Advertising used to be a lot simpler.

With clever creative and strategic media placement, brands could effectively interrupt their target audience multiple times a day/week/year. Rinse and repeat that over a long enough period of time and bang, you’ve built the image of your brand with your consumer.

If people didn’t like it, there was no social media for them to clap back on.

If people found it annoying, there were only a finite number of media channels for them to switch to.

It was the era of mass cultural consumption where last night’s TV was today’s water cooler chat. Everyone saw the summer’s big Blockbuster and the music top 40 was a credible bar for artists to judge their success by.

Obviously today, that’s all changed.

In the last decade or so our world has moved from a market economy to a culture economy. A world in which the consumer is firmly in charge. If they don’t like your brand, you’re blocked, skipped or ignored in the time it takes to scroll past.

A major trend of the last ten years has been the rise of the ‘Cultural’ Ad Agency, a shift mirrored in-house with the emergence of brand leads dedicated to leading the charge into the world of culture. Perhaps that sounds a bit like your role? If so, you’ll know the right title doesn’t automatically equal the right business results.

Virtue - the agency we work at - is definitely one of those culture agencies (in fact, having been born from Vice Media twenty years ago we’d say we were - ahem - the culture agency.) Over the last five years as we’ve spoken to dozens of brands about their challenges one question keeps coming up: “How do we know we’re making the right decisions when it comes to culture?”

With an infinite number of channels, niches and content creators all interconnecting globally, where is a brand supposed to begin? How do you know what will be effective for your brand?

So we set out to answer that question and the result (here comes the plug) is Pigeon.

We’re calling it a cultural accelerator for brands. Rather than trying campaign after campaign, looking to find what ‘works’ in culture, Pigeon includes an AI-driven, big-data engine trained to identify interrelated cultural territories and drive new growth for brands.

It helps brands uncover the underlying niches and networks that create meaning and value in the world. In turn, this means brands can contribute real meaning and value - not just interrupt and irritate.

Most excitingly, Pigeon can identify cultural spaces before competitors are even aware of them, it’s the ultimate first-mover advantage.

Ok enough chat, how does it actually work?

To give a real-world example, we decided to investigate a sector truly mired in a standardised playbook - luxury jewellery. We took a look at Tiffany & Co, Bulgari, Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels.

Pigeon tells us that Bulgari has the greatest cultural capital (60.77 on our Cultural Capital index) closely followed by Tiffany & Co (54.05).

Diving a stage deeper, we can see that all these brands are using similar talent to drive that cultural capital. Each relies on celebrity names symbolic of ‘the new luxury’; Dua Lipa for Bulgari, Timothy Chalamet for Cartier.

How can these brands look to differentiate themselves? Jewellery is closely associated with love, especially when it comes to gifting. Just as with a brand, Pigeon can deliver a cultural ecosystem for love and that’s where things get interesting.

Instead of just tapping up a celebrity, we are suddenly thrown into the world of limerence (the mental state of profound infatuation) which has undergone hypergrowth since 2020, or South Korean and Indian rom-coms, or a hundred other clusters that wouldn't be on the radar without a tool like Pigeon.

Not only does that allow brands to activate fandoms that are closely related to these cultural elements, but we can also look at them as elements that might influence the broader cultural conversation around love and romance. For example, Korean rom-coms have gained prominence because they're being aired on Netflix. They may not inspire as much devotion in the West as K-pop -- but people are clearly watching them because they're interested in the Korean POV on love.

If we sound like we’ve been drinking our own KOOL-AID, it’s because we are genuinely excited by what we’ve created and the power it has to objectively answer questions brand owners put to us week in, week out. We’ve seen plenty of novel uses of AI in our world; we think we’ve created something that goes way beyond that; a tool marketers can use to guide themselves through a complex landscape and enter into the culture economy with confidence.

Of course, once you know where to point your cultural powers, brands still need to know what to do. Fortunately, Pigeon lives within Virtue, so we’ve got that covered as well.