Business Director, Strategy

About WPP Media WPP Media’s position as the world’s leading media strategy, planning and investment group has recently been reaffirmed in COMvergence’s newly released 2024 Global & Regional Billings Rankings report. The report ranks us first globally with $64.6 billion in billings - up 3.6% year-over-year and 18.2% ahead of the next-largest group. Regionally, WPP Media Ranks #1 in both APAC ($20.6B) and China (with a 42% share of the Chinese market). This underscores our position at the intersection of scaled media and intelligence, to attract world leading brands and talents for our organization. In China we are proud to count a wide array of top brands to our client roster like The Coca Cola Company, LVMH, adidas, Unilever, Estee Lauder Company, Huawei, Didi, Sony, Nike, KSF, Richemont, Zara, Colgate, Mercedes Benz, Prada, AirBNB, among many others. Served through 2.500 colleagues based in 5 WPP campuses around China. About our Strategy Practice The strategy department has a key role in driving communication strategy and strategic thinking across our client’s businesses. As business growth and the marcom landscape in China become more complex, with platforms as main disrupters, clients are more open to an elevated level of marcom strategy service. That is why we created a central strategy practice that offers a diverse and dynamic array of strategy configurations, including communication, media, and platform strategy. Supported by our OS WPP Open that holds some of the most advanced and AI supported data sets and analytic tools for the region. The team has become recognized for launching at fast pace in-depth while practical thought leadership on advertising effectiveness in the Chinese market, that has been published through live stream events and industry outlets like WARC. We think our team offers a unique opportunity to work with great strategy talents and supported by learning programs. About the Position We are recruiting for an exceptional and driven strategy director / business director to join our practice. This is a unique and exciting opportunity at the intersection of communications planning and media strategy for a world-leading brands that are beloved by millions of Chinese consumers. In this highly collaborative role, you will work closely with the media planning team as well as creative, social and shopper agencies to develop insight-based, innovative, and integrated communications plans that drive brand and business growth. You will work on diverse projects ranging from annual planning, thought leadership, workshop design and facilitation. For these your primary role will be to validate business growth targets,
uncover sources of growth, define growth audiences and purchase journey pain points and translate them into differentiated, actionable campaign strategies and communication tasks. Besides you also will initiate and execute marketing projects like go to market strategy, audience strategies and portfolio strategies during the year.
3 Best Things about the Role
1. Create the New: This job is about driving growth, improvement and innovation through solid strategic thinking, and you will play a key role in developing media industry and FMCG category ‘firsts’
2. Culture of Collaboration: You will have the opportunity to work with diverse, best-in-class experts across WPPMedia and WPP who enjoy working together and learning from one another.
3. Visibility and Mentorship: In a key role on a major client, you will directly interact with senior clients as well as agency leaders who will offer hands-on guidance to further your career development
Measures of Success
• Stakeholder satisfaction (quality of strategic thinking)
• Make it happen (proactively look at strategic client demands and projects we can offier)
• Personal growth mindset (learning agility)
• Industry recognition (award wins, thought leadership)
What You Will Need
• Mindset is crucial to success in this role. We’re looking for an open-minded, ambitious individual with a ‘can-do’ attitude and a strong sense of ownership. You will have a desire not just to develop great strategic thinking, but also to help our planners turn it into award-winning executions across any channel.
• You’ll have solid strategic and problem-solving capabilities and will be comfortable with analyzing and synthesizing different types of data to develop insights and implications. You will have the ability to fuse qualitative and quantitative thinking, simplifying complexity to story tell clear solutions.
• + 7 years (for director) -10-12 years (Business Director) + years of media/communications planning experience, with a focus on strategy and media planning.
• You’ll have some grasp of how media works. This means you may work in a strategy role at another media agency, or you may be a strategist at another type of agency or consultancy with some experience in connections planning.
• You will excel at influencing stakeholders and enjoy collaborating with cross-functional experts in a matrix environment.
• You must have excellent communication skills – fluent written and spoken English and Chinese are a must – as you will be working closely with foreign and Chinese clients as well as local media partners
• You have experience in CPG/FMCG, Luxury or Lifestyle/Sports categories among other consumer categories.
• You are conversant with qualitative and quantitative research techniques, all major desktop research tools and big data analytical offering.
Responsibilities of The Role
• In-depth analysis of market and brand to define powerful insights that drive the strategic recommendation.
• Partner with the Data Science team to define through a strategic lens the growth audiences.
• Identify, and articulate compelling insights on these audiences including their consumer decision journey pain points that give the foundation for a comms platform and architecture.
• Propose, execute and report primary and secondary research, in collaboration with the Insights & Analytics team.
• Drive, embrace and integrate thought leadership on major developments in the landscape.
• Leading comms strategy resulting in annual planning, strategy for big launches and campaigns, that solve business and communication problems for clients.
• Contributing to high level strategic projects like Masterbrand strategies and Planning integration for media and e-commerce media.
• Within the development of comms strategies, deployment of our “Transform” framework for creation of growth platforms and comms architectures that are transferable to comms and media plans are key.
• Contribute to pitches beyond the assigned client scope, on ad hoc basis.
• Owning both the quality as well as look and feel of strategy deliverables.
• Leading brainstorm and ideation sessions to drive the development of engagement ideas, in workstreams that include other agencies and media partners. What We Expect
In Three Months:
• Learned how to effectively use various data and insights tools
• Understood the client’s business, terminology, structure
• Understood the roles and responsibilities of different members of the agency team
• Started to establish relationships with internal and client stakeholders
• Built a solid, up to date understanding of the diverse media landscape in China
In Six Months:
• Met with all your clients and established yourself as a strategy expert
• Become a trusted partner to your seniors and your peers
• Developed an effective pattern of collaboration with other team members
• Independently delivered and sold in campaign strategy for multiple campaigns
In 12 Months:
• Delivered annual strategy for multiple brands
• Contributed to award-worthy campaigns that are recognized as ‘best-in-class’ by the industry
• Identified at least one area of thought leadership and created provocative content to build WPP Media reputation with clients and to drive the client’s business forward
• Consistently act as a role model to other team members