Associate Strategy Director

DEPT®; Greater London; On-site; GBP 85,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

DEPT® in London is seeking an Associate Strategy Director to lead and shape high-impact, culture-informed strategy for a key client. You will bridge client briefs with creative execution, guiding a team to deliver market-leading campaigns across digital and social channels.

You will balance upstream strategic thinking with hands-on delivery, collaborating with broader EMEA teams to scale impact and nurture senior client relationships.

Qualifications

• Highly experienced in a strategy-focused role within an agency setting.

Responsibilities

• Lead hands-on with one key account to drive the most pioneering work.
• Guide creative thinking across TTL, digital and social campaigns.
• Write and communicate compelling briefs to empower the creative team.
• Develop strategies and ideas that exceed client briefs and ROI expectations.
• Collaborate with Strategy Director and other teams to remove barriers to creativity.

Skills

Strategy leadership

Client management

Cultural strategy

Team collaboration

Job description

DEPT® is a Growth Invention company built to help the world’s most ambitious brands grow faster. Operating at the intersection of technology and marketing, our 4,000+ specialists deliver growth invention services across Brand & Media, Experience, Commerce, CRM, and Technology & Data. We’re 50|50 tech and marketing, partner-led, and first to move. Clients include Google, Lufthansa, Meta, eBay, and OpenAI. We have been certified B Corp and Climate Neutral since 2021.

Job Purpose

This position sits in our Marketing & Technology service based in London. We combine data, technology, creative content, and paid media to crack brands’ business problems & drive revenue through a variety of digital marketing solutions like ad campaigns, augmented reality, and chatbots. Our clients include ASOS, Just Eat Takeaway, Twitch, TikTok, and The White Company.

We are excited to be looking for a new Associate Strategy Director to join the team! This Associate Strategy Director will join a London based service whose specialism is producing award winning, digital and social, creative campaigns and content for a variety of well known and culturally current clients.

The role of the Associate Strategy Director will be to balance creating & guiding longer-term up-stream strategy, with sharpening the quality and strategic nature of our creative executions for a high volume of work; they will be responsible for being the buffer between a client brief and a creative idea. This person will be responsible for championing excellent strategic thinking that sets our brilliant creative teams up for success on all briefs. The Associate Strategy Director will collaborate closely and effectively with wider strategy teams, account managers, creatives, media specialists and a Strategy Director to create brilliant work that works.

The UK Strategy offering is small, but growing fast, and collaborates with wider EMEA Strategy teams. This person will ensure that we continue those relationships with wider EMEA and global strategy teams to identify talent, resources and shared processes and tools.

What We Need From You
For the work:

• Deeply understand human beings. Real ones. The ones we’re making the work for. You’re good at finding what they need. At identifying real problems to solve for them. You find humanity in data. And ultimately, you define a genuine role that brands can play in their lives.
• Get into the world and into culture. We don’t expect you to be a world-famous TikTokker, DJ or photographer (although we would welcome it). We do expect that you develop strategy informed by culture, so that we inform culture in turn.
• Innovation: instill market-leading innovations in digital and social strategy that our clients couldn’t get anywhere else

For our clients:

• Understand our client’s business. Not better than our clients do. That’s crazy and an insult to our clients. But understand it: how they make money and their business strategy, that, we must do.
• Building & maintaining trusted client relationships: being on speed dial for our clients to align on challenges, opportunities or ambitions. In this, utilising the most advanced thinking and approaches to deliver incremental improvements on ROI for any type of business.
• Be a partner + confidante: Usher them when they want it, guide them if they need it. We work in partnership with our clients, it helps the work and it helps the team, so we need the relationships in place to do so.

For the team:

• Work autonomously, together. We want you to feel autonomous – that your work is yours. At the same time, we expect you to enrich your work with other people’s perspectives.
• Be comfortable in a debate. We’re not order takers. We disagree a lot. With everyone. Not because it’s fun, but because it’s necessary for better work.
• Lead. Not in a performative way, more, set the tone. Motivate with your actions. Push the boundaries. That kinda way.

Key Responsibilities

Lead hands on with one key account to drive the most pioneering work.

• Support client + creative teams across the business to develop strategies and ideas that answer our clients briefs and exceed their expectations
• Bring the audience into the agency, let their voice be heard to guide thinking.
• Understand culture and harness it to shape the work
• Lead hands on with one key account to drive the most pioneering work.
• Guide creative thinking across a range of campaign types including but not limited to TTL, Digital and Social
• Write and communicate compelling creative briefs to help our creative teams deliver ideas that overcome business challenges
• Work in partnership with the Strategy Director and creative teams, removing the barriers to creativity, help guide them towards powerful, effective work.
• Prove the effectiveness of campaigns
• Be able to engage top-tier clients when presenting, with their strategies rooted in robust insights
• Work with senior clients and consult on key strategic projects
• Participate in new business pitches
• Serve as a thought leader across the business

Skills And Previous Experience
Highly experienced within a strategy-focused role in an agency setting