Director of Strategy

Job Description

Who We Are

Horizon Sports & Experiences (HS&E) is a full-service sports marketing agency that connects brands and properties with fans through the power of sport, culture, and storytelling. We develop integrated marketing strategies, experiences, and partnerships that drive impact for our clients across the sports and entertainment landscape.

What You’ll Do

We are seeking a dynamic, collaborative, and forward-thinking Strategy Director to lead strategic development across key accounts and new business efforts. This role will be instrumental in shaping insight-driven marketing strategies that connect brands with sports audiences in meaningful, innovative ways.

The ideal candidate is equal parts brand strategist, cultural analyst, and storyteller—someone passionate about the fusion of insights and creativity to develop comprehensive and impactful strategies.

Reporting to the SVP Strategy, the person in this role will work as part of a highly collaborative team of sports and brand marketing experts based in NYC.

Responsibilities

We’re looking for someone who has a passion for understanding consumer behavior, dissecting client challenges, gleaning unique insights, and developing game-changing solutions. Someone who is comfortable working across a variety of projects and topics, and who approaches every opportunity with the goal of making the work better – more insightful, more organized, more impactful.

• Lead the creation and stewardship of integrated marketing strategies for clients, collaborating internally with account teams to identify brand goals and explore the art of the possible
• Uncover consumer, category, and cultural insights to inform sponsorship strategies, partnership positioning, campaign planning, and activation ideas.
• Distill information into informative briefs, compelling narratives, and concise strategy documents that clearly articulate the business challenge and guide the ideation and planning of actionable solutions
• Support account teams as partnership strategies are brought to life, to ensure the ongoing development of sponsorship tactics, activations, creative assets, etc continue to ladder back up to strategic framework
• Partner with Account, Creative, and Experiential teams to ensure strategies are translated into breakthrough work
• Conduct data analysis (or work closely with Data & Analytics resources) to ensure recommended plans are both rooted in data-driven insights and measurable over time
• Develop comprehensive measurement frameworks to help clients track and understand the impact of their sports marketing investments across a variety of objectives and KPIs
• Contribute to new business development, including supporting on RFP responses, building capability presentations, and helping to evolve agency narrative and go-to-market
• Build case studies that showcase the agency’s impact on client business and how those experiences can help influence prospective clients
• Develop and deliver high-quality presentations that masterfully communicate complex topics into terms that can be easily understand by various audiences, both internally and externally
• Keep a strong pulse on fan engagement, media, and innovation trends across the sports and entertainment landscape that can help inform strategic planning
• Contribute to the agency’s thought leadership strategy by leading proprietary research, identifying new topics to be explored, developing trend reports, and crafting new IP strategies for the agency in the marketplace
• Mentor and manage junior strategy team members; foster a culture of curiosity and insight

Who You Are

• Team-spirited and collaborative to achieve client objectives
• Ability to work in a dynamic, fast-pace environment, working on multiple partnerships and activations at a time
• Proven leader, experience managing a team
• Passionate in the live events landscape and a desire to innovate and keep up with trends
• Tremendous organizational skills, attention to detail and ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously and competing priorities
• An innovative thinker, concepting creative ideas for various activations
• A strong writer, listener, communicator and presenter
• Solutions oriented and proactive problem solver with foresight and the ability to develop creative solutions
• Experience with sponsorship measurement techniques
• An advocate for and supporter of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Preferred Skills & Experience

• Minimum 5+ years of experience in brand/partnership strategy, marketing, or planning—preferably at a creative, media, or sports marketing agency.
• Deep understa