Culture is everywhere. So why is it rarely planned for?

Opinion | The Future of Planning, Strategy and Innovation Week in Focus

Adding ‘cultural relevance’ through news brands to media plans sees a bigger impact on sales. Newsworks’ insights director has the data to back it up.

Culture has become one of marketing’s favourite topics this year. At every media conference, trend report, and thought-leadership piece, culture looms large: brands and their agencies are encouraged to understand culture, anticipate cultural shifts, join conversations, and stay connected to the issues shaping people’s lives.

Yet despite all this attention, cultural relevance rarely appears as an explicit objective on a media plan. It is talked about constantly. But rarely planned for properly.

Media strategies are built around awareness, consideration, reach and effectiveness, while cultural relevance is often treated as something that simply happens along the way.

Cultural relevance drives 15% of UK sales, Newsworks research finds

So, when advertisers attempt to “capture” culture, investment increasingly gravitates towards social platforms and influencer ecosystems. In doing so, many overlook the role that established media, and specifically news brands, play in shaping the stories, debates and moments that become culture in the first place.

At Newsworks, we knew this had to change. At the end of last year, with the support of research agency Trajectory, we set out to put a commercial value on culture, or, to be precise, cultural relevance, for the first time ever.

The findings should act as a rallying cry to ensure advertisers see building cultural relevance as an important commercial endeavour and ensure that news brands are part of advertisers’ media mix.

Building cultural relevance

First, through qualitative research, we identified five areas where brands need to focus their efforts to build cultural relevance.

There is no hierarchy among the five dimensions of cultural relevance: aspiration, authenticity, credibility, timeliness and visibility. All are important and present a framework for measuring a brand’s cultural relevance and identifying opportunities for growth.

Secondly, across the four categories measured in this study (autos, digital subscriptions, retail and travel), cultural relevance consistently drove 15% of sales. This is not a negligible amount. Scaled up to total UK consumer spending, which the Office for National Statistics put at £978bn in 2025, 15% of sales driven by cultural relevance represents £147bn.

Third, by breaking down our analysis by media channel, we found news brands emerged as the standout effective medium, with a return on investment (ROI) of £3.97. This figure included both the paid advertising that drove sales (£3.52) and the boost to sales from driving cultural relevance (£0.43). The news brand boost was double that of the average media channel measured.

For me, this final learning matters most. The ROI figures suggest that when brands invest in news, the payoff is strong. Other effectiveness studies tell a similar story, most notably Thinkbox’s Profitability 2. Simply put, if brands advertised more in news brands, they would see a bigger impact on sales.

The cultural relevance boost observed in our research shows that news brand environments offer advertisers a culturally rich space that creates extra value.

If culture is the stuff of life, the stories we tell about ourselves and each other, then that is the business of journalism. Every day, journalists identify emerging ideas, explain why they matter, and bring them to wider audiences.

Journalism ensures news brands deliver scale, credibility, and aspiration, engaging readers in a timely and authentic way. They give ideas context and turn niche conversations into mainstream conversations.

News brands are the beating heart of culture. That’s exactly why news brands deliver commercially for advertisers.

Read more about Newsworks’ Cultural Relevance research at newsworks.org.uk

Heather Dansie is the insight director at Newsworks