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Associate Director, Strategy
Initiative
Los Angeles, CA, United States
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Initiative - Associate Director, Strategy
About Us
Initiative is different to other media agencies. We are not trapped by a legacy structure primarily centered on paid advertising. Instead, we are liberated by a new world structure designed to deliver highly differentiated and highly effective communications strategies for our clients.
We’re not the biggest agency in town. So rather than outsize our competitors we must outsmart them. That’s why we’ve built the strongest strategic capability of any agency in the market. Core to this strategic capability is an obsession with culture and how brands can pivot from brand advertising (which is forgettable) to cultural branding (which is highly memorable). Our new world model is comprised of five central “craft centers” – Client Advice and Management, Strategy, Communications Design, Partnerships, and Analytics.
The Account
This position will be dedicated to Uber - one of the world’s most disruptive and highly valued brands. As with any disruptive platform, rapid growth among users and contractors must be balanced with a humanized and admired reputation. The Asccociate Strategy Director is an essential partner to Client Advice, as well as all other department leads to maintain a position of thought leadership with our most senior clients, while creating great work.
Position Summary
In this Associate Director role, you will help to strategize, produce and make sense of the key cultural, consumer and market intelligence required to design the best possible holistic communications plan to deliver on that task. You have a passion for people, brands and ideas and an insatiable curiosity for culture in every sense. You believe that brands can & should mean in the world, and are driven by the desire to understand the changing world and people’s subsequent shifting motivations and behaviors.
Discipline Overview: Strategy
Initiative’s Strategists generate smart and strategic brand platforms that inspire and inform the conditions needed for each brand to grow. They are the agency’s cultural architects, single-minded in both their approach and ambition to create lasting cultural impact vs. singular media moments.
Future-focused and independent, they sit as an entrepreneurial, agile unit of consumer, creative & analytical experts who are cast & deployed according to Brief/skillset vs. Client. They take a holistic ‘full world’ POV to drive smarter, better & broader ‘media’ thinking that generates more interesting and rich territories for a brand to explore, working in creative collaboration with all teams - Client Advice, Communications Design & Partnerships - to inspire and inform the creation & design of culturally-led brand experiences.
A brilliant & diverse group of creatives, analysts, planners & anthropologists, they are charged with leveraging the cultural landscape to find the most profitable communications opportunity for growth. They:
• Are experts in consumer & cultural insight
• Lead the creation of strategic platforms that inspire & inform the Communications Design process
• Work with creative & cultural collaboration partners (media, creative, technology, platforms, Specialty Business Units) to shape how a brand will behave & lead within culture
• Maintain ownership of that vision from planning through to execution, ensuring that the design/delivery of the total brand experience is both strategically sound & rooted in genuine cultural insight
• Lead the development and identification of new & interesting cultural opportunities (audiences to target &/or spaces to inhabit) to meet & surpass the required business goals
• Drive bigger, better & smarter thinking across platforms & touch-points to deliver more innovative & creative strategic thinking that can direct the design of leading edge solutions & award-winning breakthrough work
Role Overview: Associate Director, Strategy
As an Associate Director of Strategy you are responsible for the development of strategic recommendations that solve client challenges. You will work across all accounts & clients (depending on the Brief ask/rating & the skillset need) and should strive to produce outstanding communications strategies, as recognized through awards, client satisfaction scores and tangible examples of innovation.
You will help to strategize, produce and make sense of the key cultural, consumer and market intelligence required to design the best possible holistic communications plan to deliver on that task.
You have a passion for people, brands and ideas and an insatiable curiosity for culture in every sense. You believe that brands can & should mean in the world, and are driven by the desire to understand the changing world and people’s subsequent shifting motivations and behaviors.
You are responsible for creating the strategic recommendations and engaging with the client in an advisory capacity in conjunction with the Strategy Team. It is not your responsibility to manage the client relationship & you will – by Brief – report to the Client Lead to deliver brilliant strategic thinking for the client team. Creative thinking and sound presentation skills are critical in delivering success in this role.
You should produce work that drives re-appraisal of communications and what media can do in the world, and your work should be seen as one of the key levers working to drive the agency forward.
You are responsible for ensuring that the Strategy Associates’ work is robust and fully thought-through. You have considered all consumer, category and culture trends, helping the wider team to think about new ways to connect to people in culture & working real-time alongside the Analytics, Communications Design and Client teams to deliver better, smarter and more innovative work.
Essential Functions
Client
• Demonstrate understanding of the clients' key business and challenges
• Be considered a valuable contributor during client meetings, providing, for example, research &/or deep understanding of how consumers are interacting with culture (their behaviors & motivations/mindsets)
• Deliver innovative thinking that inspires leading edge solutions and award-winning breakthrough work – contributing the creation of best in class work as standard (both internally & externally)
• Arming the client team with knowledge & expertise to speak confidently about the strategic direction where required
• Measurable client & strategy business KPIs
Internal
• Identify, develop & oversee the delivery of unique and innovative strategies to deliver the client’s desired results
• Demonstrate a good understanding of consumers & their behaviors
• Clearly demonstrate how the strategy delivers on the business need and focus on results and measurement
• Be an Infinity Planning Expert & champion its usage amongst the team and client base
• Bring fresh thinking & inspiration into the Strategic Process to help the teams springboard to better Strategic thinking
• Adoption, promotion & facilitation of the Cultural Analytical Process/Tools to help teams find new insights that unlock growth
• Deliver executable, relevant, on brand platforms with the potential for fame/award entry
• Write cohesive communications architectures that deliver on the platform and give guidance for how the brand will play in culture
• Train, guide & assist the Strategists in development and packaging of ideas
• Positively collaborate with SBU and independent creative partners, contributing to their/our client work
• Use qualitative and quantitative communications channel & cultural tool research to develop applicable insights into the consumer connection with the brand
• Partner with Analytics to develop new tools, inputting into the development of new & cutting edge proprietary planning, research and reporting models for Initiative
• Lead ideation team sessions in conjunction with the Communications Design team and relevant SBUs to generate creative & compelling communications ideas
Commercial
• Contribute to Agency & Client revenue opportunities through Strategic output
• Maintain effective relationships with key strategic partners (vendors, academic institutions, creative consultancies), keeping up to date on their offer & using that information to help the Strategy Team unlock new growth opportunities for the client &/or the agency
Prioritization
• 20% Client
• 70% Internal
• 10% Commercial
Qualifications
Education:
• Bachelor’s degree in related field or equivalent work experience
Work Experience:
• 6-8 years in integrated planning role in media, creative, innovation or communications discipline (digital, content, invention, social, activation)
Skills:
• Ability to think differently: creative & adaptive, entrepreneurial, independently-minded; deeply immersed in cultural understanding and driven by a desire to know more the world / to better understand people’s motivations & behaviors in the shifting landscape