REALMS LAUNCHES TO REFRAME CULTURAL STRATEGY

Senior industry leaders Rhian Mason and Elly Brand have launched REALMS, an independent culture consultancy designed to connect specialist brand and agency capabilities around cultural opportunities. Built as an operating model for culture, REALMS aims to transform cultural intelligence into coordinated action, ensuring relevance across creative, media, social and partnerships.

Senior industry leaders Rhian Mason and Elly Brand have unveiled REALMS, a new independent culture consultancy that promises to reshape how brands and agencies engage with culture. Positioned as an operating model for culture, REALMS is designed to connect specialist capabilities around shared cultural opportunities, ensuring intelligence translates into coordinated action across disciplines.

The consultancy emerges at a time when marketing has become increasingly specialised, while culture itself has grown more interconnected. Culture is not a series of reactive trends, Mason and Brand argue, but a fluid force moving across platforms, communities, creators, media, entertainment, experiences and commerce. Yet brand and agency teams remain largely organised by discipline, often producing fragmented strategies. REALMS seeks to bridge this gap by aligning teams around one cultural strategy.

“Most organisations don’t have a capability problem. They have a connection problem,” said co-founder Rhian Mason. “The opportunity isn’t to undo specialisation. It’s to connect it around the same cultural opportunity, rather than producing separate discipline and channel plans.” REALMS will remain independent and senior-led, offering a model where ownership, ambition and flexibility coexist—particularly significant as a new blueprint for senior women in the industry.

Rather than replacing specialist partners, REALMS plugs into brand teams, agency teams and integrated agency villages to connect existing expertise around a shared cultural strategy. Its focus lies in the disciplines where cultural behaviour is evolving fastest—social, earned, creators, content and partnerships—while ensuring cultural intelligence also informs creative, media, experiences and broader brand activity. The result is a single cultural strategy that can shape everything from creative briefs and social ecosystems to creator partnerships, earned ideas, media opportunities and brand experiences. Importantly, REALMS’ tools are designed to turn cultural signals into actionable strategy, briefs and ideas, not just trend reports.

Together, Mason and Brand bring more than 25 years of experience. Mason’s leadership roles span M+C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment, Clemenger BBDO and Emotive, while Brand’s career includes McCann and TEDxSydney. Their client portfolios feature global names such as Google, Amazon, CommBank, LEGO, eBay, Mastercard, Microsoft, Hyundai and L’Oréal. For Brand, the way companies hire Heads of Social reflects a deeper structural issue. “We keep hiring ‘culture-obsessed’ social leads, then bringing them into the process after the big decisions have already been made,” she noted. “One person is expected to span cultural strategy, community, creators, platforms, paid amplification and content, while somehow championing culture across the organisation.”

Her conclusion is clear: cultural relevance cannot be retrofitted at the end. “If culture matters to the brand, it has to shape creative, media, earned, creators, partnerships and social from the beginning. Culture should be a shared responsibility, not a final layer applied by social,” Brand said.

REALMS’ launch signals a shift in how cultural intelligence is harnessed. By reframing culture as a connected operating model rather than a reactive trend cycle, Mason and Brand are offering brands a way to embed cultural relevance at the heart of their strategies—ensuring it informs every discipline, every decision and every opportunity.