Director, Strategy & Insights

About WPP Media

WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands. With exceptional talent, trusted data and intelligence, and world-class partnerships, all united by our pioneering agentic marketing platform, WPP Open, we help clients navigate change, capture opportunity, and deliver transformational growth.

WPP Media is WPP's AI-driven media operating unit, bringing together media, data, and partnerships to deliver creative personalization at scale. Connected through WPP Open and powered by Open Intelligence, clients see exactly where, how, and why their media investment is working. For more information, visit wppmedia.com.

About EssenceMediacom

EssenceMediacom is a new kind of media agency, combining the performance, data, analytics, and creative technology capabilities of Essence with MediaCom’s scaled multichannel audience planning and strategic media expertise. We help brands break through by using media to create meaningful business growth and stronger consumer connections.

Role Summary

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.

Key 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 highpriority 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; familiarity with data visualization, AI-enabled research, and collaborative planning tools is strongly preferred.
  • Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience in marketing, communications, business, psychology, sociology, economics, data analytics, or a related field.

  Life at WPP Media & Benefits

  Our passion for shaping the next era of media includes investing in our employees to help them do their best work, and we’re just as committed to employee growth as we are to responsible media investment. WPP Media employees can tap into the global WPP Media and WPP networks to pursue their passions, grow their networks, and learn at the cutting edge of marketing and advertising.

  We have a variety of employee resource groups and host frequent in-office events showcasing team wins, sharing thought leadership, and celebrating holidays and milestone events. Our benefits include competitive medical, group retirement plans, vision and dental insurance, significant paid time off, preferential partner discounts, and employee mental health awareness days.

  WPP Media is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without discrimination or regard to particular characteristics. We are committed to fostering a culture of respect in which everyone feels they belong and has the same opportunities to progress in their careers.

  We believe the best work happens when we're together, fostering creativity, collaboration, and connection. That’s why we’ve adopted a hybrid approach, with teams in the office around four days a week. If you require accommodations or flexibility, please discuss this with the hiring team during the interview process.

  WPP Media is committed to providing reasonable accommodation to, among others, individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans. If you need an accommodation because of a disability to search and apply for a career opportunity with WPP Media, please email GroupM Leave Administration at [email protected] or call (212) 2978507 and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information.

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