Jupiter Huidrom leads Integrated Media Strategy at Weber Shandwick Singapore, helping global B2B and B2C brands connect with communities through culture-driven, AI-enabled strategy. His work focuses on turning fragmented channels into one interconnected ecosystem, where PR, influencers, social, paid and earned media amplify each other to build genuine relevance and belonging. With experience across emerging markets and deep expertise in cultural analytics, he bridges data, creativity and local insight to help brands show up in ways that feel human, timely and meaningful. In this interview with Shivangi Agarwal of The Himalayan Times, he shared his perspective on media strategy, culture and belonging in the age of AI. Excerpts: You lead Integrated Media Strategy at Weber Shandwick in Singapore, working across B2B and B2C clients. How do you think media strategy can help a brand foster real emotional connection and belonging with its audience? Winning today means winning in culture. Brands need to be honest about their place in people's lives because for most audiences, a brand is only a small part of their cultural world. As strategists, our role is to bridge that gap – to make sure brand worlds connect meaningfully to people's real worlds. It begins with understanding the brand's role in culture in a way that feels earned and authentic, then identifying the community truths that can unlock ideas people genuinely want to engage with. This is where media strategy becomes critical: translating those ideas into the right delivery, at the right moment, to the right communities. To build real emotional connection and belonging, brands need to move from an omnichannel mindset to an interconnected, community-specific one. Too often PR, influencer, social, ATL and BTL are treated as separate streams, when audiences experience all of it as one ecosystem. The job of media strategy is to make these channels accelerate one another - influencers spark earned attention, social reactions amplify it, and media builds the receptivity needed for advertising to land with impact. What underpins all of this is the ability to combine the power of AI with the intuition of cultural strategists. That's how we ensure we're not only reaching audiences but generating measurable passion - getting through to communities, sparking interest and earning true advocacy for the brand. With so much of your work involving performance marketing, AI and automation, how do you maintain creativity and purpose in highly data-driven campaigns? AI is evolving fast, but the core truth hasn't changed: creativity anchored in strong insight still wins. Data, automation and AI can accelerate how we discover those insights, but they don't replace the human ability to interpret culture, context and emotion. The responsibility sits with us to treat AI as an ally - a force multiplier that elevates our strategy and unlocks stronger creative thinking. At Weber Shandwick, we use Cultural Choreography to keep creativity and purpose at the centre of highly data-driven campaigns. It's a system that blends predictive analytics, marketing fundamentals, influencer and platform mastery, and an earned-at-the-core but paid-integrated approach. The goal is simple: help brands win with communities, win in culture and win in an AI-driven age where relevance matters more than reach. A key part of this is our AI plus cultural-insider model through Culture Compass, which sits within the Cultural Choreography suite. It helps us uncover the cultural territories that genuinely matter to people: • We map cultural dynamics across markets to understand the forces shaping audiences' worlds. • We use enterprise-grade analytics to zoom in on what people care about and who they engage with. • We mine coverage and conversation trends and connect them to global and local cultural narratives. • And with a proprietary AI model, we identify and prioritise the cultural spaces where a brand can play with meaning and impact. On a personal level, creativity thrives when we stay curious - observing, learning and keeping our minds open. AI can sharpen the work, but the creative leap still comes from people who understand culture deeply and care enough to push the ideas further. You have experience building strategies for global brands in emerging markets. What do you see as unique opportunities (and challenges) for underdog nations in using media to build powerful brands? Emerging markets and underdog nations are powerful brand-building grounds because culture moves fast and communities drive behaviour. Working across India, Malaysia and Singapore and other APAC markets on regional B2B and B2C brands, three opportunities consistently stand out. First, these markets are culturally rich and community-led, which gives brands a clearer path to build emotional relevance through real local insight. Second, audiences adopt new behaviours quickly - from social commerce to creator-led trust – creating room to test, learn and earn attention in ways that feel immediate. Third, constraints often fuel sharper creativity. Tighter budgets and fragmented ecosystems mean you can't rely on heavy paid investment; you have to build ideas that spark conversation, travel through communities and deliver impact through interconnected channels. The challenge is turning this cultural energy into scalable systems. That's where brand strategists, creatives and Comms professionals really matter: grounding ideas in cultural truth, connecting channels so they amplify one another and pairing AI with local expertise to identify the cultural spaces where brands can lead. When done well, underdog markets don't just keep up with global culture; they shape and influence it. In a world where digital transformation is rapid, how can brands ensure that their media presence feels human and not just transactional? As mentioned earlier, brands feel more human when they ground their presence in culture rather than pure efficiency. That means understanding their real role in people's lives, using tools like Culture Compass to identify meaningful cultural spaces, and letting ideas move through interconnected channels where each touchpoint amplifies the next. When you pair that cultural intuition with AI-driven understanding of behaviour, brands show up in ways that feel not just transactional but also conversational, relevant and empathetic. From your multi-market experience, how can internal team culture reflect the same sense of belonging and purpose that a brand wants to project externally? Internal culture has to evolve as quickly as the world around it. The strongest teams ground themselves in purpose and belonging, but they also invest in change management, ongoing learning and real skill development so people feel equipped for what's next. Across markets, I've seen that when teams embrace local perspectives, build shared rituals and create space for continuous growth, they foster the same sense of connection and confidence internally that the brand aims to project externally. At BrandFest 2025, with its theme of 'Branding in the Age of Belonging,' what one key insight or principle about media strategy do you believe is essential for the next wave of brand builders? The next wave of brand builders needs to shift from omnichannel thinking to a truly interconnected, community-specific strategy, and the way to do that well is by pairing AI with cultural insiders. Audiences experience PR, influencers and social and media as one ecosystem. So, our job is to make those channels amplify one another while using AI to map the cultural spaces where the brand can genuinely belong. That combination is what will drive real emotional connection in the age of belonging.