Culture hacking is how Middle Child (née The Colony Project) managing director Amanda Shuchat likes to describe her agency’s philosophy. It’s about understanding cultural conversations and being able to insert clients into them in a meaningful way.

Shuchat says Middle Child works to ID trends as they’re emerging – collecting insights that come from a cocktail of research, daily news and social listening, trend updates, collaborative brainstorms and dialogue directly with key audiences.

And while that might sound like table stakes for a PR agency today, pulling it off has taken a remarkable amount of skill and insight over the last 18 months – considering the global pandemic and a culture cognizant of social injustice now more than ever.

“There are different sensitivities than there were before,” says Shuchat, “and we need to be especially thoughtful in our counsel and what we’re doing to really make clients relevant.”

In fact, the agency now often consults with clients on what not to do as much what to do.

“A client will come to us and say, ‘This is a big sensitive issue – we want to put out a statement about this. We want to do a campaign or social post.’ And, a lot of times our counsel will be: ‘Don’t do it unless you’re willing to make a long-term meaningful investment.”