Director, Strategy & Insights

The Director, Strategy & Insights is a senior strategic leader responsible for turning audience, category, cultural, and performance intelligence into clear growth strategies for clients. Based in Los Angeles, this role leads the development of integrated communications strategies, inspires teams with compelling insight, and partners with client leaders to connect media decisions to measurable business outcomes. You will guide major client assignments from problem definition through strategic recommendation, ensuring that research, analytics, planning, and activation work together around a distinctive consumer and business opportunity. The ideal candidate is equally comfortable shaping a senior client narrative, interrogating data, facilitating collaborative working sessions, and coaching strategists to produce rigorous, actionable work.

Responsibilities

Lead the development of integrated media and communications strategy for key client businesses, translating marketing objectives into clear strategic choices, audience priorities, channel roles, and measurement frameworks; Turn complex research and data into a focused story about the client's growth opportunity, including consumer motivations, category dynamics, cultural context, competitive behavior, and media implications; Serve as a trusted strategic partner to senior client stakeholders, bringing a proactive point of view and connecting recommendations to brand and business outcomes; Design and facilitate strategy workshops, briefings, and working sessions that align cross-functional teams around a shared problem, insight, and strategic platform; Partner closely with Communications Planning, Analytics, Research, Investment, Creative, Data, and Activation teams to ensure strategy is actionable and consistently expressed throughout the plan; Develop audience frameworks and segmentation approaches using available research, first-party data, platform intelligence, and syndicated tools; Establish learning agendas and measurement approaches with Analytics partners, ensuring hypotheses, KPIs, and optimization signals are defined before activation; Bring together qualitative and quantitative evidence to identify shifts in culture, consumer behavior, technology, and media that create new opportunities for clients; Lead strategic contributions to new business pitches, annual planning, major campaign development, and high-priority client presentations; Raise the quality of strategic output by creating useful frameworks, improving briefs, challenging assumptions, and establishing clear standards for evidence and storytelling; Coach and develop strategists and managers through hands-on feedback, structured development plans, and opportunities to lead increasingly complex assignments; Contribute to the broader EssenceMediacom strategy community by sharing thought leadership, tools, case studies, and emerging best practices

Requirements

8+ years of experience in media strategy, communications planning, consumer insights, brand strategy, management consulting, or a related discipline, including experience leading complex client assignments; Demonstrated ability to connect consumer and cultural insight to media strategy and measurable business outcomes; Strong command of qualitative and quantitative research methods, with the judgment to assess evidence quality and synthesize findings into an actionable point of view; Experience using syndicated and digital intelligence tools such as MRI-Simmons, YouGov, GWI, Comscore, Nielsen, Kantar, Pathmatics, social listening platforms, or comparable sources; Ability to partner with analytics teams on audience development, learning agendas, KPI design, experimentation, and campaign measurement; Exceptional storytelling and presentation skills, including the ability to make complex ideas clear, persuasive, and relevant to senior executives; Proven success leading cross-functional teams and influencing stakeholders without relying on formal authority; A collaborative, curious, and inclusive leadership style, with a record of coaching and developing high-performing talent; Strong organization and commercial judgment, with the ability to prioritize across multiple workstreams and deliver high-quality work under deadlines; Proficiency in Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel; Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in marketing, communications, business, psychology, sociology, economics, data analytics, or a related field

Nice to have

Familiarity with data visualization, AI-enabled research, and collaborative planning tools

Benefits

Competitive medical insurance; Group retirement plans; Vision and dental insurance; Significant paid time off; Preferential partner discounts; Employee mental health awareness days; Employee resource groups; Access to global WPP Media and WPP networks for growth and learning