Associate Cultural Insights Director

The role

Who We Are

We are a global, socially led creative agency, with unrivalled social media and influencer marketing expertise. With over 1,200 people in four continents, we deliver a global perspective to our clients in a time when social media is shaping culture.

We’re proud to be a multi award-winning agency, with Cannes Lions, One Show, Webby and Shorty Awards, to name but a few. Our most recent work has seen us help Amazon Music, Activision and Adidas deliver some of their biggest and most innovative campaigns to date. As well as creating for clients, we help educate the wider industry. 

Our Instagram publication The Feed tracks culture at the speed of social. 6,500 people registered or tuned into our events last year, and our reports garnered more than 20 million views.

The Opportunity

We’re looking to hire an Associate Director to lead the agency offering in partnership with the Cultural Insights Director and support the day-to-day running of client projects for a number of forward-thinking brands including adidas, Carlsberg, Lego and Lucozade.

This appointment represents an exciting part of the agency’s move to expand its Cultural Insight practice as part of our commitment to innovation in research and insight generation, as we continue to deliver the long-term social strategies and award winning creative that underpin excellent business results for our clients.

We’re seeking an industry champion of cultural insight: a self-starting advocate who is passionate about the craft as well as its value in building brands and impactful communications. Inclusive of this is experience in designing and running end-to-end research sprints that incorporate methodologies including trend analysis, semiotics, ethnography, in-depth interviews, and focus groups. This person will also be interested in developing interdisciplinary methods that drive social strategy and creativity, with an appetite to experiment.

We’re a deeply collaborative practice and working culture, and so this person will also have great communication skills, a generous spirit and a deep respect for the diversity of skill sets, disciplines and ideas that makes We Are Social’s work so great.

For the successful candidate, this role offers an opportunity to take a leadership role in growing a Cultural Insight offering within advertising, showcasing best-in-class use of cultural insight to drive award-winning creativity.

Requirements

What You’ll Have Delivered Elsewhere

• Designed mixed-methodology research proposals that got to the heart of the client’s problem, and ultimately led to insights that could inform strategies and inspire creativity. 
• Led research projects end to end, from data collection through to delivery with Strategy and Creative teams. 
• Applied socially-led insights to business problems, is able to both support Strategy teams in delivering socially-led propositions and insights, and generated them yourself. 
• Drove the social insight agenda within an organisation, ensuring that junior members fully understood the concept of social insight and how this was applied to briefs. 
• Led the strategic direction, management and development of key clients. 
• Knowledge shared: Public presentations to an organisation and delivered workshops with internal teams to ensure interesting cultural insights show up in the work. 
• Worked closely with creative and content teams in creative ideation and concepting. 
• Developed insight in large research projects across market – these included: Insight generation to feed into social strategy, audience profiling and deep dives, competitor positioning and analysis  showing a understanding of wider societal trends that impacted category, brand, audience and product
• Drafted proposals for new business and help expand offering with current clients.

What Else Were We Looking For?

• Someone to partner with the Cultural Insight director to manage and lead a sub-team, including being an active member of The Feed 
• Strategic thinking — this person needed to be experienced in applying insight to a range of businesses, categories and business problems. 
• Storytelling — this person needed to demonstrate a talent for collating decks that communicated insights and applications in an engaging way. 
• Cultural intuition — this person needs to be engaged with current affairs and popular/digital culture, be actively curious about it, and have a knack for pulling out insights around it that were useful for our brands. 
• Excellent understanding of qual research methodologies including trends, semiotics and primary research e.g. in-depth / expert interviews (sample design, moderation and debrief writing) was required.

Benefits

Our Culture and the Nice Stuff

Equity, Diversity and Inclusion runs in the water here at We Are Social. We are transparent about the changes that are needed, we are focused on making real strides, both internally and within the industry and we strive to truly be a workplace that represents, supports and advocates for ALL. Our Charter for Change in the UK  can be found here which details our focus areas across People, Work and Culture in 2025.

If you require any support, adjustments or accommodations for any reason whatsoever during the recruitment process, please let us know via [email protected]

So let’s get to the good stuff,  we offer all those things you would naturally expect; 25 days holiday, pension scheme & life assurance. But what we love most is connection, so we have our WAS Passport and Work From Anywhere schemes which allow you to truly connect to colleagues all over the world! 

But what’s life around here really like day-to-day? Well, we ask our people regularly what they think about us/their role and here are some of the most common things they say:

• I value my manager we have a good relationship
• We love to ‘get social’ with the people I work with
• Trusted to get on with the job, without ‘micro-management’!

If this all sounds like the place you have been waiting to find then apply now! What are you waiting for?