Carissa Estreller Interview
Carissa Estreller explains what it means to be a digital culturist, reading the internet like an anthropologist so brands can find cultural clarity rather than chase fleeting trends.
Published on
Jan 16, 2026
6
min. read
Where's your hometown and where do you live currently?
Born and raised in Los Angeles
In a few sentences, describe what you do.
I study the internet so brands don’t have to.
You call yourself a digital culturist. How do you explain that to people who don't get it?
I usually say: imagine if a strategist, an anthropologist, and an internet detective had a group chat, that’s kind of what I do.
Being a digital culturist means I track the signals, behaviors, language, and vibes that show up online and then decode what they mean beneath the scroll. It’s part pattern recognition, part meaning-making. I’m less interested in chasing trends and more focused on understanding why something is resonating in the first place. What cultural tension is it speaking to? What identity is it reshaping? What behavior is it validating?
When people don’t get it, I bring it back to this: we’re all consuming content at hyperspeed, but very few people are zooming out to connect the dots. My job is to help brands and creatives slow down just enough to see and to find clarity in the chaos, and build things that feel culturally fluent, not forced.
What does that title mean to you and how is it different from being a strategist or a social media expert?
To me, digital culturist is a reclamation title.
It’s how I name the work I’ve actually been doing for years, the in-between space that doesn’t always fit neatly under “strategist” or “social media expert.” Those roles often center deliverables or execution: the campaign plan, the content calendar, the KPIs. Important, yes. But digital culturist is about interpretation. It’s about seeing the culture behind the content, the context behind the comment section, the emotional pulse behind a trend.
Where a strategist might focus on positioning a product, and a social media expert might optimize how it shows up on-platform, I’m more interested in why people care in the first place. What makes something culturally charged, not just creatively clever? What does it say about identity, aspiration, community?
It’s a title that gives language to the invisible labor so many of us do, like tracking signals, collecting screenshots, noticing patterns before they fully form. It’s not about replacing other roles; it’s about making room for the meaning-makers who’ve always lived in the margins.
You work with brands to find "cultural gaps" to stand out. What does that actually mean?
It means I help brands stop shouting into the same echo chamber as everyone else.
A cultural gap is that space between what a brand is saying and what people are actually feeling, needing, or expressing in the world. It’s where there’s tension, silence, or missed connection and also where the opportunity lives.
Most brands are either chasing trends or repeating what’s already been said. I help them find the whitespace, like the overlooked signals, the emotional undercurrents, the communities or conversations that haven’t been fully seen or heard yet. That’s the gap.
When brands can meet people there (in that space of emerging need or unspoken feeling), they don’t just stand out. They matter. They show up not just as clever, but as culturally fluent. And that’s what builds real resonance.
You recently launched Digital Culturist as a product to help teams organize cultural insights. Walk us through what problem you were seeing that made you build this.
Honestly? I built what I couldn’t find :)
As a strategist, I was constantly screenshotting things, TikToks, random comments, instagram carousels, substack articles, and saving them everywhere. I was saving them in my camera roll, my desktop folders, Slack DMs to myself. I was living in what I call “digital purgatory.” I had all these cultural receipts, but no clean way to organize them, annotate the why, or connect them into something meaningful.
And I realized: this wasn’t just a me problem. So many of us who do strategy and creative work are pattern thinkers trapped in fragment workflows. We’re constantly signals early but no way to validate them.
Digital Culturist is my answer to that. A tool designed for how strategist minds actually work: non-linear, thematic, constellation-style thinking. It gives your insights a home, not just another folder. Somewhere you can collect signals, layer context, zoom out, and actually see the patterns you’ve been holding in your head.
AI is in there too but more like a helpful co-organizer than a flashy feature. It helps you group signals into themes and see the high level connections. The stuff you’d do eventually, just... faster. This isn’t about replacing your gut, it’s about giving it room to breathe.
You mention that internal teams are often "too close to the brand to see what's really happening outside of it." What are the blind spots you see most often when you come in with an outside perspective?
A lot of teams are so deep in the brand bubble they forget how real people actually talk, feel, or behave outside the deck.
One big blind spot is assuming the brand is more relevant than it is. Just because something feels big internally doesn’t mean it’s hitting in culture. Sometimes the campaign that got the internal high-fives is barely making a dent in the real world.
Another blindspot is looking sideways too much, only comparing themselves to direct competitors, or what’s happening in their industry. Meanwhile, the most interesting signals are bubbling up in unexpected corners: a meme thread, a niche subreddit, a throwaway TikTok with 300 likes that’s saying something no brand is.
When I come in, I’m basically there to hold up a mirror to what’s actually happening out there. Not to tear things down, but to widen the lens. Most of the time, the truth is just outside the frame they’ve been staring at for too long.
Social listening is part of your toolkit. How do you distinguish between signal and noise? What should brands actually be listening for vs what they're usually tracking?
Social listening, in the traditional sense, is kind of outdated.
It’s good for foundational brand hygiene; understanding sentiment, tracking mentions, catching a crisis before it escalates. But if you’re using it to figure out where your brand should be going, it falls short. That’s where meaning gets lost.
Most tools are built to measure volume, not value. You get dashboards full of mentions, hashtags, and “top words,” but they rarely tell you why something matters, or what it’s signaling about the culture around you.
To me, the real signals live in the nuances: the inside-jokes, the fringe posts, the way people describe themselves or each other. A single TikTok comment can be more revealing than a whole sentiment report, if you know how to read it.
So the shift is this: don’t just listen for what’s loud. Listen for what’s emerging. Not “what are people saying about us?” but “what are people expressing about themselves and where do we fit into that?”
Social listening might tell you where you’ve been. Cultural sensing tells you where to go next.
Tell us about a few brands you think are culturally relevant? And brands you think are less successful at capturing cultural attention and resonance?
Fishwife is a great example of a brand that gets it. They’ve taken something deeply ordinary, tinned fish and made it feel covetable, playful, and culturally current. It’s not just about the product, it’s the positioning. From their art direction to their collabs to the way they show up on social, they’ve tapped into the pantry-core aesthetic, the rise of “girl dinners,” and the whole idea that everyday essentials can still have identity and taste. It’s weirdly aspirational without trying too hard.
What makes them culturally relevant isn’t just aesthetics, it’s timing, tone, and ecosystem fluency. They understand their audience isn’t just buying sardines; they’re buying into a lifestyle, a moment, a mood. And Fishwife nails that.
On the other side, you can usually spot when a brand is missing the mark just by glancing at their socials.
It’s the repurposed TV ad dumped into a square crop. It’s the AI-made carousel with generic quotes and stock photos. It’s captions loaded with #hashtag #stuff #noone #cares #about. Or the evergreen classic: “Click this link” with the URL in the caption with no reason to care or connect.
These aren’t just aesthetic misses on social, they’re trust issues. Because when a brand doesn’t give their social team real creative trust or resourcing, it shows. Audiences feel the lack of intent, and engagement drops accordingly. Social isn’t a dumping ground for leftover content, it’s the front line of cultural relevance. If you treat it like an afterthought, your audience will do the same.
What are the skills that make the biggest difference in your work?
Pattern recognition, hands down. The ability to spot an early signal before it becomes a headline, to notice the connective tissue between a TikTok comment and a brand behavior, that’s the throughline in everything I do.
Also: cultural translation. I don’t just collect trends; I make them make sense. For a client, a creative team, or a deck that needs to move fast. It’s about decoding the emotional why behind what people are doing online and framing it in a way that’s actually useful.
Then there’s the less sexy but crucial stuff: information architecture. Organizing chaos. Turning 72 open tabs and 14 half-formed thoughts into a clear POV. That’s what helps turn insights into a narrative that the executive leadership team, creative team, and social team can read and say AHA, yes.
And one last important one, discernment. Knowing what’s noise vs. what’s signal. What’s momentary hype vs. what’s a deeper shift. That kind of taste and the ability to zoom out and see the difference is everything.
What about the industry do you wish you knew starting out in your career?
That being “good at the internet” is a skill and a valuable one.
I used to think all my screenshotting, note-hoarding, and rabbit hole behavior was just a side habit. Turns out, it was the foundation of my work. The industry didn’t have language for it then, but now we know: cultural fluency, pattern thinking, digital anthropology – it matters!
I also wish I knew how much of this work is about making sense for other people. It’s not just about having sharp ideas; it’s about helping others see what you see. How you communicate, frame, and structure your thinking is just as important as the thinking itself.
Bonus Round
What do you listen to while working?
I have a curated playlist for every mood haha. So for research mode (digging into the internet) I like to listen to 2010 era EDM. For deck making, I like to listen to 1990s alternative rock. For analysis, I like to listen to girl pop.
What's your most creatively inspired time of day?
I’m a night owl – 8-10pm is peak creative time for me.
Carissa Estreller is a digital culturist and founder of Hook and Anchor, a digital intelligence agency helping brands understand the digital landscape and act on it. She’s also the creator of Digital Culturist, a tool and community for strategists and creatives to organize digital signals and turn them into meaningful strategy.
With 15+ years in digital marketing, content strategy, and digital analysis, she’s worked across industries and brand sizes. Her work combines digital insight with systems thinking to help teams make sense of what matters.
You can connect with her on Linkedin.
Where's your hometown and where do you live currently?
Born and raised in Los Angeles
In a few sentences, describe what you do.
I study the internet so brands don’t have to.
You call yourself a digital culturist. How do you explain that to people who don't get it?
I usually say: imagine if a strategist, an anthropologist, and an internet detective had a group chat, that’s kind of what I do.
Being a digital culturist means I track the signals, behaviors, language, and vibes that show up online and then decode what they mean beneath the scroll. It’s part pattern recognition, part meaning-making. I’m less interested in chasing trends and more focused on understanding why something is resonating in the first place. What cultural tension is it speaking to? What identity is it reshaping? What behavior is it validating?
When people don’t get it, I bring it back to this: we’re all consuming content at hyperspeed, but very few people are zooming out to connect the dots. My job is to help brands and creatives slow down just enough to see and to find clarity in the chaos, and build things that feel culturally fluent, not forced.
What does that title mean to you and how is it different from being a strategist or a social media expert?
To me, digital culturist is a reclamation title.
It’s how I name the work I’ve actually been doing for years, the in-between space that doesn’t always fit neatly under “strategist” or “social media expert.” Those roles often center deliverables or execution: the campaign plan, the content calendar, the KPIs. Important, yes. But digital culturist is about interpretation. It’s about seeing the culture behind the content, the context behind the comment section, the emotional pulse behind a trend.
Where a strategist might focus on positioning a product, and a social media expert might optimize how it shows up on-platform, I’m more interested in why people care in the first place. What makes something culturally charged, not just creatively clever? What does it say about identity, aspiration, community?
It’s a title that gives language to the invisible labor so many of us do, like tracking signals, collecting screenshots, noticing patterns before they fully form. It’s not about replacing other roles; it’s about making room for the meaning-makers who’ve always lived in the margins.
You work with brands to find "cultural gaps" to stand out. What does that actually mean?
It means I help brands stop shouting into the same echo chamber as everyone else.
A cultural gap is that space between what a brand is saying and what people are actually feeling, needing, or expressing in the world. It’s where there’s tension, silence, or missed connection and also where the opportunity lives.
Most brands are either chasing trends or repeating what’s already been said. I help them find the whitespace, like the overlooked signals, the emotional undercurrents, the communities or conversations that haven’t been fully seen or heard yet. That’s the gap.
When brands can meet people there (in that space of emerging need or unspoken feeling), they don’t just stand out. They matter. They show up not just as clever, but as culturally fluent. And that’s what builds real resonance.
You recently launched Digital Culturist as a product to help teams organize cultural insights. Walk us through what problem you were seeing that made you build this.
Honestly? I built what I couldn’t find :)
As a strategist, I was constantly screenshotting things, TikToks, random comments, instagram carousels, substack articles, and saving them everywhere. I was saving them in my camera roll, my desktop folders, Slack DMs to myself. I was living in what I call “digital purgatory.” I had all these cultural receipts, but no clean way to organize them, annotate the why, or connect them into something meaningful.
And I realized: this wasn’t just a me problem. So many of us who do strategy and creative work are pattern thinkers trapped in fragment workflows. We’re constantly signals early but no way to validate them.
Digital Culturist is my answer to that. A tool designed for how strategist minds actually work: non-linear, thematic, constellation-style thinking. It gives your insights a home, not just another folder. Somewhere you can collect signals, layer context, zoom out, and actually see the patterns you’ve been holding in your head.
AI is in there too but more like a helpful co-organizer than a flashy feature. It helps you group signals into themes and see the high level connections. The stuff you’d do eventually, just... faster. This isn’t about replacing your gut, it’s about giving it room to breathe.
You mention that internal teams are often "too close to the brand to see what's really happening outside of it." What are the blind spots you see most often when you come in with an outside perspective?
A lot of teams are so deep in the brand bubble they forget how real people actually talk, feel, or behave outside the deck.
One big blind spot is assuming the brand is more relevant than it is. Just because something feels big internally doesn’t mean it’s hitting in culture. Sometimes the campaign that got the internal high-fives is barely making a dent in the real world.
Another blindspot is looking sideways too much, only comparing themselves to direct competitors, or what’s happening in their industry. Meanwhile, the most interesting signals are bubbling up in unexpected corners: a meme thread, a niche subreddit, a throwaway TikTok with 300 likes that’s saying something no brand is.
When I come in, I’m basically there to hold up a mirror to what’s actually happening out there. Not to tear things down, but to widen the lens. Most of the time, the truth is just outside the frame they’ve been staring at for too long.
Social listening is part of your toolkit. How do you distinguish between signal and noise? What should brands actually be listening for vs what they're usually tracking?
Social listening, in the traditional sense, is kind of outdated.
It’s good for foundational brand hygiene; understanding sentiment, tracking mentions, catching a crisis before it escalates. But if you’re using it to figure out where your brand should be going, it falls short. That’s where meaning gets lost.
Most tools are built to measure volume, not value. You get dashboards full of mentions, hashtags, and “top words,” but they rarely tell you why something matters, or what it’s signaling about the culture around you.
To me, the real signals live in the nuances: the inside-jokes, the fringe posts, the way people describe themselves or each other. A single TikTok comment can be more revealing than a whole sentiment report, if you know how to read it.
So the shift is this: don’t just listen for what’s loud. Listen for what’s emerging. Not “what are people saying about us?” but “what are people expressing about themselves and where do we fit into that?”
Social listening might tell you where you’ve been. Cultural sensing tells you where to go next.
Tell us about a few brands you think are culturally relevant? And brands you think are less successful at capturing cultural attention and resonance?
Fishwife is a great example of a brand that gets it. They’ve taken something deeply ordinary, tinned fish and made it feel covetable, playful, and culturally current. It’s not just about the product, it’s the positioning. From their art direction to their collabs to the way they show up on social, they’ve tapped into the pantry-core aesthetic, the rise of “girl dinners,” and the whole idea that everyday essentials can still have identity and taste. It’s weirdly aspirational without trying too hard.
What makes them culturally relevant isn’t just aesthetics, it’s timing, tone, and ecosystem fluency. They understand their audience isn’t just buying sardines; they’re buying into a lifestyle, a moment, a mood. And Fishwife nails that.
On the other side, you can usually spot when a brand is missing the mark just by glancing at their socials.
It’s the repurposed TV ad dumped into a square crop. It’s the AI-made carousel with generic quotes and stock photos. It’s captions loaded with #hashtag #stuff #noone #cares #about. Or the evergreen classic: “Click this link” with the URL in the caption with no reason to care or connect.
These aren’t just aesthetic misses on social, they’re trust issues. Because when a brand doesn’t give their social team real creative trust or resourcing, it shows. Audiences feel the lack of intent, and engagement drops accordingly. Social isn’t a dumping ground for leftover content, it’s the front line of cultural relevance. If you treat it like an afterthought, your audience will do the same.
What are the skills that make the biggest difference in your work?
Pattern recognition, hands down. The ability to spot an early signal before it becomes a headline, to notice the connective tissue between a TikTok comment and a brand behavior, that’s the throughline in everything I do.
Also: cultural translation. I don’t just collect trends; I make them make sense. For a client, a creative team, or a deck that needs to move fast. It’s about decoding the emotional why behind what people are doing online and framing it in a way that’s actually useful.
Then there’s the less sexy but crucial stuff: information architecture. Organizing chaos. Turning 72 open tabs and 14 half-formed thoughts into a clear POV. That’s what helps turn insights into a narrative that the executive leadership team, creative team, and social team can read and say AHA, yes.
And one last important one, discernment. Knowing what’s noise vs. what’s signal. What’s momentary hype vs. what’s a deeper shift. That kind of taste and the ability to zoom out and see the difference is everything.
What about the industry do you wish you knew starting out in your career?
That being “good at the internet” is a skill and a valuable one.
I used to think all my screenshotting, note-hoarding, and rabbit hole behavior was just a side habit. Turns out, it was the foundation of my work. The industry didn’t have language for it then, but now we know: cultural fluency, pattern thinking, digital anthropology – it matters!
I also wish I knew how much of this work is about making sense for other people. It’s not just about having sharp ideas; it’s about helping others see what you see. How you communicate, frame, and structure your thinking is just as important as the thinking itself.
Bonus Round
What do you listen to while working?
I have a curated playlist for every mood haha. So for research mode (digging into the internet) I like to listen to 2010 era EDM. For deck making, I like to listen to 1990s alternative rock. For analysis, I like to listen to girl pop.
What's your most creatively inspired time of day?
I’m a night owl – 8-10pm is peak creative time for me.
Carissa Estreller is a digital culturist and founder of Hook and Anchor, a digital intelligence agency helping brands understand the digital landscape and act on it. She’s also the creator of Digital Culturist, a tool and community for strategists and creatives to organize digital signals and turn them into meaningful strategy.
With 15+ years in digital marketing, content strategy, and digital analysis, she’s worked across industries and brand sizes. Her work combines digital insight with systems thinking to help teams make sense of what matters.
You can connect with her on Linkedin.
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