CultureRate:Ad measures ad performance using a proprietary metric, the Ad Cultural Fluency Quotient. With a deep oversample of diverse Americans, brand leaders get rich insight into how consumers process ads across race and ethnicity, generation, sexual orientation and gender.
Brand leaders use CultureRate:Ad and CultureRate:Brand to build cultural fluency, the capability to drive total market growth from inclusive, diverse-led marketing.
To learn more about how our CultureRate:Ad capabilities can help you become more Culturally Fluent, contact Zekeera Belton, Vice President of Client Services, today.
With a focus on the New Wave of Americans (18-40), the generation setting the pace for brand growth, CultureRate surveys are measuring ads and brands continuously. The CultureRate database is the largest of its type available, growing annually by over 200,000 responses or 30 million unique datapoints.
CultureRate:Ad leverages 10+ years of research and expertise in the survey design methods needed to understand diverse America. Built in partnership with more than 200 Collage Group brands across 10 major sectors, CultureRate:Ad allows you to:
Benchmark how effectively ads connect with diverse consumers, compared to industry or database norms.
Dive deep into diagnostics scores to understand the gaps you must address to improve your ads.
Better understand how to touch hearts and minds through culturally authentic storylines, values, casting and more.
Capture halo effects that enable ads targeting one segment to succeed across all segments.
Show diverse consumers you know them, understand them, and value their lived experience.
Consistently measure and iterate on marketing that improves cultural resonance.
CultureRate:Ad data analyses convincingly reveal that culturally fluent advertising featuring a specific segment can and will resonate across broader audiences if done in an authentic, relatable way.
Don’t get trapped by the false “trade-off” that implies investment in culturally targeted ads for specific segments comes at the expense of general market impact. Winning brand leaders now understand that culturally targeted ads can leverage powerful halo effects that can reach the general market without compromising segment-specific nuance. Use CultureRate to take control of your message and learn how to tell culturally authentic stories that work with all segments.
CultureRate:Ad data is available across the following industries and demographic groups.
Home Care
Media
Non-Alcoholic Beverages
Personal Care
Telecom
Alcoholic Beverages
Automotive
Financial Services
Food / QSR
Health Care
To help brands connect the dots to existing testing methods, CultureRate:Ad explores the correlations among conventionally defined ad features, and the Ad-Cultural Fluency Quotient. We help clients cast new light not only into the required performance of these features, but also into how important they are to creating culturally resonant ads. These include ad features such as People, Stories, Visuals and Music; a range of user emotions including Pride, one of the most powerful culturally resonant emotions; and a range of Brand Effects measures, including various ways of measuring virality.
The CultureRate:Ad approach is now categorizing ads using an objective taxonomy that avoids the critical problem faced by some approaches, which rely on subjective categorization that can be easily disputed. The CulureRate taxonomy categorizes ads on a range of features.
CultureRate:Ad is referencing the largest database of culturally focused consumer response to ads growing at an annual rate of 100-120 ads.
CultureRate:Ad helps marketers develop more efficient ad campaigns and executions.
Advertising traditionally is caught in a trade-off between campaigns targeting specific demographic segments, like Hispanic and Black, vs campaigns for the “general market.” We help you transcend this trade-off. Leveraging CultureRate:Ad, our ad testing methodology, we find the sweet spot in nuance, storyline and representation. We take it a step further to help you link cultural perspectives and deepen cultural resonance in general marketing campaigns while making dedicated marketing more effective. Use CultureRate:Ad to get more from your integrated ad campaigns or improve performance of targeted ad campaigns.
The Ad Cultural Fluency Quotient (A-CFQ) at the core of CultureRate:Ad is a powerful metric that improves favorability and purchase intention.
We measure four key experiences felt by survey respondents that reflect their cultural perspective. Use A-CFQ to understand how your executions are helping you become more inclusive of diverse consumers while maintaining your connection to core consumers. Build culturally fluent creative to avoid the risks of relying on generic and bland content, or on nuances that only some groups can understand.
Amplify the insights from your ad’s A-CFQ scores with Groundswell and Backlash metrics.
These metrics take conventional brand favorability a step further. We quantify the degree to which an ad can “flip” perception from positive to negative or vice versa. A startling 20-25% of consumers experience a “flip” in perception after watching just one ad, depending on the category.
Combining A-CFQ and Backlash metrics for each demographic segment reveal dynamics that make your ad successful.
CultureRate is a benchmark from which to build cultural fluency and iterate over time.
Establish a starting point that allows for cultural fluency accountability–based on your score, we identify opportunities where you can improve, set timelines and goals for measurement, and tell the story of how and where you are improving cultural resonance over time.
CultureRate:Ad is complemented by our Cultural Traits system, a rigorously proven method for measuring cultural variation. CultureRate and Culture Traits provide a powerful one-two punch: CultureRate enables insights and marketing professionals to discover critical improvement opportunities in brand and ad performance that they can address by applying insights derived from Cultural Traits analyses.
CultureRate:Ad & Brand, Cultural Traits and much more are embedded as part of our consumer research platforms, and available to all members.
CultureRate is a benchmark from which to build cultural fluency and iterate over time.
Establish a starting point that allows for cultural fluency accountability–based on your score, we identify opportunities where you can improve, set timelines and goals for measurement, and tell the story of how and where you are improving cultural resonance over time.
CultureRate:Ad is complemented by our Cultural Traits system, a rigorously proven method for measuring cultural variation. CultureRate and Culture Traits provide a powerful one-two punch: CultureRate enables insights and marketing professionals to discover critical improvement opportunities in brand and ad performance that they can address by applying insights derived from Cultural Traits analyses.
CultureRate:Ad & Brand, Cultural Traits and much more are embedded as part of our consumer research platforms, and available to all members.
Use CultureRate:Ad to evaluate creative and augment standard testing with deep cultural insights into ad performance.
Clients use our CultureRate:Ad methodology on a custom basis to evaluate in-process creative, compare Spanish language and English language executions, and perform portfolio-level analysis to set creative strategy.
But there’s more. In combination with attitudes and usage studies, clients embed our proprietary cultural attributes profiling tool to gain powerful new insights into the connection between brand equities and positioning statements and cultural traits of target consumers by segment and ad performance.
Culturally Fluent Ad Testing is Now a Must
Without Cultural Fluency, Brands Risk Major Backlash
If done incorrectly, advertising can create Backlash, which we define as flipping perception from positive to negative, creating a substantial decline in Brand Favorability. According to our CultureRate:Ad research, a startling 20-25% of consumers experience a “flip” in perception after watching just one ad. Our measurement of Backlash, combined with other metrics, can reveal characteristics of your ad that could be harmful to your brand.
This is a common challenge by leading brands. Read on for several examples of consumer backlash resulting from ads that missed the cultural mark.
|
With the attack on the U.S. Capitol only a month prior to the airing of this ad, emotions were high – fear, and anger, and joy – and all still fresh in the public consciousness. Calls by Jeep for unity and “the middle” were panned as “late” and “tone-deaf.” Featuring Bruce Springsteen, a working-class hero of days gone by, the somber embrace of nostalgia didn’t seem to be an answer to the challenges of “the road ahead.” While it may have been intended as heartfelt, especially coming from the Boss, the dissonance between tone and message seemed to offer more confusion than reconciliation for Americans across all political persuasions. The ad was eventually pulled, following consumer backlash combined with a Springsteen drunk driving scandal. |
In its attempt to celebrate the Hispanic community during Hispanic Heritage Month, Twitch was heavily criticized for their campaign launching “stereotypical” emotes and spotlighting primarily English-speaking streamers. The streaming community responded with outrage. Within three hours, Twitch apologized saying they “missed the mark” and removed the emotes from the platform. |
|
With an ad widely criticized as “sexist and dystopian,” Peloton effectively tanked their stock by nearly $1.5 billion. The ad features a woman who received an exercise bike from her partner as a Christmas gift. She’s inspired to record a video diary of her new exercise routine, which she says, “changed her.” Critics slammed the ad as “offensive” and “damaging” calling attention to the fact that she was thin at the beginning of the ad, and implying her partner was patronizing for telling her to get fitter and lose weight. |
In a failed attempt at a gaffe, a D&G ad featured a confused Asian woman attempting to eat spaghetti with chopsticks. Dressed in a red, European style dress the ad subtly suggested that while the woman embraces European fashion, she’s too stupid to truly understand European culture. Chinese consumers took to social media (Weibo), calling the ad offensive, racist and deliberately misrepresenting their country as a third-world nation. |
|
With borrowed imagery from the Black Lives Matter movement, Pepsi failed in its attempt “to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding”. The ad, featuring Kendall Jenner, shows attractive young people smiling, laughing, dancing, and clapping at a public demonstration. Supported by cheers and applause from the crowd, Jenner, a white woman, gives a grinning police officer a can of Pepsi. Social media erupted with criticism accusing Pepsi of “appropriating imagery to sell its product, while minimizing the danger protesters encounter and the frustration they feel.” Within a day of airing the ad, Pepsi immediately pulled it and offered a public apology. |
CultureRate:Ad Insights
Learn how to use culturally nuanced and emotionally intelligent storytelling to effectively navigate the modern polarization landscape.
Using our CultureRate database, we analyzed over 500 brands and 100 ads gathered across the last 12 months to a set of lessons that help marketers better connect with today’s “New Wave” consumers between 18 and 41, across race and ethnicity.
