Two people walk into a sneaker drop. One is a 28-year-old software engineer from Austin. The other is a 45-year-old accountant from Chicago. On paper, they share almost nothing: different ages, different incomes, different zip codes. But both have been tracking this release for months, both know exactly what SNKRS shock drop means, and both will judge any brand that tries to sell them running shoes with the same creative they'd use for marathon training.
This is the gap Joe Ligé, founder and CEO of Culture Hive Media Group, has been talking about since he launched the company in 2024. And as of last month, he's got the infrastructure to prove whether he's right.
In a recent AdExchanger interview, Ligé laid out his thesis: the ad industry has been targeting the wrong thing. Not the wrong people, necessarily, but the wrong layer of who those people are. Demographics tell you what census bracket someone falls into. Culture tells you how they actually live.
The Timing Isn't Accidental
Culture Hive's Cultural Relevance Score (CRS) integration into Magnite's ClearLine platform landed in July 2026, roughly 28 days after a similar integration with Index Exchange. That's two major independent SSPs in under a month. The pace suggests either remarkable execution or a market that was waiting for exactly this kind of solution.
I'd argue it's both.
The old targeting playbook relied heavily on third-party cookies to stitch together behavioral profiles across the web. That infrastructure has been eroding for years: Safari blocked third-party cookies in 2017, Firefox followed in 2019, and while Google keeps delaying Chrome's full deprecation, the trajectory is clear. Even without a hard cutoff, user opt-in rates for tracking are abysmal. When Apple gave iPhone users the choice to block app tracking, most of them did.
So here we are: the demographic-plus-behavioral targeting model that powered programmatic advertising for a decade is looking increasingly threadbare. And into that gap steps a company arguing that culture, not cookies, should be the next targeting layer.
What "Culture" Actually Means Here
Ligé is careful to distinguish culture from demographics, and from DEI initiatives.
Joe Ligé
Culture is not a demographic. It's the identity, values, interests, rituals and communities that define who we are.
The distinction matters because it changes what you're buying against. A brand chasing runners doesn't need to spray impressions across the 25-to-34 demographic hoping to catch some. With CRS operating inside ClearLine, that same brand can target environments where running culture actually lives: training content, gear communities, race-day moments. The audience is defined by what they care about, not what census bracket they fall into.
This isn't entirely new thinking. Contextual targeting has been around forever, and the post-cookie era has given it a second wind. But Culture Hive is making a more specific claim: that cultural relevance can be scored, measured, and optimized against, the same way we've historically optimized against click-through rates or viewability.
The Performance Question
Here's where it gets interesting for the ROI-obsessed among us (which, let's be honest, is all of us). Ligé claims brands using CRS are seeing 4x ROAS and a 300% increase in retail media performance. Those are big numbers. They're also the kind of numbers that make experienced marketers reach for the "show me the methodology" button.
The mechanics, as described, work through curation. Culture Hive builds inventory packages informed by CRS, and buyers transact against them inside ClearLine using standard deal structures. The score evaluates content, audiences, and media environments against what the company calls cultural communities, affinities and moments. Whether scoring happens at the impression level or the package level isn't entirely clear from the public documentation.
What is clear is that Culture Hive's advisory board includes former leaders from GroupM, PubMatic, and CBS/Paramount. That's not proof of concept, but it's a signal that people who've seen a lot of ad tech pitches think this one has legs.
The Tokenism Problem
There's another angle here that doesn't get enough attention. Ligé built Culture Hive partly in response to watching campaigns that got culture wrong, not just in the underperforming sense, but in the actively damaging trust with the communities you're trying to reach sense.
Getting culture wrong isn't just a missed opportunity. It's a liability. The cringe-worthy Super Bowl ad that tries too hard to be "relatable" to a community it doesn't understand. The influencer partnership that reads as tokenism. The creative that uses cultural signifiers without understanding what they mean to the people who actually live that culture.
CRS is designed to catch these misfires before they launch, scoring how well creative and media align with the cultural values of the target audience. Whether AI can reliably detect tokenism and stereotyping is a fair question. But the fact that someone's building infrastructure to try suggests the industry is at least acknowledging the problem exists.
What This Means for the Rest of Us
If you're a CMO or marketing leader watching this space, here's my read: cultural targeting isn't going to replace demographic targeting overnight. The infrastructure isn't there yet, the measurement frameworks are still being built, and most brands don't have the internal expertise to think about audiences in cultural terms rather than demographic ones.
But the direction of travel is clear. As third-party cookies continue their slow fade and privacy regulations tighten, the industry needs new signals to target against. First-party data is one answer. Contextual targeting is another. Cultural relevance might be a third.
The brands that figure this out early will have an advantage. Not because cultural targeting is magic, but because it forces you to think about your audience as communities of shared values and interests rather than demographic buckets. That's a more sophisticated mental model, and sophisticated mental models tend to produce better marketing.
Ligé put it well:
Joe Ligé
We got very good at finding people. The next evolution is helping brands measure and connect with consumers on a deeper, more nuanced level.
Marketing has always been about understanding people. Demographics were a proxy for that understanding, a useful shortcut when we didn't have better tools. Now we might. The question is whether the industry is ready to use them.
