CultureRate:Ad measures ad performance using a proprietary metric, the Ad Cultural Fluency Quotient. With a deep oversample of diverse Americans, brand leaders get rich insight into how consumers process ads across race, ethnicity, generation, gender, sexuality and parent-child relationships.
Brand leaders use CultureRate:Ad and CultureRate:Brand to build cultural fluency, the capability to drive total market growth from inclusive, diverse-led marketing.
With a focus on the New Wave of Americans (18-40), the generation setting the pace for brand growth, CultureRate surveys are measuring ads and brands continuously. The CultureRate database is the largest of its type available, growing annually by over 200,000 responses or 30 million unique datapoints.
CultureRate:Ad leverages 10+ years of research and expertise in the survey design methods needed to understand diverse America. Built in partnership with more than 200 Collage Group brands across 10 major sectors, CultureRate:Ad allows you to:
Better understand how to touch hearts and minds through culturally authentic storylines, values, casting and more.
Capture halo effects that enable ads targeting one segment to succeed across all segments.
Show diverse consumers you know them, understand them, and value their lived experience.
Consistently measure and iterate on marketing that improves cultural resonance.
CultureRate:Ad data analyses convincingly reveal that culturally fluent advertising featuring a specific segment can and will resonate across broader audiences if done in an authentic, relatable way.
Don’t get trapped by the false “trade-off” that implies investment in culturally targeted ads for specific segments comes at the expense of general market impact. Winning brand leaders now understand that culturally targeted ads can leverage powerful halo effects that can reach the general market without compromising segment-specific nuance. Use CultureRate to take control of your message and learn how to tell culturally authentic stories that work with all segments.
CultureRate:Ad data is available across the following industries and demographic groups.
Home Care
Media
Non-Alcoholic Beverages
Personal Care
Telecom
Alcoholic Beverages
Automotive
Financial Services
Food / QSR
Health Care
To help brands connect the dots to existing testing methods, CultureRate:Ad explores the correlations among conventionally defined ad features, and the Ad-Cultural Fluency Quotient. We help clients cast new light not only into the required performance of these features, but also into how important they are to creating culturally resonant ads. These include ad features such as People, Stories, Visuals and Music; a range of user emotions including Pride, one of the most powerful culturally resonant emotions; and a range of Brand Effects measures, including various ways of measuring virality.
The CultureRate:Ad approach is now categorizing ads using an objective taxonomy that avoids the critical problem faced by some approaches, which rely on subjective categorization that can be easily disputed. The CulureRate taxonomy categorizes ads on a range of features.
The cultural transformation of the American consumer poses major creative challenges in advertising.
CultureRate is generating 30+ million datapoints annually, with nearly one million consumer responses collected since 2018.
Referencing the largest database of culturally focused consumer response to ads growing at an annual rate of 100-120 ads, 50,000 of responses or 9 million datapoints.
CultureRate:Ad helps marketers develop more efficient ad campaigns and executions.
Advertising traditionally is caught in a trade-off between campaigns targeting specific demographic segments, like Hispanic and Black, vs campaigns for the “general market.” We help you transcend this trade-off. Leveraging CultureRate:Ad, our ad testing methodology, we find the sweet spot in nuance, storyline and representation. We take it a step further to help you link cultural perspectives and deepen cultural resonance in general marketing campaigns while making dedicated marketing more effective. Use CultureRate:Ad to get more from your integrated ad campaigns or improve performance of targeted ad campaigns.
The Ad Cultural Fluency Quotient (A-CFQ) at the core of CultureRate:Ad is a powerful metric that improves favorability and purchase intention.
We measure four key experiences felt by survey respondents that reflect their cultural perspective. Use A-CFQ to understand how your executions are helping you become more inclusive of diverse consumers while maintaining your connection to core consumers. Build culturally fluent creative to avoid the risks of relying on generic and bland content, or on nuances that only some groups can understand.
Amplify the insights from your ad’s A-CFQ scores with Groundswell and Backlash metrics.
These metrics take conventional brand favorability a step further. We quantify the degree to which an ad can “flip” perception from positive to negative or vice versa. A startling 20-25% of consumers experience a “flip” in perception after watching just one ad, depending on the category.
Combining A-CFQ and Backlash metrics for each demographic segment reveal dynamics that make your ad successful.
Monthly CultureRate:Ad studies identify ads that resonate with the “New Wave,” consumers aged 18 to 40.
New Wavers grew up with far more diverse peers than any generation in American history. They look to brands to represent the diversity of their daily lives in advertising. CultureRate:Ad studies examine how ads within specific categories or industries rank on A-CFQ for each segment in the New Wave. Members can see how well ads rank on A-CFQ by race and ethnicity, LGBTQ+ status, gender, and by Hispanic acculturation. Learn more about how Collage Group has helped brands improve cultural fluency with CultureRate in our case study.
CultureRate is a benchmark from which to build cultural fluency and iterate over time.
Establish a starting point that allows for cultural fluency accountability–based on your score, we identify opportunities where you can improve, set timelines and goals for measurement, and tell the story of how and where you are improving cultural resonance over time.
CultureRate:Ad is complemented by our Cultural Traits system, a rigorously proven method for measuring cultural variation. CultureRate and Culture Traits provide a powerful one-two punch: CultureRate enables insights and marketing professionals to discover critical improvement opportunities in brand and ad performance that they can address by applying insights derived from Cultural Traits analyses.
CultureRate:Ad & Brand, Cultural Traits and much more are embedded as part of our consumer research platforms, and available to all members.
Use CultureRate:Ad to evaluate creative and augment standard testing with deep cultural insights into ad performance.
Clients use our CultureRate:Ad methodology on a custom basis to evaluate in-process creative, compare Spanish language and English language executions, and perform portfolio-level analysis to set creative strategy.
But there’s more. In combination with attitudes and usage studies, clients embed our proprietary cultural attributes profiling tool to gain powerful new insights into the connection between brand equities and positioning statements and cultural traits of target consumers by segment and ad performance.
I had the pleasure of taking part in one of our recent in-house studies, which took a look at over 250 iconic brands. In the end, we were able to objectively identify the top 10 brands for Hispanic consumers.
In 2022, increasing polarization on social issues revealed that America’s cultural divisions are likely here to stay.
Here’s an overview of the new consumer insights reports we’re releasing in Q4 2022 and beyond that you’re missing out on.
Where To Find Us
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Bethesda, Maryland, 20814
(240) 482-8260
Collage Group is a certified Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) by the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC).
Engage & Celebrate Women: A Conversation About Gender Equity
Representation alone is not enough to prove that your brand cares about their identity. Has your brand evolved to effectively understand and engage the modern American woman?
Women’s History Month, March 2023, is an opportunity for brands to celebrate women, and refocus year-round efforts to effectively connect. In commemoration of Women’s History Month, we invite you to join Collage Group and diversity, marketing and research leaders for a conversation on how to support women and advance gender equality.
