Freelance Culture Strategist

Engagement Type: Fixed-Fee Freelance Contract

Project Fee: $3,904.50 CAD($2,850 USD)

Estimated Hours/Effort: 40 hours

Expected delivery timeline: December 2026 to February 2027, with a readout in early March.

We are open to hire within Canada or the United States.

We’re looking for a Culture Mapping Strategist & Researcher with direct experience in entertainment, talent discovery, and the creator economy. You combine a cultural anthropologist’s perspective with applied research and strategic foresight, helping teams understand not just what is gaining attention, but why it matters, who it resonates with, and what opportunities it presents.

You bring an understanding of communities, fandoms, cultural narratives, and emerging behaviors. You can distinguish lasting shifts from short-lived trends and are comfortable exploring how social platforms, creative networks, and audience relationships infl uence the discovery and development of talent.

You will help shape the evolution of an entertainment-focused creator relationship platform, researching how development and production teams identify, evaluate, track, and collaborate with talent. Beyond discovery, you will explore how the platform can encourage deeper, mutually valuable relationships with creators, preserve institutional knowledge, and support collaboration beyond individual campaigns.

This is a hands-on, client-facing role. You will conduct research, synthesize evidence, facilitate working sessions, and present clear recommendations. We need someone who can connect ambitious thinking to practical outputs and deliver within an established scope, pace, and schedule.

What you’ll do

• Plan and conduct interviews with development and production leads to understand how talent is discovered, assessed, tracked, and shared across teams.
• Audit existing tools, platforms, informal networks, and workflows to identify gaps, duplicated effort, and opportunities for a more connected talent-discovery experience.
• Apply appropriate research methods, including stakeholder interviews, desk research, digital ethnography, and social listening, to understand creator communities, audience behaviors, and cultural context.
• Map relevant fandoms, subcultures, creative networks, and industry relationships, examining the motivations, shared meanings, and behaviors behind visible trends.
• Explore how teams identify potential across creators, writers, actors, comedians, directors, and hosts, distinguishing campaign suitability from longer-term development and production opportunities.
• Use strategic foresight to identify emerging shifts in content creation, discovery, and collaboration, translating these into grounded opportunities rather than unsupported predictions.
• Identify how the platform can support sustained creator relationships through better recognition of creative strengths, interests, relationship history, and collaboration learnings.
• Partner with the Data Strategist to interpret talent and audience signals in cultural context, contributing qualitative insight to their work on data sources, search criteria, and discovery rules.
• Produce clear current-state maps, tools-and-gaps assessments, cultural insights, and opportunity recommendations, with evidence and implications that teams can act on.
• Collaborate with Product, Experience Design, and Technology leads to translate findings into feasible platform recommendations and inform prioritization.
• Lead client-facing research readouts and facilitate working sessions that challenge assumptions constructively, build alignment, and connect insights to decisions. Partner with graphic design support on final presentations.
• Manage research activities, documentation, feedback, and deliverables against agreed milestones, maintaining research quality while moving work forward at an agency delivery pace.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience in cultural research, cultural strategy, or talent discovery within film, television, digital entertainment, or closely related entertainment businesses. Specific industry experience is essential.
• A strong foundation in cultural anthropology, ethnographic research, cultural studies, or applied cultural analysis, demonstrated through formal study and/or substantive professional practice.
• Familiarity with how studios, development and production teams, talent agencies, managers, and creators identify opportunities and build working relationships.
• Experience conducting qualitative research and synthesis, including interviewing, digital observation, landscape analysis, thematic analysis, and ecosystem or opportunity mapping.
• Ability to interpret cultural narratives, community norms, and audience motivations beyond surface-level trends, demographic labels, or follower counts.
• Working knowledge of strategic foresight, including identifying emerging signals and exploring their implications for products, services, or relationships.
• Work samples demonstrating how research informed practical strategies, product opportunities, or changes to working practices, rather than solely conceptual trend reports.
• Strong facilitation, storytelling, and presentation skills, with confidence leading senior stakeholder discussions and explaining the evidence behind recommendations.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, select methods appropriate to the question and timeline, and independently deliver high-quality work within a multidisciplinary team.
• Sound judgment around confidential information, research consent, representation, and bias when interpreting creator, talent, and community data.
• Flexibility to collaborate across Eastern and Pacific time zones as needed.
• Scheduling will be coordinated to keep meetings and delivery work within one working day wherever possible, rather than expecting routine split shifts or extended days.

Nice to have

• Advanced study in anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, strategic foresight, or a related discipline.
• Experience with semiotics, narrative analysis, or participatory research that helps teams understand how people create meaning and imagine future experiences.
• Experience translating cultural research into digital product strategy, creator relationship management, or talent search and tracking tools.
• Familiarity with creator intelligence and social-listening platforms, including their limitations and the value of combining quantitative signals with qualitative context.
• Experience creating structured research repositories, cultural maps, or signals libraries using tools such as FigJam, Miro, Dovetail, Notion, or Airtable.
• Availability to continue into a potential extended engagement as research and planning needs evolve.

BIMM is committed to providing an environment that is inclusive and accessible. We are an equal opportunity employer and consider all applicants for employment without discrimination. Please let us know if accommodation for the recruitment/interview process is required and we will work with you to make sure your needs are met.

AI In Recruitment

While we are exploring ways to best utilize AI in our hiring processes, BIMM currently does not use AI-enabled tools in our hiring process. All candidates are screened by humans, and approved by humans.