Associate Director of Cultural Strategy

We’re looking for an Associate Director of Cultural Strategy to lead our social practice and help our clients show up in culture in ways that feel real and relevant. At Fact & Fiction, social is where culture moves first. It’s where we find the human truths behind our best ideas, and where brands earn attention instead of buying it.

You'll report to our Senior Director of Cultural Strategy as part of the Strategy discipline. You'll lead the people who do social strategy, community, reporting, trend spotting and conversation intelligence every day, and you'll connect their work to the ideas that command attention and live at the peak of cultural fluency.

Can do this

• Find the truth inside the conversation. You read comments, threads, creators and communities the way a strategist reads research, and you come back with insights that make ideas undeniable.
• Turn social into strategy. You can take a trend, a moment or a pattern in the data and show a client exactly why it matters to their brand and what to do about it.
• Lead with conviction, simplicity and cleverness. You fight for the right ideas, cut what doesn't earn its place, and bring the kind of thinking that makes our friends in the industry jealous.
• Build ideas people want to talk about and share. You know how brands show up in the world in ways that feel real and relevant, not like a brand trying to be relevant.
• Make the people around you better. You mentor with clear direction, give a smart and autonomous team room to run, and raise the bar on what they deliver.
• Punch above our weight. You use the emerging AI and social listening landscape to give a small, hungry team the firepower of agencies five times our size, and to out-heart and out-maneuver the holding companies.
• Earn incredible trust. Clients and creative partners want you in the briefs and in the room because you bring empathy, passion for the work and a point of view.

Responsibilities

Leading the social practice

• Own the day-to-day leadership of the social team, including social strategy, community management, reporting, trend spotting and conversation intelligence.
• Set the standard for how we plan, make and measure social work across every client.
• Partner with the Senior Director of Cultural Strategy to package, sell, staff and deliver the practice as it grows.

Connecting social to strategy and culture

• Bring what's happening in culture into every brief so our ideas start from real human truths, not assumptions.
• Work alongside strategy, creative and influencer partners to build ideas that earn attention and travel.
• Connect social insight to our Culturistics and audience intelligence work so it all ladders up to the science of what moves people.

Mentoring the team

• Give a smart, driven team clear direction, regular feedback and real growth paths.
• Help shape hiring, team structure and rituals as the practice scales.

Showing up for clients

• Be a trusted strategic voice for clients on how their brands show up in social and in culture.
• Turn reporting into recommendations: what we learned, why it matters and what we do next.
• Contribute to new business pitches with social and cultural thinking that wins the room.

Building the toolkit

• Evaluate and integrate AI, listening and analytics tools that make the team faster and sharper.
• Develop repeatable frameworks for trend spotting, conversation analysis and social measurement.

Must haves

• 6+ years in social strategy, with at least 2 years leading or mentoring a team (placeholder; confirm level).
• Agency experience, or brand-side experience leading social for a national or global brand.
• A portfolio of social and culture-driven work you can walk us through, including the insight behind it and the results it drove.
• Fluency in social listening, analytics and reporting tools, plus curiosity about where AI is taking them.
• Strong writing and presentation skills. You can make a complex idea simple and a simple idea compelling.
• A builder's mindset. You'd rather be in the work than just overseeing it.

What we give

• A real seat at the table in a practice we're building from the ground up, with a direct voice in how it grows.
• Medical, dental, vision and life insurance, 100% company-funded.
• Medical and dependent flex spending accounts, plus voluntary life coverage.
• A 401(k) with a company match up to 4%, fully vested from day one.
• Flex Time Off.
• A hungry team that cares about the work, fights for the right ideas and genuinely likes working together.