NEW YORK — April 27, 2026 — Sundial Media & Technology Group, whose portfolio includes ESSENCE, Refinery29, AFROPUNK, and BeautyCon, and Culture Hive Media Group today announced a strategic partnership to redefine how media is planned, activated, and measured by making cultural relevance a real-time transactable signal.
Together, the companies are turning over a century of cultural insight into a modern intelligence system creating a closed loop where cultural signals are identified, scored, and activated in real time. Sundial contributes first-party data rooted in real communities and authentic cultural participation. Culture Hive powers the system with its Cultural Relevance Score (CRS™), the first framework that makes culture measurable, scalable, and actionable within the programmatic ecosystem.
“Advertisers have always known that relevance drives performance, but they haven’t had a consistent way to act on it,” said Kirk McDonald, CEO of Sundial Media & Technology Group. “As a human connections platform built on more than 100 years of cultural insight, we understand that real influence lives within communities, not just content. This partnership turns that legacy into a modern intelligence layer, giving brands a clear, actionable path to align media investment with the environments and communities that shape behavior, and ultimately drive more meaningful, measurable connections.”
For the first time, publishers, platforms, and brands can operate on a shared system for cultural intelligence, turning culture from a qualitative input into a measurable, transactable signal that informs how media is planned, bought, and optimized.
“This partnership replaces assumption with precision, giving brands the ability to invest with confidence in culturally aligned environments that drive performance,” said Joe Lige, CEO, Culture Hive. The industry has treated culture as a proxy for DEI that misses the point.Culture drives behavior, and we can now measure and activate it at scale. CRS makes that possible. This marks a turning point for the industry: culture is no longer just an input into strategy, but a core signal in how media is transacted.”
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