Senior Strategist

Job Description

The role in a nutshell:

The Senior Strategist uncovers answers and insights through research, instinct and immersion in the business, culture, category and consumer. This person shows inexhaustible curiosity in seeking information and inspiration, making them an indispensable part of the end-to-end strategic and creative process.

Essential Skills 

• Storytelling/Storyselling. Creating a compelling narrative is essential in both inspiring and selling great work. Being a master storyteller is essential as you develop creative briefs and lead briefing meetings in an inspirational manner with little to no oversight. You will be expected to not only find the right data, but also find the story in the data points. You want to get clients excited about brilliant ideas and saying YES. 
• Brief Writing. The best briefs have a clear objective, consumer barrier and compelling insight that can serve as a  
  jumping-off point for creative ideation. As Senior Strategist, you’ll continue to build your brief writing skills and contribute insights and inspiration for the briefing and throughout creative development. 
• Taking Initiative. As you take on more responsibility within this role, independently managing and prioritizing tasks/projects will be essential to your growth. You will be expected to attend and contribute during client briefings  
  and take the lead on creative brief writing and presenting. 
• Shaping the Creative Product. Being a senior member of the team means being not only a key contributor to the strategic product, but also helping shape the creative product. From having a strong presence in brainstorms and internal reviews to supporting, nurturing and challenging the work, your job is to ensure creative solutions are strategically sound and maximally impactful.  
• Subject Matter Expertise. Making sound strategic decisions and having a strong POV will go a long way in cementing your status as a valued team member. As a Senior Strategist, you should know the ins and outs of the business, the category and have a relentless curiosity around changing consumer behavior. 
• Thought Leadership. Part of taking an ownership role on the business means identifying opportunities to organically grow your business. You will also be expected to take ownership in developing white papers, POVs and agency thought pieces. 
• Research Chops. You will be a key contributor in the design and execution of research (qualitative and quantitative) projects, including: owning vendor relationships, writing screeners, crafting discussion guides, moderating, capturing key takeaways and creating reports. You are hands on with our data tools in IRC, working fluently in Google Insights Finder, Meltwater, Numerator, Simmons and other types of secondary source data to be used for insight generation and strategic POVs.  
• Experience Design. Showing how an idea goes from a single comp to a full user experience can be a crucial step in selling creative solutions to clients. You will create frameworks and user flows that bring ideas to life and identify the human behavior we seek to change. 
• Success Planning. You will build measurement plans to ensure the work is working. You will partner with clients, account and media to align on objectives, KPIs and metrics and help foster a culture of accountability and continual optimization. 
• Inclusivity in the Everyday. Contribute to, seek out and support diversity in our strategies and creative product (leveraging our Multicultural Intelligence suite), bringing more authentic representations into every step of our process. 

How to Thrive 

• Contribute. Seek out opportunities to contribute, whether that be jumping in on a new business pitch, training the team on a new research tool/capability or raising your hand for a pro bono project. 
• Be Proactive. Anticipating the needs of your team and clients will be imperative to your success in this role. You should be entrepreneurial about the business opportunities and ensure POVs with team members and clients are inspiring and thought provoking.  
• Manage Up. While this role will provide ample opportunity to work more independently and take ownership of projects, use your manager as a sounding board. This means knowing when to elevate a problem, ask for guidance and get a second set of eyes on something, but always come to the table with a proposed solution.  
• Confidence with Multicultural Intelligence. You can inform our agency and brands with the rigor, insight and understanding needed to produce a more authentic a