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Group Director, Strategy
Initiative
Los Angeles, CA, United States
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Initiative - Group Director, Strategy
Position Summary
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 Group 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.
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. 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
As a Group Strategy Director, you are responsible for the creation of the strategic direction a brand will take in communications to achieve their business goals. You are responsible for helping 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. This work should be held up as best practice both within the agency and externally – recognized by winning awards and client scores. You are also accountable for a team of other strategists and their ability to deliver quality work with consistency.
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. 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, sound presentation skills & leadership behaviors 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 driving the agency forward.
You are responsible for ensuring that the Strategists’ work is strong and sound. That it has considered all consumer, category and culture trends, helping them to think about new ways to respond to a brief and encouraging them to work – with you – alongside the Analytics, Communications Design and Client teams to deliver better, smarter and more innovative work.
ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:
Client
• Maintaining excellent client relationships & understanding of the clients' key business and challenges
• Being considered a valuable contributor during client meetings with the ability to challenge others’ opinions in the right forum/manner
• Delivering innovative thinking that inspires leading edge solutions and award-winning breakthrough work – best in class work as standard (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
• Lead Infinity Planning for the team and client base
• Bring fresh thinking & inspiration into the Strategic Process to help the teams springboard to better Strategic thinking
• Drive usage 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 Strategy & Client teams 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
• Manage other strategists on the account to ensure quality and consistancy
Commercial
• Contribute to Agency & Client revenue opportunities through Strategic output
• Proactively work with all partners (vendors, academic institutions, creative consultancies) to unlock new growth opportunities for the client &/or the agency
New Business
• Participation in active contribution to new business as required (local market)
QUALIFICATIONS:
• Bachelor’s degree in related field or equivalent work experience
• 10+ years in integrated planning role in media, creative, innovation or communications discipline (digital, content, invention, social, activation)
• 5+ years of experience managing or developing a staff
• 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
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.