Associate Director, Social & Content Strategy

DEPT®•New York, NY

3d•$85,000 - $115,000•Remote

About The Position

The Associate Director, Social & Content Strategy is a senior practitioner role within DEPT®'s integrated Strategy organization. You report to a Group Director of Strategy and work alongside discipline leads across brand strategy, communications planning, media strategy, and research. You track culture before it surfaces in a brief. You have strong opinions about what makes content work on a platform, and you have shaped bold creative campaigns that move brands forward. You bring craft to strategy: your briefs sharpen the problem, your frameworks drive execution, and your thinking gives creative teams somewhere real to go. You understand how audiences truly behave: how they form communities, participate in trends, and move between content and commerce. You use that understanding to build strategies that are specific enough to be actionable and ambitious enough to be interesting. You have developed fluency across the full social ecosystem: organic, earned, paid, and the creator economy. The best version of this role looks like a brief that unlocks a campaign, a content system that performs at volume without losing its point of view, and a creator strategy that feels native to a platform and right for a brand. You are equally at home in social strategy and digital strategy. You can build a channel strategy to inform creative production at scale and write a creative brief to anchor a major brand platform. You understand paid social as a strategic amplification layer and can contribute meaningfully to conversations about digital performance media, display, and DOOH without owning those channels. This role is for someone who brings strong independent output, earns client trust through the work itself, and actively develops the strategists around them.

Requirements

5+ years demonstrated experience in social and content strategy built inside agency environments, with a track record of rigorous, deadline-driven work across brand-led campaigns and always-on programs.
Practitioner-level fluency in how modern social works: algorithmic distribution, paid amplification mechanics, creator ecosystems, commerce layers, and how AI-influenced search is reshaping content visibility and discovery.
Brief-writing craft. Your briefs create useful constraints, build a clear point of view, and give creative teams problems worth solving.
Experience developing audience intelligence that produces real outputs: culturally grounded personas, trend analyses that shape decisions, and social listening with enough rigor to move strategy.
Working knowledge of digital strategy beyond social, including digital OOH, display, and performance media—sufficient to contribute to integrated channel planning conversations.
The communication clarity to present strategic work confidently, hold a point of view under pressure, and build trust with senior clients and cross-functional partners.
A mentorship orientation. You have helped junior strategists develop their thinking and approach that as a meaningful part of the job.

Responsibilities

Develop integrated social and content strategies across organic, paid, owned, earned, and creator channels, building content ecosystems and channel strategies that connect at the portfolio level and perform at the platform level.
Write creative briefs and social strategies that give creative teams a genuine problem to solve, framing the strategic challenge with precision, a clear point of view, and useful constraints.
Build content frameworks, platform strategies, and always-on programming architectures that translate brand positioning into scalable, cross-channel programs.
Build and maintain social listening programs, cultural trendspotting frameworks, and audience intelligence outputs grounded in behavioral and cultural data that inform strategic decisions.
Contribute to digital strategy conversations that extend beyond social, including digital OOH, display, and digital performance media, with enough fluency to inform channel roles and creative requirements.
Immerse yourself in each client's business and competitive landscape, developing a working understanding of category dynamics, commercial pressures, and brand context that connects business objectives directly to social and content strategy decisions.
Collaborate with media strategists, comms planners, brand strategists, and creative teams to ensure content and cultural strategy integrates credibly into full-funnel thinking.
Lead day-to-day client engagements, building trust with mid-to-senior stakeholders through the quality and consistency of your strategic output.
Mentor junior and mid-level strategists, providing feedback on their work and creating the conditions for them to grow. You do not manage headcount; you develop people.