Director, Strategy & Insights

WPP Media • Los Angeles, CA

5d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Director, Strategy & Insights is a senior strategic leader based in Los Angeles who turns audience, category, cultural, and performance intelligence into growth strategies for clients. The role leads integrated communications strategy, inspires teams with compelling insights, and partners with client leaders to connect media decisions to measurable business outcomes. The Director guides major client assignments from problem definition through strategic recommendation, bringing research, analytics, planning, and activation together around a distinctive consumer and business opportunity. The role calls for someone who can shape senior client narratives, interrogate data, facilitate collaborative working sessions, and coach strategists to deliver rigorous, actionable work.

EssenceMediacom combines performance, data, analytics, and creative technology capabilities with scaled multichannel audience planning and strategic media expertise to help brands achieve business growth and stronger consumer connections. WPP Media describes itself as WPP’s AI-driven media operating unit, bringing together media, data, and partnerships and connecting its work through WPP Open and Open Intelligence.

The position is hybrid, with teams in the office around four days a week. The stated US base salary range is $100,000–$230,000. Individual compensation varies based on job-related factors, including location, business needs, responsibility level, experience, and qualifications.

Requirements

• At least 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 and the judgment to assess evidence quality and synthesize findings into an actionable point of view.
• Experience with 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.
• 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 multiple workstreams and deliver high-quality work under deadlines.
• Proficiency in Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience in marketing, communications, business, psychology, sociology, economics, data analytics, or a related field.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with data visualization, AI-enabled research, and collaborative planning tools.

Responsibilities

• Lead integrated media and communications strategy for key client businesses, translating marketing objectives into strategic choices, audience priorities, channel roles, and measurement frameworks.
• Turn research and data into a focused account of client growth opportunities, including consumer motivations, category dynamics, cultural context, competitive behavior, and media implications.
• Serve as a strategic partner to senior client stakeholders, offering 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 with Communications Planning, Analytics, Research, Investment, Creative, Data, and Activation teams to make strategy actionable and consistently expressed throughout the plan.
• Develop audience frameworks and segmentation approaches using research, first-party data, platform intelligence, and syndicated tools.
• Establish learning agendas and measurement approaches with Analytics partners, defining hypotheses, KPIs, and optimization signals before activation.
• Combine qualitative and quantitative evidence to identify shifts in culture, consumer behavior, technology, and media that create client opportunities.
• Lead strategic contributions to new business pitches, annual planning, major campaign development, and high-priority client presentations.
• Improve strategic output by creating useful frameworks, improving briefs, challenging assumptions, and setting standards for evidence and storytelling.
• Coach and develop strategists and managers through hands-on feedback, structured development plans, and increasingly complex assignments.
• Contribute thought leadership, tools, case studies, and emerging best practices to the broader EssenceMediacom strategy community.

Benefits

• Competitive medical benefits
• Group retirement plans
• Vision insurance
• Dental insurance
• Significant paid time off
• Preferential partner discounts
• Employee mental health awareness days
• Employee resource groups
• In-office events celebrating team wins, sharing thought leadership, and marking holidays and milestones
• Access to global WPP Media and WPP networks for professional growth, networking, and learning

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director