Company

This role is to lead Strategy globally on Carlsberg, Harman and be a senior lead on global new business pitches. This role demands the need for innate understanding of consumer motivations on the path to purchase and understand how to apply cultural, behavioural and buying trends to a client challenge.

This role will:

• Uncover powerful consumer and cultural insights across Carlsberg’s five global brands and the Harman portfolio using Initiatives proprietary tools, 3rd party sources and industry research.   
• Work with the Cultural Insights and Analytics team to decipher and translate research into thought leadership that keeps their clients ahead of competitors and market trends.  
• Lead the creation, embedding and evolution of Integrated Planning Processes working closely with partner agencies, Initiatives Special Business Units and key client Stakeholders. 
• Lead the Annual Media Summits for both clients, working with key stakeholders to identify and capitalise on the biggest opportunities within media and marketing across the network.     
• Manage the client “roadshows” with our internal Client Advice Managemen counterparts to embed key Media Summit opportunities in high priority markets to drive network excellence.  
• Work closely with the Client Advice Management and Connections Design teams to create, share and embed annual campaign guidance to Carlsberg’s extensive network of 34 markets.  
• Monitor and report on interesting trends shaping the industry, category, and culture through our quarterly thought leadership pipeline.    
• Bring big cultural ideas and thinking to key global brands and support local markets to create and share innovative campaign ideas for internal awards programs.

Being a Strategy Director at Initiative means working seamlessly with other hub team members to create work that doesn’t just move through paid channels, but through culture itself. They are self-starters, and often required to identify, and activate against opportunities that aren’t always outlined in a client’s brief.

You have a passion for people, brands and ideas and an insatiable curiosity for culture in every sense. You believe that brands can & should have meaning in the world, and are driven by the desire to understand the changing world and people’s subsequent shifting motivations and behaviors.

Creative thinking and sound presentation skills are critical in delivering success in this role. 

You should produce work that drives re-appraisal of communications and what media can do in the world, and your work should be seen as one of the key levers working to drive the agency forward.

Client

• Positive client relationships; understands clients' business and challenges
• Aids in elevating Initiative’s profile with key clients – particular our new wins
• Award winning work delivered as a result of close collaboration with local markets identified as opportunity areas.
• Deliver innovative thinking that enable award-winning &/or breakthrough work, helping to orchestrate, identify & write and win awards submissions
• Measurable client & strategy business KPIs met

Internal

• Lead team member providing quality control/best practice in the presentation of ideas
• Able to translate the client's business goals into Strategic Communications Tasks
• Able to deliver a strategy with insight, audience & targeting info with first thoughts & a POV on the potential strategic platform and communications architecture
• Day-to-day active working knowledge of the Infinity Planning Process including training wider teams on process, usage on how to speak to the Initiative product with confidence in front of clients.
• Positive feedback on ability to collaborate with other agencies, partners, teams & SBUs
• Able to brief the global CD/ CAM team & local market teams with executable, on brand platforms that inspire
• Collaborates with all teams to steward campaign strategic rigor
• Proactively seeks to understand campaign results in real-time to feed learnings back into the Loop
• Lives Initiative behaviors whilst also demonstrating solid time and management skills

Commercial

• A key contributor to Agency & Client revenue opportunities by improving the teams' Strategic output
• Contributor to client KPI delivery & Agency revenue opportunities through the improvement of the Strategy Teams’ strategic output (the provision of best in class thinking & future-focused insight/idea generation)

• Experience in an integrated planning role within media, creative, innovation or communications discipline (digital, content, invention, social, activation)
• Ability to think differently: creative & adaptive, entrepreneurial, independently-minded; deeply immersed in cultural understanding and driven by a desire to know more the world / to better understand people’s motivations & behaviors in the shifting landscape