Our Eye on Culture

We’re the Creative Strategy and Cultural Intelligence team at ViacomCBS Velocity, responsible for decoding what’s going on in culture for the branded content studio at one of the the world’s largest media companies. Whew. Now that that’s out of the way, hi!

We are a group of critical thinkers and strategists who care about the intersection of what matters in culture and what matters to marketers. Culture is the context in which we live, work, and play. Everything brands put out into the world, the conversations that advertisers take part in — all of these are determined by, and reflections of, the culture that we live in: Companies issuing statements and new initiatives in support of the Movement for Black Lives. Smirnoff and LVMH making hand sanitizer in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Steak-umm using Twitter to combat the spread of misinformation. Taco Bell creating branded Zoom backgrounds.

Our team is highly tuned into the movements of culture across audience segments, interest groups, and brand responses. We come from a range of ages, geographies, and ethnic backgrounds, and our past jobs and side hustles include photographing nightlife, producing videos, curating exhibitions, and being micro-influencers. We’re interested in everything from the memeification of movements to the rise of camming, how consumers turn themselves into brands and how companies compete for attention in the changing media landscape. We tune in to everything from the Wall Street Journal to TikTok, but we’re extra curious about leading edge culture as it relates to youth audiences, with a focus on Gen Z as the current and future culture-makers.

We like to stay promiscuous in our approach to theory and methodology. Our cultural sleuthing methods range from the personal — bursting our social media bubbles, making our own TikTok videos — to the scientific, considering all sorts of signals as we analyze trends (survey data, Twitter threads, memes, astrological charts). We stan semiotics — the study of signs and symbols — which we use to decode the words, images, and sounds we encounter. And while we may borrow the theoretical lenses of McLuhan and Sontag, we corroborate all of our ideas with language from real-life consumers, marrying academic thought with user research and marketing.

As more and more of our lives move online, we’re using this platform to share the trends we’re tracking, and how they relate to wide-ranging culture. We’ll look at how Gen Z both responds to and influences culture at large, and how brand leaders can reframe young consumers as creators and partners. We will explore how marketers can think responsibly and responsively about how to communicate with their audiences. And we’ll engage in some speculative thinking about how the trends we’re seeing today will impact the culture of the future.

Some questions we’ll use this space to answer:

• How do consumer expectations push brands towards activism?
• Will virtual reality start mainstreaming in a post-COVID world?
• How are young people fulfilling their needs for intimacy amidst a global pandemic?
• Will technological addictions follow in the footsteps of big tobacco?
• Does sex still sell in advertising?
• What does social media tell us about the future of American democracy?
• How do we celebrate the past through a contemporary, intersectional lens?

Stay tuned.