Inside Culture Works’ rebrand and pivot to a brand experience agency

The Brand Identity: Culture Works didn’t start as an agency. It began with four guys in Aarhus running a non-profit music association, learning to make people turn up and care before they learned to build a brand. Sixteen years on, that instinct underpins the agency’s biggest shift yet: a move from activation agency to brand experience agency, building on the conviction that being online alone no longer builds great brands in an AI-saturated world. It arrives with a new identity two years in the making, with a logomark made from handmade brushstrokes and sharp geometry, born out of team workshops, stacks of sketches and a fair few empty wine bottles.

In this conversation, Brand Director Mads Severinsen and Design Lead Jesper Juul Sehested Larsen explain why physical experience is gaining ground, why they keep running their own ventures and more. TBI Hi Mads and Jesper, how are you? Huge moment getting the new identity out there! MS Great, thank you. It’s definitely a huge moment for us. Culture Works is a small, family-driven agency and has always been deeply shaped by the personalities and people behind it. So there was no way around involving the entire team in the process to make sure the new identity genuinely reflected who we are. That also made it an extremely demanding process.

Balancing workshops, discussions and creative development with client projects and everyday agency life meant it ended up taking almost two years. There were moments where we questioned everything. But now that it’s live, we couldn’t be prouder of the result! TBI Culture Works started out as a non-profit music association. Does that origin still shape the agency today? MS Haha, it’s true. Looking at where we are today, the clients we work with and the scale of projects we deliver, it’s still a bit surreal to think about how it all started.

Four young guys with a vision to push the cultural scene in Aarhus, our hometown and Denmark’s second largest city, forward. But that mindset still shapes almost everything we do. Back then, we learned how to create and work with cultural mosaics before we learned how to build brands, campaigns and activations. We had to make people physically show up, care about something and feel part of it.

That teaches you a very different understanding of attention and relevance than traditional marketing does. Today, we’re a 12+ person agency across two cities, working with everything from brand strategy and identity to campaigns, employer branding and large-scale activations for international brands.

But fundamentally, we still approach brands more like communities or cultural platforms than traditional advertisers. Brands become memorable when people actively engage with them through authentic experiences. The world is prompting brands back towards real life again. The world is prompting brands back towards real life again. TBI What prompted the move from positioning yourselves as an activation agency to a brand experience agency? MS Funny you say prompted.

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The article discusses a significant rebranding of an agency that aligns with current industry trends, making it impactful and relevant, while the concept of brand experience is increasingly recognized, which slightly lowers its novelty.