Cultural Intelligence Moves Audience Analysis Ahead Of Media Investment

Central American advertising takes more from the US than from the creative industries of Colombia, Argentina or Brazil, and its output leans heavily toward retail communication. Orlando Alvarez is building a way to judge whether that work will connect with an audience, scoring it for cultural relevance while it is still a brief. Agencies in the region already buy modeling that reports on how a campaign performed, and nothing comparable exists for the stage before the work is made.

Orlando Alvarez is Chief Creative Officer at Publicidad Comercial MullenLowe, a leading agency in Central America, and serves on the regional executive committee of GCC Group, which supports agencies across Central America and the Caribbean. His academic background includes AI and machine learning at MIT, digital filmmaking at the New York Film Academy, art direction through ICOGRADA in Japan, and a master's in branded content from Madrid Content School. Alvarez now works on what can be established about an audience before a campaign exists.

"You receive the forecasts once you've invested, and it takes a few years of spending before they become accurate. I'm working on how to do it beforehand, how to build this cultural intelligence, and how to predict relevance in what people are consuming in entertainment," says Alvarez. He raises no objection to the method itself, and his agency works with clients who buy it. His concern is timing, because a brief has to be written and approved long before those numbers arrive.

Where popularity misleads

Scoring work before the media is bought requires evidence that already exists at brief stage, and the most available evidence is popularity data. Streaming figures and music charts are public across much of the region, which makes them the default input for a media plan.

Alvarez treats a chart position as a starting question. "If you have Bad Bunny, who is a global phenomenon, you have to see what's going on with him. He might be popular and trending, but what if your audience is listening to Yuri, a 90’s artist, very relevant to your real audience. You also have to see what's happening with the consumption of Rosario Tijeras, for example, which is the Netflix soap that's going on right now, very popular, but not only because of a trend, but because your audience is consuming it as entertainment; this places popularity vs relevance in the spotlight," says Alvarez. "You have to figure out what's influencing your audiences by their choices and not what you think they want to listen to that's convenient for your brand."

Chart position and audience overlap are separate measurements, and a brand can score well on one and badly on the other. Alvarez proposes a check of both before any creative direction is set. Survey work across the US, UK and Australia found 78% of social and video platform users saying their purchase likelihood would rise for personally relevant advertising, with 56% saying the same about culturally relevant advertising. "If they're watching that kind of genre on Netflix and they're listening to music from certain artists, and your brand wants to talk like Bad Bunny, but their audience is not even listening to Bad Bunny, this is a more accurate way of approaching the audience," Alvarez notes.

Crossing the signals

No single feed shows what an audience consumes across formats, so he pulls from several at once. Network tools supply media data, and further feeds arrive through APIs, and Alvarez proposes counting live entertainment among them. "When you cross these different signals, what they are listening to in music, what they are watching on streaming devices, what they are looking at in traditional entertainment formats like theater or circus, and what's going on in the cultural aspect in a country, you can create a map of interests according to social economics and different kinds of audiences," he explains.

A map of that kind is only useful when it converts into instructions a creative team can act on. Alvarez describes an output specific enough to shape the work itself, extending to decisions that would otherwise be settled by convention. "It's based on what they want to see, not on what they're forced by your spending to see," he says.

Scoring before the spend

In a consumer survey across demographic segments, respondents who found an ad culturally relevant were 2.7 times more likely to buy a brand for the first time and 2.8 times more likely to recommend it than those who did not. Alvarez is careful about what that score claims. "It's not a prediction, it's more of a probability score of what these people are more likely to consume," Alvarez explains.

Building that score is an engineering problem as much as a planning one. The work is still in development, and Alvarez separates it from the forecasting tools the agency already runs. "I’m developing artificial intelligence capabilities for cultural intelligence, which is previous to the work being launched."

The commercial reason for building it appears at brand level, where brands scoring high on cultural relevance grow nearly six times faster than brands scoring low. Alvarez aims the system at the creative decisions themselves, working from a low estimate of what any advertiser can assume about an audience. "Nobody's running around saying, I'm going to go and watch an ad," concludes Alvarez. "No one is watching an ad purposely, so we are working on how we can have a better probability of what people would be more attracted to watching."