Cultural Planner

Company Description

As Leo Burnett himself once said: “At the end of the day, we’re just people talking to people.” We think about the human side of every screen. On the other side of every ad or tweet sits a person, not just a pair of eyes with a credit card. We aim to make the good stuff in life accessible to everyone. That’s our North Star, guiding everything from our work to our culture and our DE&I initiatives. We celebrate a strong culture that puts people and creativity first, supported by a passionate team that invites ideas and thrives in an informal atmosphere. Our staff survey shows record happiness scores over the last 12 months, and we’re always looking for passionate, curious people to join our gang.

Our DE&I group, DIAL, tracks progress and implements policies to move toward positive change. We also support industry‑wide initiatives such as Unstereotype Alliance and others, and we embed DE&I practices into our clients’ creative processes through The Everyone Way. We’re proud to be a uniquely special place to work, combining populist creativity with relentless pursuit of excellence.

Our Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion

We’re committed to building an inclusive culture that celebrates and supports our diverse employee group through age, gender identity, race, sexual orientation, ability, and ethnicity. It fuels our creativity and innovation and allows us to get closer to our people and audiences. We provide reasonable adjustments for employees with disabilities and for candidates in the application process. If you need assistance or adjustment due to a disability, please contact us.

Overview

We’re looking for a Cultural Analyst/Planner to join our team at Leo UK. You’ll play a key role in helping brands stay culturally relevant, identifying the tensions, movements and behaviours shaping people’s lives, and translating those into powerful strategic opportunities for our clients.

Responsibilities

• Social analysis: Undertake data‑led analysis of social conversations, social listening, search analysis, and other digital/social data sources through a uniquely cultural lens. Champion social data across the agency and clients as a key touchpoint of cultural insights.
• Cultural analysis: Work with strategists and account teams to build a real understanding of culture, spotting emerging trends from the social landscape. Dive into qualitative social/digital data, find patterns in how people talk online, track cultural narratives over time, and understand different audience groups and subcultures.
• Research oversight & management: Help run “PopPulse”, an ethnography‑based research piece to understand big and small themes impacting British culture.
• Insight generation: Work with planners to enrich briefs and strategies with inspiring cultural insight. Briefs vary – from Valentine’s Day for Morrisons to McDonald’s understanding the culture of fried chicken.
• Working across teams & departments: Gain rapid insight into various clients and teams across the agency and leverage culture in their specific sector/industry.
• Thought leadership: Own a weekly cultural insights newsletter shared across the agency and with clients, delivering hot takes and digging into fresh trends across social with expert opinion.

Qualifications

What Skills We’re After:

• Social listening: Social‑first mindset, fluent across TikTok to Reddit, hands‑on experience using social listening tools (e.g., Brandwatch). Comfortable extracting cultural meaning from data using Boolean queries, dashboards, and analysis.
• Live and breathe culture: Deep understanding of the intersection of brand and culture, experienced in productising and packaging insights for internal teams and clients. Skilled at surfacing subcultures and identifying authentic opportunities.
• Social obsessed: Perpetually online, keen cultural sensibility, thrives on exploring new platforms, channels, creators, and trends, and can craft findings into actionable recommendations.
• Data analysis: Experienced with Excel to analyse and quantify results, size and trend data, and present findings in a clear, narrative format.
• Research skills: Able to combine multiple sources—qualitative, quantitative, secondary desk research—into a single perspective grounded in cultural insight.
• Confident communicator: Credible presenter and writer, able to share complex ideas digestibly. Experienced presenting to senior clients and adept at storytelling through words and numbers.

What Qualities We’re Looking For:

• Analytical
• Entrepreneurial
• Collaborative
• Resourceful
• Autonomous

Additional Information

Leo Burnett offers a wide range of benefits to support our employees. Highlights include pension, life assurance, private medical cover, reflection days, shared parental leave, and more. Full details are shared when you join, but highlights include core benefits such as Pension, Life Assurance, and Private Medical cover, alongside enhanced policies like Reflection Days and Shared Parental Leave.

Publicis Groupe works primarily from the office or clients’ office four days per week. We welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds, and do not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion or belief, disability, age, citizenship, relationship status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other protected characteristic. We are committed to providing a fair, accessible, and inclusive recruitment process. If you have any access needs – for example, related to disability, neurodivergence, or a health condition – let us know. We’ll work with you to ensure the process works for you. Sharing this information will never impact your application. Guided by our values, we listen with empathy, uplift each other, take responsibility, and embrace change – building a culture where everyone feels seen, respected, and genuinely included.