When a campaign billed as “cultural” falls flat, the trend it picked is rarely the problem. The trend was real, people were already using it, and the brand arrived late and with nothing to add. The campaign had the trend and none of the structure that makes people want to talk about it.
Most advice on this reads like a checklist of trends to jump on. This piece takes the builder’s side. It breaks a culturally relevant campaign into four parts, tests them against three documented examples, and ends with a check you can run before you brief anyone. Gut feeling still has a role in judging relevance, but a structure gives you something to argue about in a briefing meeting.
Why going viral is the wrong thing to reverse-engineer
Virality is an outcome, and outcomes are a poor place to start. If you collect campaigns that got attention and look for what they share, you will find a lot of reach and very little else, because attention also comes from ridicule, outrage and confusion. A campaign that everyone is mocking is also being talked about.
Starting from the outcome has a second problem: you only study the winners. The campaigns that copied the same surface tactics and went nowhere are not in your sample. So the visible pattern (“they used a meme format,” “they hired a creator”) says little about why it worked.
A better question is what a campaign people talk about, and keep talking about, has underneath it. The four parts below are my working framework, drawn from reading documented cases. It is an analytical lens, not a research finding, and I treat it as an opinion that you can test. It answers the question of what makes a campaign culturally relevant in terms you can check on a brief.
Part one: a behaviour that was already happening before the brand showed up
A trend is a surface: a sound, a format, a phrase, a challenge. A behaviour is what people are doing underneath it, and it usually outlasts the format. People sharing something about themselves, people pairing two things they love, people mocking a shared annoyance: these are behaviours, and a dozen different formats can carry them.
Chasing campaigns start from the format (“there’s a trending audio, let’s use it”). Campaigns people discuss start from the behaviour and work out which format suits it.
A quick test: can you describe what people are doing without naming a platform or a format? “They’re posting their own listening stats to compare taste” passes. “They’re using the trending sound” does not. If all you have is the format, you have something that will expire in weeks and an audience that already moved on.
The behaviour also has to exist before you arrive. A brand cannot invent a cultural behaviour in a brief and then announce it. It can notice one, and that takes watching the audience closely enough to see what they do when no brand is involved.
Part two: a believable reason for this brand to be in the conversation
Audiences ask, quickly and mostly without noticing, why you are here. A believable answer usually comes from one of a few places: your product, your data, your expertise, your access, or a position you have held for long enough that it does not look new.
The simplest test is to remove the logo. Would the contribution still make sense coming from you? If the same post could be published by any of your competitors, or by a brand in an unrelated category, you have no reason to be there and people will notice.
This is where most chasing campaigns fail even when the trend is well chosen. The brand has no stake in the conversation, so the only visible motive is wanting the attention. That is the gap between being relevant and looking desperate to be relevant, and the Gen Z relevance test covers how audiences read it from the other side.
Part three: a way for people to take part, not just watch
A campaign that people only watch can be admired, but it gives them nothing to do. A campaign they can take part in lets them use their own material: their own stats, their own edit, their own version of the joke. Participation is also what carries the campaign past your own channels, because the audience does the distributing.
Participation needs a low cost of entry. If joining requires making a video, buying something or following an eight-step instruction, most people will watch and move on. The strongest versions hand people something already made about themselves and let them share it in one tap.
It also changes who owns the result. When people take part, they put their own spin on it and the brand loses some control. That is a real trade-off, and it is one reason cautious teams default to polished, watch-only creative. It is also why restraint, the next part, matters so much.
Part four: timing, restraint and knowing when not to post
Timing has two sides. One is speed: a moment has a shelf life, and arriving three weeks after a joke peaked reads as late. The other is fit: some moments are not available to brands at all, however quickly you could respond. Anything tied to a tragedy, a protest, or a community’s pain belongs in that category unless you have a long, real record of involvement.
Restraint is the harder skill because it produces nothing visible. The best response to many moments is no response, and nobody gives credit for a post that was never published.
Build restraint into the process rather than relying on judgement in the moment:
- Agree in advance which topics the brand stays out of, and write them down.
- Name one person with the authority to say no, and make sure they are reachable when a moment breaks.
- Treat enthusiastic engagement as a decision, not a reflex. Liking, quote-posting and replying all count as the brand speaking.
Three documented campaigns, taken apart
The details below come from public reporting at the time. Check the original coverage before you quote any of it in a client document.
The one that landed: Spotify Wrapped
Spotify has run Wrapped every year for years, releasing personalised listening summaries at the end of the year. Against the four parts:
- Behaviour: people already enjoyed talking about their taste and comparing it with friends. Wrapped did not create that.
- Reason: Spotify holds the listening data. No other brand can credibly produce your year in music.
- Participation: each summary is made to be shared, so the audience carries it onto other platforms with their own commentary attached.
- Timing and restraint: it arrives on a predictable schedule, once, with the same recognisable format each time. It does not chase moments.
One caveat is that Wrapped is closer to a product feature than a campaign, and that is part of why it works. The reason for the brand to be there is built into the product. Most brands do not have that, which means they have to work harder on part two.
The one that stumbled: Pepsi’s 2017 Kendall Jenner ad
In April 2017, Pepsi released an ad featuring Kendall Jenner that used imagery resembling street protests. Criticism arrived quickly, centred on the accusation that it trivialised protest movements, including Black Lives Matter. Pepsi withdrew the ad within days and apologised.
Against the four parts, it has the trend and little else. Protest was a real part of the culture at the time, but the ad borrowed the imagery without taking part in anything. A soft drink had no believable reason to resolve a social conflict. Viewers could only watch a scripted scene. On timing and restraint, the brand treated a sensitive subject as available to it when it was not. A review process that asked “do we have any standing here?” might have stopped the ad before release.
The debatable one: Barbenheimer
In July 2023, Barbie and Oppenheimer opened on the same day, and audiences began treating them as a double feature. Fans made the memes, planned the viewing order and coordinated the outfits, and the studios and cinemas then leaned into it. That puts part one largely in the audience’s hands, which is why the case is debatable. How much credit the brands deserve for a behaviour they did not start is a fair argument.
On participation it scores very high, because people had endless ways to join in with their own edits and plans. The reason to be there was also credible, since the conversation was about the brands’ own films.
Restraint is where it gets complicated. As reported at the time, the official Barbie account engaged with fan edits that used mushroom-cloud imagery, and Warner Bros. apologised after backlash, including from the film’s Japanese account. A campaign can pass three parts and still fail the fourth. It is a good case to bring to a critique session because reasonable people will disagree on how to score it.
What survives after the moment: relevance versus brand identity
A relevance spike and a brand identity do different jobs. Relevance is attention you borrow from a moment, and it expires with the moment. Brand identity is what a person remembers when the moment is over, and it is the reason someone would choose you without a trend pushing them to.
The practical check is to ask what is left in a month. If the answer is a follower bump and a few screenshots, the campaign borrowed attention and returned nothing to the brand. If the answer is that people understand something new about what you stand for, or what you are good at, the campaign did some identity work as well.
This is also where part two connects to brand building. The believable reason to be in a conversation comes from an identity you built before the moment arrived. A brand with a vague, interchangeable voice has no reason to offer, which is part of why so many brands sound the same when they all reach for the same trends. Spend on identity between moments, and relevance becomes something you can use when a moment comes rather than something you scramble for.
A four-question check to run before you brief anyone
Write the answers down. If an answer is vague, that part of the idea is missing.
- What are people already doing? Describe the behaviour without naming a platform or format. If you cannot, you have a trend and not a behaviour.
- Why would they believe this comes from us? Take the logo off. Name the product, data, expertise, access or track record that gives you a reason to be there.
- What can they do with it? Name the specific action: a thing they can share about themselves, remix or add to, with a low cost of entry.
- When do we post, and who can say no? Name the timing, the topics you will not touch, and the person with authority to stop it.
A campaign that answers all four has the structure that campaigns people talk about tend to share. A campaign that answers only the first is a trend with a logo on it. The check is a judgement aid, not a predictor: an idea can pass and still underperform, because execution, budget and luck all matter. What the check does reliably is expose the ideas that were never going to hold up.
Next steps
Run your next campaign idea through the four-question check before you commit budget to it. If you want a second pair of eyes on your positioning, get in touch about a positioning audit. And for the audience’s side of the same problem, read the companion piece on the Gen Z relevance test.