Why culture is rejecting brand tourists

The industry has long been concerned with culture. They want to be in it, shape it, own it. Harness it like some elusive resource that can be bottled and resold.

Yet real culture has grown more fractured, selective and less patient with brands who treat it as a quick route to attention. It's no longer enough to deploy a pop-up or sponsor a panel and hope for the best.

There's a pervasive myth that omnipresence pays off, that if you plaster your brand across every moment, you'll secure relevance by sheer accumulation. In truth, being everywhere often just means you're nowhere in particular. The result is a sea of brand cameo appearances that nobody recalls past the next scroll.

This is the essence of "cultural tourism"—transient, surface-level efforts that seldom lead to lasting impact. In turn, culture has become self-protective: people remember who contributed, who hovered and who crashed the party empty-handed.

The danger of being everywhere

Some marketers still default to an "always on" approach. They want to be in every trending conversation, leaving a budget buffer to pounce on the next big wave. Opportunistic cultural participation is on the rise, but these moves demand cultural fluency.

Mia Rocco, Senior Publicist at Manifest US calls this "treating culture like a tactic instead of a strategy." She sees brands latch onto buzzy memes, partnerships, or tones, copying the shape of success without the substance. The result is "a sea of sameness: campaigns that feel disconnected, derivative, or like they're trying too hard."

Manifest references their client Daiya (a dairy-free cheese brand) as an example of doing it right. Daiya's forays into cultural conversation haven't been earth-shattering but they're genuine. A "Pizza Pyramid Scheme" that ironically parodied multi-level marketing, a "Slice Club" that welcomed plant-curious folks without judgment, a "Fromage Forgery" leaning into "dupe culture" to see if Daiya's cheese could pass as the real thing.

None of it was a mass, blanket approach. All of it was consistent in one storyline: plant-based can be cheeky, surprising, even fun. Over time, that built a slow but tangible foothold. The brand didn't show up everywhere but rather, in places that made sense. It also wasn't fixated on immediate cultural takeover. The target was progress, not loudness.

If this underscores anything, it's that focusing on fewer, more meaningful moments often yields stronger returns than being scattered across them all. The chase to appear in every feed and every trending topic can leave audiences with an impression that you're turning up for the sake of it—an expensive form of insecurity that drains budgets on ephemeral hype.

How do brands find their cultural place?

If you can't be everywhere, how do you decide where to be?

It starts with the basics: figure out your brand's deeper values, track record and audience overlap. Lauren Moult, Head of Studio Growth at Weirdo says "defining your place in culture works best when it's backed by action." Is there a real space where your brand can act as a catalyst or partner, rather than a tourist?

Weirdo has a stark caution: many brands "show up in spaces that don't want or need a big branded activation." Before you go, you have to ask whether you're prepared to step aside if the community leads or whether you're just there to overshadow local voices.

A good illustration is Weirdo's collaboration with Arsenal Women's FC. For a match against Liverpool, they set out to create "A Match to Be Proud Of," an event pitched as the most LGBTQ+ inclusive football match in history. Instead of a top-down Pride activation, it was born in East London bars, grassroots meetups and content partnerships with groups like Gay Times.

The result was an in-stadium DJ, a different kind of pre-match show and a sense of authenticity—rooted in local supporter networks and the queer fans on Weirdo's own team. The brand's job was simply to amplify what was already there, not forcibly overlay a separate agenda.

When the final whistle blew (Arsenal won 4–0), the bigger story was how the brand had rethought stadium culture itself. This didn’t happen because they tried to be at every sports moment; it happened because they honed in on a specific angle—LGBTQ+ safe spaces in women’s football—and delivered on it. That’s what “cultural specificity” looks like.

Fieldwork, not folklore

Warm Street's Beyond programme takes this idea further, swapping out the usual "culture trend report" approach for something more immersive.

Instead of reading slides and secondhand data, brand leaders go on field trips, talk to community builders and watch how certain scenes function. Founder Theo Gentilli calls it "stepping away from desks," an antidote to the polished but distant culture decks that rarely equip marketers with real empathy.

Gentilli has an unfiltered take on how culture marketing got fetishised. He referenced the old idea that you needed a full decade of unwavering commitment or the sort of budget that powers Red Bull Music Academy. In 2025, that's no longer feasible for many CMOs under pressure for performance.

So Warm Street attempts a compromise: they invite marketers to test immersion, measure the outputs rigorously and see if short-term ROI can still lead to deeper, longer-term brand equity.

Beyond's case study with Spotify exemplifies this. The brand "took over Spotify with nature sounds" on World Mental Health Day, collaborating with grassroots nature organisations and the rapper-zoologist Louis VI, netting 38 million impressions and a 50% Gen Z audience. But the real success was intangible: it felt respectful.

Listeners didn't see it as a brand hijack, but as a calming intervention shaped by genuine insight. That's the difference between a campaign plastered onto a timely cause and one shaped by immersion in actual conversations.

Marcus Foley, co-founder of Tommy, references Netflix as a cautionary tale for those who assume big cultural presence means no work required. Netflix has shaped modern culture by reviving old songs (Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill") and saturating conversations around series like The Crown or Stranger Things.

Yet Tommy points out that Netflix still localises how it partners with influencers across different markets, taking the time to reflect each region's behaviors and values. If Netflix, with its near-limitless cultural heft, doesn't just assume universal acceptance, can any brand afford to?

Find your cultural lane

The simplest place to start is by quietly questioning your brand's actual values: do you really embody them, or do they vanish under scrutiny? Are you turning up in a space that resonates with what you do, or just hoping the vibe rubs off?

If your brand has rarely set foot in a cultural community until now, maybe that's fine, but own that you're an outsider. Show humility, find local partners, contribute something tangible.

At the end of the day, if you're just tacking your brand onto cultural moments for the look of it, you'll probably get a short burst of attention—and a long tail of indifference. Culture in 2025 is too conscious and too connected to reward that for long.

Warm Street's stance is that you can demonstrate performance if you define success early. Maybe it's not immediate sales; maybe its new audience segments, deeper sentiment shifts, or stepping stones to a bigger presence. As Gentilli says, "Culture marketing can only thrive if we can demonstrate its power: that it boosts performance short term and drives a halo of fame and advocacy in the long term."

Culture isn't a general arena, but a mosaic of protective communities. If cultural tourism is dead, perhaps a visa is only relevant in how it frames a simple truth: you can't claim cultural cachet by wandering around every happening. You claim it by building trust in the places you genuinely deserve to be.

Natasha Randhawa, newsletter editor.

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