Part 3 of The Cultural Fluency Advantage
Most agencies aren’t asked to go deep. So they don’t. Not because they’re lazy, but because the system rewards speed over sharpness, and alignment over impact. Most communications still get built from the inside out: strategy first, media second, creative third, localization at the end. A few tweaks. A global toolkit. And off it goes.
All agencies – indies or not – want to deliver more value. But to do that, you have to create it first. That means starting closer to where the work lands. Where value is transacted. In the market. On the platform. In the moment when someone might actually feel something or do something different. You have to start between the ears of your audience. That’s the hard part. But it’s also the right part.
Start closer to where the work lands
At JOLT, we approach this by working backwards; from the industry trade show, the supermarket aisle, the commerce platform, the gifting moment, the lunch break walk. Finding the point at which someone is most receptive to the message. Understanding how they feel in that moment. What they need. What they reject. What role the brand might realistically play. Then we build from there, back to the strategy. Back to how to win. It sounds slower. But it’s smarter.
Because when you plan from the edges inward, and base decisions on actual human and behavioral signals, rather than creative hope, risk goes down. Relevance goes up. And campaign effectiveness becomes an input, not an outcome. Our planning process is built for that: to start closer to the moment of human truth, and reverse-engineer campaigns so they don’t just fit, but they work.
Making fluency operational
It’d be arrogant to say it’s about smarter insights. What it is about, though, is structure. Allowing for a system that lets those insights shape the work instead of getting diluted or delayed. That starts with how the problem is framed. Too often, that happens before anyone’s looked at how the message will show up in the real world; who’s saying it, when, through which screen, and in what emotional state. In a better process, that gets built in from the start. Not as decoration. But as foundation.
The system we use runs through six collaborative steps: from fact-finding and insight development, to defining commercial and emotional tension and opportune moments, to aligning formally with the client on the brief we need to solve for. The goal of our process isn’t more complexity. It’s clarity. What’s the work really trying to do? And what’s most likely to make it stick?
The role of process – and where most fall down
I have a strong belief that fluency becomes real only when it’s given a place in the process. That’s why we developed our own approach J-CULT as a working calibration engine. It’s what we use to pressure-test tone, decode platform logic, map moments of optimum ad receptivity (and a few other things). And when something’s unclear, the process obliges us to go and find it. Not with assumptions. With research.
And as there’s no single source of truth for cultural timing, we interrogate it until we have clarity. Market-specific moment mapping. CEP entry point testing. Creator role calibration. Social response tracking that goes deeper than a metric. This is what fluency needs to thrive – and what most global processes often don’t make room for.
When the structure is in place. When the message, moment, and messenger are aligned. It doesn’t just work. It really works.
What structure actually lets us do differently
I’d like to think that most of us have been in the room where one sentence from a market lead – usually unprompted, often at the end of a call – quietly reset the entire brief. Not because it challenged the idea, but because it clarified the moment we were hunting for: The real audience in the right emotional context. And suddenly everything else started to fall into place.
That’s what structured cultural fluency allows for on a consistent basis. The signal isn’t lost. The market isn’t an afterthought. The creative doesn’t feel like a fit check. And the team doesn’t burn three rounds just to land on something that feels honest.
Proof, not promise
We see the difference when fluency is built into the system from the start, not added at the end. CEP timing has shaped creative in ways that lifts branded search significantly. Messaging calibrated through J-CULT, e.g. tone, rhythm, messenger delivers sharply higher engagement, especially when matched to local platform logic. And in markets where campaign flighting is sequenced to actual cultural usage windows, not global launch cycles, we see massive reductions in media waste. This doesn’t happen because we push for localization. It happens because we plan for relevance; emotionally, behaviorally, commercially.
The system’s the unlock – not the people
Cultural fluency should never be reduced to a creative instinct. It’s a system requirement. And if your planning model isn’t built to surface, protect and scale, it won’t show up. Not because people don’t care. But because the process isn’t designed to let them.
Over the last few years, we’ve worked to rebuild our system. Not to slow things down, but to remove the expensive, last-minute workarounds that happen when context is added too late. When the system is working properly, the ideas sharpen. Media and creative works harder, together. The team finds alignment earlier. And most importantly, the work moves people. In the head, the heart, or the wallet. Sometimes all three.
As an industry, I think we can all learn from the past. We can ask better questions, earlier, sharper and closer to the audience. We can give good teams the tools to make better decisions, before the cost of being wrong gets expensive.
Because when fluency is built in, you don’t need a hero to make the campaign land. You just need a system that knows what it’s doing.
Sebastien Lepez, Founder and CEO at JOLT Digital
