Authored by: Kaveri Roy, Senior Director - Strategic Planning & Creativity at Burson India. There is a version of this conversation happening in every communications agency right now. Someone senior says, "We need to be more culturally relevant." Someone junior nods. A mood board gets made. A creator gets briefed. The campaign launches, gets decent reach, disappears within a week, and everyone quietly moves on to the next one. Nothing technically went wrong. And yet nothing quite worked either. That gap between execution that is competent and impact that compounds is where the most interesting question in PR currently lives. And the answer is not just about selling in better ideas. It’s also a fundamentally different understanding of what creativity is supposed to do. Because when cultural relevance is treated as a one-off creative output rather than something a brand earns through consistent participation, the impact on reputation is inevitably short-lived. To understand why, it helps to start with why the old model made sense in the first place. What the Broadcast Era Got Right (And Why That's Now the Problem) The campaign model was a logical response to the media environment that then existed. With a handful of television channels, a few major newspapers, and limited digital real estate, attention was concentrated. If a brand could afford to occupy that space with something memorable, it won. Reach and frequency were the mechanics. A strong message, delivered consistently at scale, shaped public perception almost by default. The problem is that the environment it was designed for no longer exists, and the muscle memory of that era still drives most of how communications is planned, briefed, and measured. That doesn't mean broadcast has become irrelevant. For some audiences, some categories, and some moments, mass reach is still exactly the right answer. But the environment around it has become far more fragmented and saturated, with audiences moving between mainstream media, creators, communities, and niche cultural spaces. What replaced that environment went far beyond platform and demographic shifts. The Shift Nobody Fully Named What nobody fully accounted for was the direction cultural influence travels. Influence now moves horizontally, through peer networks, creator communities, fandoms, and shared context that builds inside niche corners of the internet before it ever reaches mainstream visibility. A trend originating on a regional meme page can travel nationally faster than a brand campaign could get through legal approval. So today, a social post requires the same preparation and care as a broadcast media interview.In India, this inversion is happening at a pace that makes it one of the most instructive markets to watch. Over 950 million internet users, one of the world's largest creator economies, a digital culture moving simultaneously across languages and geographies that traditional segmentation would treat as entirely separate. A Malayalam meme format, a Delhi food trend, and a Tamil creator catchphrase can all be in the same national conversation on the same Tuesday afternoon, with local specificity and national reach not in tension but actively reinforcing each other. What becomes relevant is decided collectively, publicly, and in real time. AI arriving in this environment removed the last remaining reason to pretend the old model still worked, but not entirely in the way most people assume. The Attention Economy Got a Second-Order Problem The obvious observation most people make is that AI helps develop content faster and cheaper. And that is undoubtedly part of the opportunity. But AI's more consequential impact on communications may be what it makes possible beyond content production: the ability to listen, detect patterns, and understand cultural movement at a scale and speed that humans alone could not. AI is also the most powerful listening and pattern recognition tool that communications has ever had access to. It can map emerging cultural conversations before they surface, identify genuine community momentum versus manufactured noise, and help smaller teams participate at a scale that previously required significant resources. The opportunity is not to replace cultural judgement with AI, but to use AI to sharpen it: to understand which cultural spaces matter, which communities a brand has earned the right to participate in, and when the window to act is opening. This is the shift from simply tracking trends to understanding cultural playgrounds: the subcultures, communities, and conversations that shape what people care about, and where brands can build relevance over time. The role of technology is to make that map clearer. The role of people is to know what to do with it. Cultural credibility is now a harder asset to build and a more durable one to hold than any individual piece of content. People are drawn toward what feels irreducibly human: genuine cultural fluency, shared context, trust built through consistency, humour that requires insider knowledge. AI sharpens the map. The territory still belongs to people, and that territory runs on a logic most brands have been slow to internalise. Optimising for Participation Culture Digital culture manufactures collective desire in real time, and it optimises for belonging. The question audiences are unconsciously asking when they encounter brand content is no longer simply "Is this useful?" It has become "Does engaging with this say something about who I am?" Fandoms, creator communities, gaming groups, niche comment sections: all these spaces generate emotional closeness that polished brand communication structurally cannot replicate, because the closeness comes from participation. A creator who says "We found this before it got famous" is doing something categorically different from a brand announcing the same discovery. The creator is offering membership. The brand is making an announcement. The internet rewards participation over perfection. Always has, increasingly does. What this creates is 'community gravity'—the capacity of certain online spaces and fandoms to pull people into shared behaviours, references, and meaning. Community gravity compounds over time. Campaign reach does not. Food culture makes this visible: the most successful food and beverage brands launching today are designed for online participation before they reach retail shelves. The product is the entry point. The culture around it is the actual product. For brands, this means moving beyond the question of "Where is my audience?" to "Which cultures and communities are most relevant to my brand, and where have I earned the right to participate?" This is the thinking behind cultural segmentation: starting with the culture rather than the demographic, and then finding the people who participate in it. Burson’s Culture Up work has found a 33% increase in purchase intent when brands use cultural segmentation rather than traditional demographic segmentation, which is a useful reminder that cultural relevance is not simply a softer measure of brand affinity; it can have a measurable business consequence. The result is not one audience, but a cultural portfolio: the ecosystem of cultural playgrounds where a brand can credibly show up, contribute, and build relevance. The creative opportunity then becomes less about forcing a brand into every cultural moment and more about choosing the right spaces in which it can genuinely belong. From Message Architecture to Participation Architecture Most creative briefs in PR, though, are still written as if the product is the point, still centred on the same question: what do we want to say? The more generative question is: what do we want people to do with what we give them? Message architecture treats the audience as a receiver and defines success as coverage and recall. Participation architecture treats the audience as a co-creator and defines success as longevity, producing open-source cultural assets: ideas, formats, and rituals that communities can claim, adapt, and continue long after the campaign budget has been spent. The brands sustaining cultural relevance leave space in the idea. They design for participation first and polish second. They understand the goal is to make the story worth continuing. Most of the industry, though, still works from the opposite instinct. And that is where creativity in communications is heading: away from creating a finished story and towards creating the conditions for a story to keep moving. The strongest ideas do not simply generate attention; they create something people can participate in, adapt, share, and ultimately associate with the brand. Over time, that repeated participation is what turns cultural relevance into reputational equity. The Future of Creativity in Communications Is an Open Loop Creativity in communications will not be defined by how effectively a campaign closes a message, but by how well an idea opens a conversation that people want to continue. Great advertising has traditionally been designed to close the loop: create desire, resolve it toward purchase, and measure the conversion. Communications has an opportunity to work differently. The creative goal can be to open a loop that communities want to close themselves. This is why the measure of success of earned-first creative communications moves from how many people received the message to how many chose to carry it forward without being asked or paid to do so. Cultural fluency becomes the primary discipline: understanding not just what communities care about, but what they are already doing, and where an idea can genuinely inhabit that space rather than advertise adjacent to it. In India especially, audiences read the difference between a brand inserting itself into culture and one genuinely participating in it. Community-driven credibility travels faster than corporate messaging. Community-driven damage travels faster still. Both realities have direct consequences for how communications teams need to be built. The opportunity for PR is therefore not simply to become "more creative". It is to redefine what creativity is solving for: relevance, participation, credibility, and ultimately reputation. A creative idea that earns genuine participation can do more than win a news cycle; it can give a brand a meaningful place in culture. What This Means for Communications Teams Right Now The traditional separation between PR, social, influencer, community management, and cultural intelligence is architecturally misaligned with how culture moves. Culture does not move in departments. Building teams around silos produces communications that feels exactly as fragmented as the org chart that generated it. Cultural pattern recognition—identifying what is emerging before it reaches mainstream visibility—now matters more than many of the skills that job descriptions still prioritise. Gen Alpha will make this more acute, as the first generation raised inside fully interactive digital environments where participation is the default. In spaces where everything is expected to be remixable, static messaging barely registers. The teams that win will therefore look less like collections of channel specialists and more like cultural intelligence systems: people who can identify the right cultural playgrounds, understand the communities within them, spot the moments when cultural momentum is building, and translate those signals into ideas people actually want to participate in. Technology will make that process faster and more precise. But the strategic judgement will remain human: knowing which communities matter, what a brand has earned the right to say, when to enter, and when not to. Because ultimately, the value of cultural relevance is not relevance for its own sake. It is what relevance builds over time: familiarity, credibility, and a stronger reputation. And the business case is beginning to catch up with the cultural one. Burson’s analysis of more than 10 million data points across 30 global brands found that combining cultural segmentation, a dynamic cultural portfolio, and the right moment for activation can drive a 3.2x lift in purchase intent. The most enduring communications work of the next decade will not be remembered because it dominated a media cycle. It will be remembered because people chose to keep it alive. And when people choose to keep a brand's idea, story, or participation alive, the outcome is bigger than a successful campaign. It is a brand that has earned a place in culture and, in doing so, strengthened the reputation that makes that place worth having.DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and theprpost.com does not necessarily subscribe to it.