Peer39 Interview Series: Joe Lige, CEO, Culture Hive Media Group

Culture Hive Media Group now has pre-bid segments available in Peer39's Contextual Data Marketplace^®. Their mission is to shift the advertising industry from demographic targeting to culture-first activation. Through its proprietary cultural intelligence technology and Cultural Relevance Score (CRS™), the company helps brands better understand and connect with audiences based on shared values, identity, and community—turning cultural fit into a measurable advantage. In anticipation of our upcoming partnership, we sat down with Joe Lige, CEO, Culture Hive Media Group, to learn more. 

Why do you feel that traditional demographic targeting is not enough to reach today's consumers?

Joe Lige: Demographics tell you who someone is. They don’t tell you how they behave—or what actually drives their decisions. In today’s fragmented media landscape, behavior is shaped by culture: the communities people participate in, the content they engage with, and the moments they care about. That’s where attention is earned and influence happens.

The gap between demographic targeting and cultural behavior is why so much advertising feels irrelevant and underperforms. If you are not aligned to culture, you're not aligned to what drives action.

The next era of media isn’t audience-first. It’s culture-first.

Why has cultural targeting historically been treated as a multicultural or DEI add-on rather than a core performance driver?

Because the industry treated culture as a category instead of a signal.

“Multicultural” became a line item—something to layer onto a plan—rather than a foundational input into how media is bought. That framing limited culture to specific audiences instead of recognizing it as a universal driver of behavior across all consumers.

The reality is culture shapes identity, trust, and decision making at scale. It’s not a niche, it’s the system underneath how people engage with media. What’s been missing is a way to operationalize culture as a measurable, scalable signal. That’s the shift we’re driving—moving culture from the margins of planning into the core of performance.

How does Culture Hive rethink audience strategy through a culture lens?

We fundamentally changed the starting point. 

Instead of asking "who is the audience" we ask "what cultural signals define how this audience behaves". 

We translate those signals into scalable segments through our CRS™ framework, built on real-world cultural participation across content, environments, and moments — not static demographic traits. 

From there, we activate directly against environments where that culture is already expressed. 

This creates a closed loop:

• Cultural intelligence defines behavior

• CRS makes it measurable and scalable
• Activation ensures alignment in market

The result is a shift from static audience targeting to dynamic cultural alignment where every impression is grounded in real behavior, not assumptions.

Can you walk us through the Cultural Relevance Score (CRS™) and how AI helps you measure cultural fit—and flag cultural missteps—before a campaign goes live?

CRS™ is the first system design to make cultural relevance measurable, actionable, and transactable. 

It evaluates how well any environment aligns with specific cultural segments by analyzing: 

• Cultural alignment to real behavioral segments
• Contextual and editorial signals
• Content and engagement patterns
• Risk indicators tied to cultural misalignment

AI allows us to process this at scale across the open web and CTV— turning culture from qualitative insight into quantified signal. For advertisers, that changes two things:

First, it shows exactly where to invest to maximize relevance and performance. Second, it proactively flags where not to show up — reducing the risk before a campaign goes live. CRS™ doesn't just optimize media. It ensures every impression is culturally aligned to drive better outcomes. 

What does culture-first targeting look like in the wild? Can you share an example of a brand getting it right?

The brands that get it right are not trying to enter culture — they're reflecting it. 

With MSI, instead of targeting "gamers" as a broad category, we broke the audience into distinct cultural segments like PC builders, esports communities, and streaming culture. Each of these groups behaves differently and engages in different environments. 

Using CRS™, we identified where those cultures were actively expressed across the open web, then aligned media and messaging to those environments. 

The result was a 30% lift in engagement compared to standard category targeting, driven by cultural alignment, not broad reach. This is what culture-first targeting looks like in practice: not just reaching an audience, but showing up in the moments and environments where relevance already exists. 

Peer39 is Culture Hive's first Channel Distribution Partner. What does that mean for advertisers, and what can the industry expect as CRS™ pre-bid segments roll out across DSPs and SSPs?

This partnership marks a critical shift from culture insight to market infrastructure. 

Peer39 operates in the decisioning layer where programmatic buying actually happens. By integrating CRS™ into pre-bid environments, we're making cultural relevance a real-time input into how media is transacted. For advertisers, it means:

• Direct access to CRS™ segments at the point of decisioning 

• The ability to target cultural alignment, not just content categories 
• A more precise way to connect media investment to real consumer behavior
  

For the industry, this is bigger than access. It's the beginning of standardizing culture as a transactable signal. 

CRS™ segments are not repackaged audiences. They're built from the ground up to reflect how culture actually operates; dynamic, behavioral, and constantly evolving. 

As CRS™ expands across SSPs and DSPs, cultural relevance won't be an overlay or afterthought. It will become a core input into how media is planned, bought, and optimized. 

This is how the industry moves from targeting people to aligning with behavior — and from assumptions to measurable relevance.

For anyone interested in learning more about Culture Hive's segments, you can explore and activate them directly in-platform, within your DSP of choice, or reach out to your Peer39 Account Manager to get started.