Position Summary

UM places a particular emphasis on strategy as a key business driver. The Chief Strategy Officer is a crucial Leadership role responsible for innovation, positioning, and new business across the Region. As Chief Strategy Officer you will report to the President of UM EMEA and will lead a high-performing, talented Strategy department.

A future-facing strategist with an understanding and passion for business and consumer strategy in the media space, this person will be a progressive thinker and proven leader. Responsible for UM’s strategy product and capability roadmap in partnership with the Leadership team, the Chief Strategy Officer will be the driving force in understanding client needs and marketplace opportunities to identify capabilities. The Chief Strategy Officer will lead UM EMEA’s strategic offering, driving organic growth with existing clients and developing a best-in-market strategy team. With a will to win and a proven track record in founding and cementing new client relationships, the Chief Strategy Officer will serve as a fundamental contributor to the agency’s client relationships and new business efforts, developing winning strategies and propositions for existing and prospective clients.

Key Responsibilities

External/Client

• Identify the client’s key business challenges or opportunities, and quantify the outcomes required to meet a client’s business goals, maintaining positive client relationships
• Set challenges and create a regional culture for exemplary award-winning work
• Confident approach to presenting to C-level client contacts across a range of topics, both within the usual wheelhouse of a media agency & outside, if the opportunity arises
• Developing the next iteration of our established thought leadership agenda
• Proactively identify strategic issues before they become real client problems, and demonstrate strong analytical and strategic skills to help address them
• Oversee strategic responses for UM’s most critical clients from briefing to final document
• Work closely with clients and the wider agency on helping to ‘transform’ their media needs and operationalize different multi-market structures and needs

Internal

• Represent the strategy function in the UM EMEA regional leadership Team
• Development of the high-performing strategy team
• Set examples of ways of working, motivating the team to produce smarter thinking across platforms and touchpoints to deliver more innovative and creative strategic thinking
• Ensure UM EMEA Strategy team continues to pioneer and develop world-class talent and be a beacon for the agency
• Recruit and motivate resources
• Create a powerful UM EMEA story, look, and feel with an edge to be more disruptive and provocative
• Able to deliver a strategy with insight, audience & targeting info with first thoughts & a POV on the potential strategic platform and communications architecture
• Work to continuously refine, train, and embed UM’s process and capabilities to keep it best in class in the industry
• Work with the audience, research, and analytics function to define a robust measurement and learning plan to measure and optimize media plans

Commercial 

• Working closely with the Business Development team to develop innovative pitch-winning strategies
• A key contributor to Agency & Client revenue opportunities by improving the teams’ Strategic output and positioning the strategy team to drive new products and services
• Lead the strategy function in new business pitches
• Work with key client business partners to pilot, refine, productise, and sell in new or evolved strategy capabilities – positioning strategy as a growth driver to our clients and the agency

Desired Skills & Experience

• You are a progressive, strategic, and critical thinker with a passion for client engagement, and identifying real solutions and insights that will make a difference to clients, well-versed in media operations and landscape
• You possess a keen understanding of the ever-changing media and digital landscape with a point of view on the trends that are pushing the industry; understand and remain absorbed in understanding people’s motivations and behaviors in the shifting landscape
• You have a passion for people and experience in team management and leadership
• You have good attention and focus on detail
• You have a thorough approach to seeing through the delivery of products, projects, and services
• You are a strong communicator and skilled storyteller, who sets the bar high for themselves and their team, with the ability to bring multiple, diverse groups of people together to define a single end-to-end solution
• You have highly developed business acumen with solid commercial, strategic, and analytical skills
• You are tenacious and relentless, never back down from a challenge; a superb problem solver who looks for the unexpected answer
• You embrace new ideas and experimentation; are naturally curious, and are energized rather than intimidated by ambiguity and not afraid to fail
• Ideally you will have multi-market experience but this isn’t essential