• by Jeff Snyder , September 23, 2026

A new Association of National Advertisers report finds that 90% of B2C marketers now see cultural engagement as important to their brand's growth. That part isn't surprising. The more interesting question is who's successfully pulling it off: e.l.f. Cosmetics turning pop culture cycles into product drops, French's Mustard riding internet jokes into relevance, Nestlé Purina PetCare planting itself in the middle of fan moments rather than standing next to them.

None of these are lifestyle brands with built-in cultural cachet. They're CPG, the category least likely, on paper, to feel culturally fluent, and increasingly the category proving what fluency requires. 

The instinct right now is speed: See the trend, brief the agency, get something live before the moment passes. Culture rewards understanding more than speed, though. A brand that jumps into a moment without a clear reason to be there usually just looks desperate.

So, what separates CPG brands getting this right from the ones generating a week of cringe content?

They know their role before they show up. e.l.f.'s pop culture moments work because the brand has spent years being the affordable, in-on-the-joke insider in beauty, so the culture play reinforces something audiences already believe about it. A brand with no established point of view has nothing for the cultural moment to attach to. It ends up as a logo standing next to something popular, hoping some of the popularity rubs off.

They design for participation, not a press release. The weakest cultural plays are one-directional: a brand announces it's part of a moment. The strongest ones give people something to do with it, whether that's a product tie-in, a piece of content worth sharing, or an experience worth showing up for. Purina's pet-culture moments work because they hand fans something to participate in instead of something to watch.

They pressure-test the idea from the audience's seat. The useful question isn't whether the idea feels timely internally. It's whether it feels like it's for the audience or for the brand. When the honest answer points to the brand as the primary beneficiary, that's the signal to pull back before the campaign goes live, not after the comments come in.

They stay after the moment ends. A single well-executed activation buys a CPG brand one good week, not lasting cultural credibility. What compounds is showing up the same way, around the same values, again and again, until an audience starts to expect it. That consistency is what separates a brand that got lucky once from one building a cultural asset.

Underneath all of this sits a simpler question: Does the brand have a clear enough identity that a cultural moment has something real to attach to? The CPG brands getting cultural fluency right aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the fastest social teams. They're the ones that did the harder work first, deciding who they are, so that when culture moves, they already know where they stand in it.

The brands skipping that step will keep showing up anyway. They'll just keep finding out, moment after moment, that showing up and belonging were never the same thing.