Last week, I found myself in two very different rooms. The first, with the brightest strategy minds in the world for closed door sessions in New York, the other with the brightest talent drivers with UTA in Los Angeles; both were talking about the same thing: what happens after the algorithm.

At YMS, I joined Soy Kim, YouTube’s Head of Music & Podcast Content Strategy, to unpack how Gen Z and Gen Alpha are reshaping creative ecosystems. A few days later in LA, I sat with the UTA NextGen team diving into how brands can keep up.

Different coasts, different audiences — same realization. The future of creativity isn’t about reach or visibility anymore. It’s about fluency.

From brand strategy to creator ecosystems to audience behavior— culture has become the baseline. It’s no longer the backdrop of our work; it’s the foundation every creator, brand, and platform is now building from.

Let’s jump into how we got here.

How Culture Became the Baseline

From New York to Los Angeles, every conversation I had last week pointed to the same truth: the definition and importance of culture has evolved. What we think of as “trends” are really just layers of movement happening beneath the surface, slowly reshaping how we create, connect, and communicate. Over the past few years, we’ve watched influence decentralize, audiences become co-authors, and creativity transform from self-expression into infrastructure.

These aren’t isolated shifts — they’re the stages of a new cultural narrative. A framework for understanding how culture moves; the way brands interpret it; how audiences interact with it, and how we build around it as creators and architects of influence.

The Five Stages of Cultural Architecture

Culture doesn’t move randomly. It moves fluidly through structure, intention, and design.

What looks like a trend today is often a phase in a larger system — a shift in how creators, brands, and audiences build meaning together.

Here are the five stages shaping that system — the framework behind the new cultural economy.