Introducing the Global Culture Intelligence Council
At The Next Rodeo, we position ourselves around what's next. That only works if we're actually tapped into what's shaping "next" before it shows up in a trend report.
Culture moves fast, and it doesn't move in one place. It moves through a restaurant opening in Mexico City, a beauty trend exported from Seoul, a shift in how Gen Z talks about luxury in London. Brands and businesses that wait for the summary are always playing catch-up. The ones that stay close to the source get to move first.
So we built something to help us do that: the Global Culture Intelligence Council.
The Council is a fictional, AI-assisted panel of culturally fluent 20- and 30-somethings living in ten cities around the world. Each city was chosen because it creates, accelerates or translates culture in its own distinct way. Together, they scan what's emerging across music, entertainment, food, restaurants, travel, hotels, cities, design, fashion, beauty, technology, internet culture, luxury and lifestyle, then translate it into signals that matter for brands.
Think of it as our own early-warning system: a way to stay curious, stay plugged in, and stay a few beats ahead of where culture is headed.
Meet the Council
Tessa Williams | New York
Media, restaurants, art and the collision of culture and commerce. NYC remains the great cultural aggregator: things arrive here from everywhere, get remixed and often go mainstream.
Julian Price | London
Music, fashion, media and ideas. London is our transatlantic antenna: global, young, intellectually restless and unusually good at turning subculture into broader culture.
Noah Chen | Los Angeles
Entertainment, creators, wellness and technology. LA is where entertainment culture increasingly meets internet culture, and where ideas about celebrity, fitness, beauty and lifestyle get manufactured at scale.
Aiko Nakamura | Tokyo
Design, retail, food and consumer innovation. Tokyo is one of the world's great laboratories for taste: obsessive craftsmanship, extraordinary retail and hospitality, and an ability to make the everyday feel designed.
Mina Park | Seoul
Beauty, music, fashion and youth culture. Seoul may be the world's fastest cultural exporter right now, particularly across beauty, K-pop, retail and digitally driven fandom.
Leo Baptiste | Paris
Luxury, fashion, art and aesthetics. Paris remains essential because it still helps define what the world considers beautiful, desirable and luxurious, even as those definitions change.
Sofia Martinez | Mexico City
Food, hospitality, architecture and design. CDMX is one of the most exciting creative cities in the world right now, with extraordinary cross-pollination among restaurants, art, interiors, hotels and contemporary Mexican identity.
Clara Sørensen | Copenhagen
Design, interiors, fashion, sustainability and lifestyle. Copenhagen is a bellwether for how sophisticated people actually want to live, and increasingly a source of playful, rather than purely minimalist, style.
Amir Rahman | Dubai
Luxury, hospitality, wealth and global consumer culture. Dubai gives us a window into the new geography of affluence: global wealth, ambitious hospitality, spectacle and the rapidly evolving luxury consumer.
Oliver Hughes | Melbourne
Food, coffee, hospitality, urbanism and quality of life. Melbourne keeps us connected to the culture of everyday living: great neighborhoods, independent hospitality, food and the idea that a rich life isn't necessarily a flashy one.
What the Council Is Watching
Every week, the Council looks across those markets for signals: what interesting people are listening to, wearing, eating, visiting, talking about and valuing. What feels newly relevant. And, most importantly, what those shifts might mean for brands and businesses.
A few themes are already surfacing:
Specificity is beating generic "good taste"
Human judgment is becoming more valuable as AI makes polished output abundant
Physical experiences and IRL community are gaining cultural currency
Luxury is shifting from ownership toward access, story and belonging
The most interesting brands are building worlds and communities, not just campaigns
Provenance, craft and personality are becoming more important, from hotels to interiors to food
Why This Matters
Culture is the water every brand swims in. The businesses that stay closest to it are the ones that keep their marketing feeling relevant instead of dated, and their positioning feeling ahead instead of reactive.
That's the whole point of the Council: not chasing trends after the fact, but staying close enough to culture to see where it's headed. We'll be sharing what the Council picks up here on our blog, month by month.