Brands Are Leaving Billions in Cultural Growth Unpriced, New ANA Research Finds

"Growth, Unfinished" shows brands how to capture $250 billion opportunity; ANA Cultural Leadership Alliance is providing the formula and toolbox to drive each brand's transformation

New York, New York, October 29, 2026 - Brands know where their next growth is coming from. Few have priced it, and fewer still have built their business to capture it. That is the central finding of Growth, Unfinished, new research released by ANA Cultural Marketing ahead of the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference. The research is paired with a plan from the ANA Cultural Marketing practice to help brands capture the incremental growth they are leaving on the table.

The study draws on more than fifty candid, one-on-one exchanges with senior client-side marketers and marketing solution providers. Several leaders estimated that large brands typically leave "hundreds of millions of dollars annually" unrealized. Growth audiences, the multicultural consumers now driving U.S. population growth, make up an estimated half of Gen Z, yet they receive only about 5% of advertising investment.

"Strong brands drive superior growth, and culture is one of the most powerful and underinvested pathways to that growth," said Bob Liodice, CEO, ANA. "Growth is our centerpiece. The Cultural Leadership Alliance puts the industry's leaders to work sharing best practices, measuring results, and helping their business and their peer organizations learn how to capture it."

The growth math

"The growth is here now, but the investment is not," said Carlos Santiago, EVP, ANA Cultural Leadership Alliance and ANA Cultural Marketing. "This is a growth conversation, in the language of revenue, which every CFO speaks. Culture is the multiplier to achieve that growth."

ANA Cultural Leadership Alliance has summarized the opportunity in a single equation:

(Culture × Growth Audiences × Investment) − Barriers + AI = Growth

Across the 246 consumer-facing companies among the top 500 U.S. advertisers, ANA Cultural Leadership Alliance's directional planning projects the opportunity at $250 billion a year in aggregate US sales from closing cultural fluency gaps by 10 points.

What brands need to capture the growth, and the toolbox and engine ANA Cultural Leadership Alliance is building

Study participants clearly identified the barriers to incremental growth. The ANA Cultural Leadership Alliance is developing a toolbox tailored to each need:

1. Their own number. Brands need a dollar figure for their own brand, not an industry statistic. Among the first tools are brand-by-brand growth dashboards developed with Collage Group, the leading cultural intelligence company. Each one benchmarks a brand's cultural relevance against its category leader and sizes the revenue that gap is worth.
2. Proof the CFO accepts. Campaign lift alone hides the loyalty and lifetime-value gains that culture drives. ANA Cultural Leadership Alliance's Value Creation Lab runs experiments tying cultural relevance to ROAS, brand value, customer lifetime value, and enterprise growth, including tests of culturally fluent AI.
3. Culture built into the plan. Growth comes when cultural fluency shapes the brief, creative, media, and measurement from the start, not as a review at the end. ANA Cultural Leadership Alliance equips teams with testing tools, playbooks, and cultural intelligence to make that standard practice.

"The companies that capture this growth won't treat cultural fluency as a specialty," said Stephanie Eaddy, Cultural Marketing Lead for North America at The Coca-Cola Company. "They'll embed it into how the enterprise plans, creates, and makes decisions. That is how opportunity becomes growth at scale."

1. Shared standards. No single company can set the industry's proof standard alone. ANA Cultural Leadership Alliance is building common measurements and definitions that every brand and partner can use.
2. Leaders at one table. The ANA Cultural Leadership Alliance Leadership Council brings client-side marketers and their marketing partners together, with a direct line to the CMOs of the ANA Global Growth Council.

"The $250 billion opportunity is only the beginning. The real question is what it means for each brand," said David Wellisch, co-founder and chairman of Collage Group. Through our work with the ANA Cultural Leadership Alliance, we are helping marketers quantify that opportunity and act on it."

The toolbox will roll out first to ANA Cultural Leadership Alliance members. What the Alliance proves, the ANA Cultural Marketing Center of Excellence will disseminate to the ANA's full community and help scale growth industry wide.

Media Contact
[email protected]

About the ANA Cultural Leadership Alliance
The ANA Cultural Leadership Alliance (ANA Cultural Leadership Alliance) is the premium leadership coalition within ANA Cultural Marketing. It unites senior marketers from leading brands and their marketing partners to close brands' growth gap by making culture-led marketing standard practice.

About the ANA

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) is the definitive voice of the marketing industry. Since 1910, we have set and advanced the agenda for marketing transformation, connecting over 1,600 member companies to an influential global network, insights and resources that drive growth. Our members represent 20,000 brands and $400 billion in annual marketing investment. Through industry-leading research, the CMO Growth Council, and our proprietary Growth Agenda and Practices, the ANA empowers marketers to shape the future of marketing and create lasting impact for their organizations and the industry.

About Collage
Collage Group is the leading cultural intelligence company, trusted by 250 of the world's top brands. Combining billions of proprietary data points with decades of cultural expertise, Collage helps brands quantify untapped audience growth opportunities across audiences and uncover the cultural and emotional motivations behind consumer choice. Its AI-powered platform and expert guidance turn those insights into creative, product and channel strategies that strengthen consumer connections, deepen loyalty and drive growth.