Vice President, Communications Strategy

Company Description

About Spark Foundry:

Spark Foundry is a global media agency that exists to bring HEAT – Higher Engagement, Affinity, and Transactions – to brands. By combining flawless media fundamentals with aggressive innovation, Spark inspires consumers to pay more attention, to care more about our clients’ brands, and to buy more products and services from them.

Balancing the nimble spirit of a startup with the powerhouse soul of Publicis Media, Spark Foundry delivers the best of both worlds to a client roster that spans some of the world’s best and most beloved brands and companies. We combine boutique-caliber insights and service with the buying clout and first-look access of a global leader, bringing the heat to challenger brands that want to act like giants, and to giant brands that want to act like challengers.

With a bottom-up culture that celebrates diversity and aims for all voices to be heard, Spark has become a magnet for the industry’s best talent, with one of the best retention rates in the industry. And by applying a whole-person approach to professional and personal development, Spark develops a workforce that is well prepared for today’s challenges, and also poised to create meaningful careers in the years to come. 

Because we know that heat arises the intersection of complementary forces, our professionals come from myriad disciplines and backgrounds: data, analytics, and insights, content and creative production, communications and strategy, finance and marketing, and sociology, psychology, and other liberal arts disciplines.

Job Description

Position Overview:

The VP Director, Experience Design will lead an integrated team in architecting how our key target audiences experience a brand idea across Paid/Earned/Shared/Owned ecosystems. They will work closely with key clients and agency partners and the Spark media strategy team to ensure optimal messaging that is fit for platform, aligned to a brand’s audience strategy and grounded in the needs of the priority audiences. The Experience Design VP Director will work both upstream to collaborate on idea platform, as well as see the plan through to consult on asset and content creation.       

Responsibilities:

• Ensure seamless, end-to-end integration across channels, creative, and content activation with no dead ends
• Act as a “connector” across disciplines both internally and externally with partners and clients
• Simplify client inputs to identify the critical jobs to be done with communications
• Bring a deep understanding of diverse target consumers and champion that consumer to create experiences they will want to engage with   
• Form collaborative relationships with all key partners, be it other agency capabilities, partner agency teams, the various disciplines internally and across Macy’s
• Identify opportunities upstream to leverage content and media partnerships to supercharge media plans
• Navigate multifunctional agency teams and client relationships; with authority to deliver strong and substantiated recommendations to both internal and external audiences and show the ability to quickly pivot course, based on learnings from on-going, inclusive insights
• Proactively ideates with team and colleagues to produce novel (award-worthy) solutions for clients

Qualifications

• 7+ years’ experience in leading and developing communication / integrated marketing strategy, connecting the dots across paid, owned, and earned
• Embraces a collaborative approach and experience; thrives working closely across various disciplines - research, content, activation, data specialists, planning, social strategy etc - to diagnose and solve client business challenges and audience pain points or opportunities for marketing
• A strategic thought leader with the discipline to step back from the noise in order to not only form a point of view, but to also get to inclusive behavioral insights that will incite successful connected campaigns
• A persuasive storyteller both verbally and within deliverables, who is endlessly curious, with a keen ability to shift perspective and illuminate powerful, inclusive insights and potential through data and narrative
• A proven leader and relationship builder with an authoritative presence and confident communication style across various client levels; easily accessible to all levels of the agency and client organizations
• Champions cultural attributes and continuously strives for diversity and inclusivity and broad perspectives in our human experience deliverables for clients
• Able to operate effectively in a fast-paced environment, handling multiple projects at any given time, in addition to ad-hoc fire drills
• Has critical thinking skills that enable resourcefulness and the ability to navigate th