Senior Strategy Director
BCW Europe Africa, United Kingdom

The Senior Strategy Director (SSD) is a new and critical role within BCW London reflecting the growing demand and value placed on strategy development and leadership across the business. The SSD will report directly to the BCWs Chief Strategy Officer.

The SSD will be a key senior leader in both the London strategy and Hub teams; the Hub team bringing together digital/technology, creative, design and strategy teams to drive new and more valuable work. He/she will become part of the Hub Leadership team focusing on delivering our agency purpose of ‘Moving People’ through the lens of integration and innovation.

Whilst as a business, our proud heritage is in ‘earned’, we are not constrained by it. Strategic insight and creative strategy have never been more important in directing and inspiring creative that can engage or ‘move’ critical to engage audiences and therefore work hard to solve client problems and challenges regardless of media, channel or platform. The SSD will play a key role in elevating our capabilities in creative strategy development and integrated brand and business solutions.

The SSD will be responsible for not only delivering impactful creative strategies for agency clients, working across all practices in the agency (i.e. consumer, corporate, tech, healthcare, and public affairs), he/she will also be responsible supporting other members of the strategy team as they deliver projects too. He/she will be important in directing, developing and nurturing the significant talent within the team. In particular he/she will be responsible for developing brand strategy and planning skills.

The SSD will bring experience, smart thinking and ambition to our strategic development. Helping clients win: helping BCW win.

Requirements

Strategy Team Leadership

• Being a key support to the CSO and working with CSO to decide team resource allocation, project prioritisation
• Supporting strategy management layer (Associate Director) in reporting to team and Hub on projects
• Working as part of Hub Leadership team on prioritisation, collaboration and strategic projects (e.g. new product development).
• Line management of senior strategists and input into training and development schedule

Client and ongoing project work

• Lead strategy workshops for teams and clients
• Develop strategy and creative briefs that empower new, more valuable work for BCW; ensuring excellent strategy storytelling which sets up creative for success
• Work in partnership with the Creative team to develop creative activations, tactics, and communications initiatives, ensuring they remain on strategy
• Ability to assimilate into existing client working teams and deliver value quickly

New business development

• Be the strategy leader on priority new business pitches; supported by other members of the strategy team, client team and so on
• Work with senior leaders and stakeholders across the business to shape our new business proposals and project approaches
• Support team on how they can most helpfully support the brief, analytical proof, or strategic thinking

Desired Experience

• Experience in a creative agency, ideally within a Strategy and Planning department
• Broad consumer brand, corporate communications and/or public affairs/health experience
• Ability to mine data/insight and refine into a compelling strategy stories based on data/insight
• Proven track record of working in partnership with creatives and senior clients to develop excellent creative solutions
• Good written, spoken, and presentation communications skills with ability
• Confident pitch strategy lead
• Confidence to facilitate and run internal workshops, corralling diverse perspectives
• Experience of managing the trials and tribulations as well as the joys of collaboration

Benefits

Job Rewards and Benefits