Senior Comms Strategist

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications

• 3-8 years of experience in a client-facing comms strategy or media strategy role
• We are looking for someone who has a POV on what communications strategy can and should be for an agency in today's landscape.

• Proven track record of effective and inventive use of consumer data and research to develop strategic deliverables or creative execution.

• Experience in both campaign communications strategy and web/social content strategy.
• A love of advertising, communications, media channels, popular culture and how people consume and act on all of these things.
• Insatiable curiosity that compels you to keep learning about consumers, clients and your collaborators.
• Comfortable under pressure. You bring structure to ambiguous assignments and know when and how to delegate work across the team.
• Open to giving and receiving feedback without ego.
• Clear and concise written and verbal communication skills.
• High emotional intelligence

External Description

Anticipated future hire pending new business needs.

Department: Strategy

FLSA Status (Exempt vs Nonexempt): Exempt

Location: Austin

Endlessly curious, GSD M Strategy team members focus on bringing insightful context, uncommon sense and clear inspiration to our clients. They rely on a strong understanding of how people think and behave, what's happening in popular culture, how to build memorable brands, and what's going on in the business, marketing, communications and experience landscape.

Position Function (3-4 sentences)

The Senior Communications Strategist will be responsible for developing creative and innovative communications strategies and go-to-market approaches for GSD M's clients. This individual is responsible for challenging and inspiring clients and teams to think differently about how brands show up in culture and across channels to break through in today's fragmented and cluttered landscape. In order to do so, they will need to provide both clients and the agency with a crucial perspective on culture, audiences, media trends, creative influences, business dynamics and technology innovations that will inform the strategic approach our clients take to their communications.

Position Specific Responsibilities/Duties

Strategic Thinking Leadership:

• Bringing the consumer's world to life for creative teams and clients through an understanding of how they live; their behaviors with respect to content, connections, and media; influencers; life-stage insights; attitudes; and motivations. Furthermore, how these impact on their receptivity to marketing communications, through the use of qualitative and cultural mining, plus the insightful synthesis of quantitative research.
• Collaborating with brand strategy, account management, creative, analytics, production and media, serving as connective tissue between all groups.
• Demonstrating strong analytical and business acumen, identifying a client's core business problem and developing strategic solutions to solve them
• Ensuring that actionable, up-to-date information about the media landscape and ecosystem is communicated regularly to internal teams and clients
• Proactively providing thought leadership and perspective on the significance and implications of new technologies and cultural shifts that can impact a client's business
• Willing and excited to roll up your sleeves and pull research, make decks and brainstorm ideas.
• Understanding of both campaign go-to-market planning and evergreen web/social content strategy development.

Idea Development:

• Partner with media and brand strategy to foster collaboration among client teams and internal teams; facilitate brainstorms, think tanks and ideation sessions that drive creativity, innovation and idea generation.
• Liaise with client leadership teams and activation teams (production, media partners, media agencies, etc.) to help with idea execution and measurement.
• Evaluate communications or media opportunities and provide sound recommendations on those opportunities.
• Orchestrate communications narratives and plans to be told across channels.
• Take a big idea and dictate how the story shows up in a way that is native to the environment or audience to help convey the larger brand story and platform to the audience. Leverage the big idea to create compelling stories for the brand(s) that can live within the infinite media channels of today.
• Develop plans and recommendations that go beyond the conventional media flowchart, including, but not limited to the product as media, the consumer as media, the store as media, the employees as media or owned content as media.
• Serve as the liaison between internal creative teams and external media agencies. Facilitate conversation, brainstorms and idea development.

Client Internal Relationships:

• Accurately represent the consumer point of view when reviewing work, leveraging this perspective when providing feedback to team and presenting to client, ultimately focused on doing the best work founded in consumer understanding.
• Participate and present in new business efforts and presentations.
• Provide appropriate management updates and solicit feedback, education and direction when appropriate.