Cultural currency: beg, borrow, earn

When Publicis acquired Influential in 2024, it signalled a clear direction of travel. Since then Omnicom has consolidated its influencer capability under a single ‘influencers as a media channel’ brand, while WPP has wired creator dealmaking into its own AI platform. Three holding companies, one conclusion: creator marketing is now part of the mainstream marketing system.

Media agencies are investing in scale, automation and buying power. PR has responded by reinforcing earned credibility, corporate counsel and reputation management. Both responses are rational. Together they expose a larger problem. 

The infrastructure is integrating, faster than organisational strategy.

The choice is not between paid reach and earned trust. The more important asset is cultural currency: the relevance, value and trust a brand earns within specific communities.

Reach can buy attention, but it cannot buy standing. That is the point: the infrastructure now being built at scale is intended to capture something it cannot create on its own.

Those working on the earned side of large communications groups often see the gap most clearly. Programmatic infrastructure is being built around them, while the harder-to-scale work of earning genuine standing risks being treated as secondary.

Cultural currency is the standing that allows a brand or organisation to matter within a community: accumulated relevance and value, recognised as genuine, that determine whether people notice it, believe it, participate with it or permit it to lead. It can be built, protected, borrowed, spent and rebuilt. Misuse depreciates it faster than absence does.

Different communities, different trust systems

For consumer brands, cultural currency is the difference between being genuinely embedded in a community and mining it for attention. Creators hold standing within their communities; brands that work with them well are borrowing that currency, not renting an audience.

For corporate brands and institutions, it is equally specific: the standing to be believed when a position is taken, the authority to lead a narrative rather than react to one, and the credibility that holds across regulators, investors, employees and media. Organisations operating in both registers face a compounded challenge: what builds cultural currency with a consumer community can deplete it with an institutional one, and vice versa.

The commercial task is therefore broader than choosing the right creators or managing reputational risk. It is building cultural currency across different trust systems without accumulating it in one place by depleting it in another.

PR’s traditional trust model is institutional and evidential. Creator trust is relational and community-based. Neither replaces the other; both are forms of earned belief. The highest-value work sits where they reinforce one another.

Reach is not influence

The measurement problem deepens the separation. When influencer marketing acquired a budget line, the instinct was to justify it in the language the rest of the room already spoke: reach, impressions and cost per thousand. That made the work legible. It also obscured what the work was meant to achieve.

Measuring influence in reach terms is a category error. It describes how far a message travelled, not whether anyone within a particular community changed how they thought, felt or behaved. Reach matters, but it is not the same as influence; treating the two as equivalent is how the argument keeps getting lost.

Programmatic systems optimise for audience matching, but they are less able to distinguish the roles people play within communities. Some creators are genuine innovators whose opinions and choices others follow. Others are connectors, carrying ideas across sub-communities. Others are amplifiers: people with large followings who distribute ideas effectively but rarely originate them.

Borrowing cultural currency from an innovator a community genuinely follows is fundamentally different from renting reach from an amplifier with the same demographic profile. Audience data can identify similarity; it cannot, by itself, establish the source and quality of authority. That remains a matter of cultural and strategic judgement.

One asset, many owners

This is not a new strategic problem. Working with Unilever on integrated programmes, the brief was to bring together two approaches to influence and apply media metrics to earned work. The tension was familiar: two disciplines measuring value in different currencies, reporting to different leaders and lacking a shared framework for what they were collectively building or depleting across communities.

The problem was not channel or creator selection. It was agreement on what the work was for and who held the view across it. A consumer campaign could build relevance with one audience while reputation work managed a different set of stakeholder perceptions, with the brand’s cultural currency moving in several registers at once.

Advocacy Ignition, a planning framework I wrote for Weber Shandwick back in 2006, was built around the same question: how influence moves through communities, who holds it and why, and how organisations earn it through relationships and conversation. The terminology has changed; the underlying question has not.

Cultural currency provides a stronger commercial language for that question. It compounds through sustained participation and depreciates when brands treat communities as short-term transactions. It rests on relevance and value the community recognises as genuine; without those, influence cannot be earned, only rented.

Different organisational functions affect the same underlying asset. Media, communications, public affairs, employer brand and community engagement may sit in different teams, use different data and answer to different leaders, but audiences do not experience them separately.

The creator economy has not created the integration problem. It has simply made the cost of ignoring it much higher.

The communications industry is investing heavily in the machinery of creator marketing. The larger opportunity is to manage the cultural currency that machinery is intended to build. Doing that requires judgement across communities, disciplines and trust systems: an understanding of what each community values, who holds authority within it, how one action changes standing elsewhere and how the whole system joins up. That capability risks being undervalued precisely as the market prioritises scale and automation.