Speaking to an audience of thinkers and doers at the adobo SheCreative Network Conference held on March 24, 2026, WARC APAC Managing Editor Rica Facundo knew how to use her expertise as a former marketing practitioner and cultural strategist to captivate everyone’s attention. With the event focusing on creative intelligence, Rica posed two questions that nearly every marketer in the room had in mind.
The first was, “What type of cultural intelligence do we need to redesign our organizations toward growth?” And the second, “Even though we have all the intelligence in the world, why does it fail to translate into action?”
To answer these, she put the spotlight on culture. Not cold numbers, not colorful graphs — just culture. In the context of the corporate world, she defined culture as a social operating system for people within an organization.
“With any system, there are conscious and unconscious biases, and mental models that we use to shortcut what we think good looks like, where we put our money into, and basically [what] shapes the decisions that we make every day in our marketing teams,” Rica explained. She then alluded to the very first Asian effectiveness study, which WARC has initiated through the “Pace Principle study.”
“A lot of the evidence in marketing effectiveness is actually based on Western markets, developed markets. So this is why all of our clients really ask us this annoying, yet totally valid question, ‘Does this apply here?’ If all of the data is based on Western markets, why does it apply to a region so vast and diverse, like Asia, like the Philippines?”
The answer to that question was pointed out by Rica in playful irony: “We are same same, but different.”
She explained, “We are the same because the universal rules of marketing effectiveness [are] universal, because it is based on marketing science. It’s the same logic to why we have things like universal human truth. When people say and lament, ‘Asia is so different, the Philippines is so different,’ yes, but what we’re actually alluding to is how we deliver that communication to [the] market — which, of course, needs to take into account local nuances in the medium and the message and the cultural context.”
Rica highlighted the need to shift our mindset and view cultural intelligence through an inside-out approach, wherein we explore global best practices, but make nuances based on local circumstances.
Moving on to the second question of why intelligence fails to translate into action, Rica referred to another WARC study called the “Twin Effectiveness Pace Gap,” which calls for balancing short-term optimization with sustained brand investment, supported by governance and measurement systems built for today’s growth realities.
“If we take a step back, the fundamental issues that we’re facing in marketing [are] really not a marketing issue. It’s not that the creative strategy didn’t work, the media strategy didn’t work, or the agency. It’s about governance, how marketing is managed and organized within your organization that will influence their ability to take risks, what they’re incentivized to do,” she explained.
Concluding her talk, Rica emphasized the marketing industry’s need to move from understanding culture to expanding how we think across multiple contexts. “Test and learn, but once you test and learn and you find out what works for you, do not forget to operationalize what works for you and your brand, and the kind of work that you need to do. And if I can leave you with this one key takeaway, [it] is [to] treat culture as an effectiveness lever, because, as we know, effectiveness and creativity is a team sport. And that is how we can drive conviction in the work that we do and drive the results that our brands need.”
