quirks and absurdities hiding in plain sight. Michael McIntyre might not be everyone’s cup of tea (a perfect example of ordinary culture that most comms people likely ignore), but his whole shtick centres on finding these idiosyncrasies and blowing them up to hilarious proportions (I particularly like his bit on mulled wine here:)
That’s not to say that every strategic approach you come up with or creative brief you write needs to be laugh-out-loud funny. Nor does a focus on ordinary culture mean that your response to a client or a colleague needs to be ordinary and everyday. It means identifying the moments where there’s an opportunity to take an element of ordinary culture and use your strategic firepower and creative muscle to blow it up into a big campaign idea.
Like when I pitched a potential client the idea (sourced via Chris Rock’s skit on jobs vs careers) of going into more detail than anyone had before on precisely what the world of work looked like in the early 2020s. Moving beyond tedious “WFH vs work in the office” debates into something more realistic and representative of the fact that around 55% of people have no choice about where they work.
Or like when Yorkshire Tea celebrated the very ordinary practice of British people taking tea with them on holiday, by blowing it up to ridiculous proportions and turning the whole idea into a song with accompanying music video:
Like all the big bucket words I listed out (digital, content, narrative), culture works as a shorthand precisely because of the fuzziness of its definition. Talking about culture and cultural trends is the successful shortcut you often need when you're trying to build a consensus around approaches and ideas.
But just because it works as shorthand doesn’t mean you can’t also define its use in your specific context. Whether it’s the fast-moving but shallow social and media trends (gorillas vs 100 men at the moment), or the deeper, more substantive culture that binds us together - it’s crucial to set expectations at the earliest possible stage.
Otherwise, you risk selling a Brat Girl Summer when the requirement is much more “universal thrifty behaviours”.