Strategic Planner

**Company Description**: We help grow many of the world's most iconic brands at Leo Burnett. We help grow even more of the world's most talented people. You'll find at Leo Burnett an agency built on ideas and dependent upon the people behind them. A culture that doesn't just respect creativity but cherishes it. And a community where the path you choose is your own, the places you can go limitless. Today, Leo Burnett is one of the most awarded creative networks in the world. We believe creativity has the power to transform human behavior, and we use ours to help our clients' brands discover their "human purpose" and play meaningful, active roles in people's lives. The Strategy Manager will be a digital-savvy, creatively driven strategist, who is excited to contribute to distinctive and effective strategies and creative solutions for a visionary telecommunications and technology conglomerate. Core skills: - Formulate a clear hypothesis and help drive formal and informal research.- - Visualize creative thinking to transform an idea or concept into a coherent output via channel planning.- - Identify interesting patterns from diverse sources to create added strategic value.- - Contribute to and deliver additive value in client presentations.- - Plan for emerging problems with strategic solutions focused on creativity.- - Build a detailed profile of clients that is inclusive of any potential challenges to their business.Understanding of the client: - Ensure successful delivery of client projects and support work of other colleagues.- - Build client presentations which succinctly, but effectively tell the consumer story and appropriately positions the project for success.- - Conduct competitive landscape assessments and benchmarking reviews that influence the creative product and the client’s business.- - Assist senior strategy staff in planning and managing client meetings and workshops while capturing insights gained to create value.- - Monitor political, economic, social, cultural and technological trends along with their impact on consumers’ attitudes and behaviour.Building a strategy: - Build target audience profiles, test relevance, and determine the connection strategy.- - Develop strategies around current trends and engagement tactics uncovering deep organizational, media, and audience insights.- - Synthesize qualitative and quantitative data from available sources to provide strategic implications and creative inspiration.- - Conduct and support primary and secondary research.Focus on people: - Attend industry and vendor presentations and share best practices with the team.- - Partner with Business Leadership teams and Creative teams to uncover needs and build solutions that deliver and exceed client expectations.- - Work closely with internal account teams to understand business challenges and identify strategic marketing needs.- - Build relationships with internal groups of the agency to better understand key roles and functions within the network.- - Manage, mentor and develop junior team members and interns.Deliver top results: - Review past award submissions to identify key components of a successful story, discuss findings with managers and write award submissions.- - Develop focused, insightful, and inspiring briefs and content models.- - Score culture for new uses of technology, data, and design to weave innovative thinking into strategic work.- - Assist in-depth business reporting and comprehensive advertising and marketing analyses.- - Work with Business Leadership teams to research new opportunities for growth of client’s business.**Qualifications**: - Bachelor's degree is a must and a masters degree is a plus.- - 4-6 years of experience in media and advertising and managing clients.- - 2-3 years of demonstrated hands on experience in performing strategic planning.- - Understanding of selling, designing, performing and delivering strategic projects.- - People skills are key as is the ability to inspire people.- - Ability to co-ordinate multiple projects of different scales.- - Self-starter and self-motivated with ability to work independently.- - Ability to communicate across all levels of agency, and an engaging presenter.- - A passion for creativity and effectiveness.- - Attention to detail.- - Problem-solving skills with an air of optimism.- - Proven ability to build close inter-personal relationships.- - Strategic thinker - able to answer the client’s brief with the right solution.- - Ability to work under pressure and tight timelines.- - Ability to work cross borders to source the best solution for the client.- - Build user journeys when briefing and working with creatives.- - Understanding of content within the user journey and how personalization and automation enables and powers that process.- - Ability to transform research into meaningful insights.