VP, Group Strategy Director

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About the Role

As VP, Group Strategy Director you’ll help bring out the best in our creative strategy, brand strategy, and communications planning teams. You’ll uncover meaningful, surprising insights and set the tone for creating and selling ground-breaking work–while helping to define the business, creative, future vision, and growth across our accounts.

This role is a New York City (32 Old Slip #705. New York, NY 10005.), hybrid role! 

Responsibilities:

• Develop insightful, innovative, cut-through strategies that lay the foundations for great work. Base your thinking on the client's brand objectives, KPIs, audiences, message, and voice, as well as on macro and locally relevant cultural trends and insights, overall industry best practices, business intelligence, and media performance data.
• Lead and provide hands-on project work, briefs, strategic POV, and recommendations to inform content development for connection moments and tactics, creative approaches and to answer clients’ business challenges and requests.
• Shine with your ability to blend creative, brand, product, and comms planning, always staying on top of best practices. You’re plotting how ideas will travel and be engaged with, then working with cross-functional teams to sell through and deliver them.
• Partner closely with account, creative, media, and operations leads, and any other capabilities, develop, sell, deliver, and implement best-in-class innovative work. 
• Drive collaboration with global and regional teams, clients, and agency partners to facilitate efficient ways of working and delivery. Be a catalyst for fluid, clear, and collaborative communications, and work as one team. 
• Approach all work considering data, culture, global and local relevance, and scaled content and performance rigor.
• Provide thought leadership on marketing vision and best practices for the marketing of today and tomorrow, powered by AI, fueled by cultural context, trend,s and conversations, and think dynamically about the evolution of creative media, performance marketing, content creation, and communication planning.
• Have a growth mindset and an eye to detect business opportunities for Monks and our clients, as well as the ability to build business cases and the recommended solutions.
• Have a contagious passion for our business and the creative industry, an infectious drive for rigor, qualitative work delivery, and a great collaborative attitude.

About You

The essentials:

• Minimum of 10 years in agency strategy experience. A deep strategy background and holistic approach spanning brand, creative, and comms strategy, content, channel planning, and messaging including CRM and lifecycle strategy. A great ability to connect the thinking between media strategy, performance, big idea, tactics and social is essential.
• Proven track record of producing great strategy work across B2C and B2B–experience with financial services or fintech clients a plus.
• In-depth knowledge of modern marketing, content ecosystems, tactics, trends, and formats. Ability to develop tried-and-true and to drive innovative thinking and strategies - to lead thought-leadership on the evolution of approach.
• Developed consumer journeys, communication plans, and ecosystems for a variety of clients.
• The talent to clearly articulate your recommendations and POV through excellent storytelling.
• The ability to take the lead with clients to provide valuable strategic POV.
• The ability to flex across strategic and tactical thinking, depending on what’s needed. You can go deep while always connecting to the big-picture issue or opportunity.
• Expertise on understanding audiences, their behavior online, and IRL as users and humans.
• Developed learning plans, measuring performance and recommending KPIs, according to objectives, tactics, formats, and creative content.
• Analytic skills to interpret qualitative, quantitative research and media data, to inform learnings, insights, and recommendations for opportunities and optimization.
• Proficiency in industry research, trends and data tools, such as MRI, GWI and the key platforms.