• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

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, WPP Media, PubMatic, Xandr, LiveRamp, OpenX, Oracle, and CBS industry 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 got the idea for this score and technology after seeing a "culturally misplaced ad,” he said, and wondered "how the ad made it into mass distribution.”

Lige, who has worked at Oracle, OpenX, Experian, and many other companies said 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.

CRS, an AI-powered metric, was designed to tell brands how closely their creative and media placements align with the cultural values, identities, and the communities of their target audiences.

It describes a gap in targeted advertisements through the development of sophisticated tools to develop audience segments based on demographics and behavioral signals.

But there has 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 needed improvements based on the target audience. It will not generate the changes, but it will make recommendations. 

When asked whether he thinks the platform will in the future automatically generate the changes, Lige said "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.

This allows the platform to inform media professionals in planning, buying, and optimization across channels.