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PLACED: Senior Research Manager, Qualitative; $85-100K, NYC or Chicago

Ready to join a new breed of qualitative research company?

Global insight and strategic branding group is seeking to add a curiosity-driven Senior Manager to their nimble and entrepreneurial team.  These folks believe research should be creative, rigorous, and flexible.

This qual-focused Senior Manager will have various responsibilities including client management and drafting proposals, to workshops and creation of documentaries, reporting, new business pitches, invoicing, strategic initiatives, and conducting various modes of research (ethnographies, shop-alongs, in-depth interviews, moderation of focus groups, etc.). Present projects touch on myriad categories such as CPG, technology, retail, hospitality, lifestyle, etc. While this is not a dedicated role, we are particularly interested in someone who has the skill and expertise to help advise clients working in the US Hispanic marketplace. This will include understanding segments, sub-groups, traditions, customs and nuances, as well as the related cultural dynamics and issues. Fully English/Spanish bilingual a must.

YOU are a talented senior researcher, planner or strategist with an involved, passionate, connected, collaborative spirit. You are smart, ambitious, exciting, a strategic thinker up for the challenge of growth. Experienced in tackling strategic, high profile briefs and projects, you’ll be happy working in a creative, informal but intellectually demanding environment. Enjoyment is key; please love what you do.

Further, a forward-thinking qualitative researcher with 5+ years experience (planning, brand consulting and/or research), involved in all stages of the research process, from designing and setting up projects and conducting fieldwork, through to analysis, report writing/storytelling and presenting findings. You must have experience leading projects and being the main client point of contact.  You should relish the idea of working in a small growing team that offers progression through achievement and attitude rather than moving up a static career ladder.  Please be human, creative and full of energy; resourcefulness, flexibility, individual passions, and confidence mixed with quirkiness are highly valued.

You will be fully supported by a well-developed project management team, back office support team, film team and a very ambitious group of qualitative researchers and brand consultants who delight in getting on planes to go to places to solve client problems. Compensation will be competitive based on the skills and experience of the candidate and will include healthcare, 4 weeks vacation as standard, participation in the company bonus scheme and of course invitations to our various outings, shindigs and away days.

If this is you, send us your resume/portfolio showing that you are whip-smart and never boring and why we would be mad not to have you on the team.

Sounds great?! Shoot your details to [email protected]. Not for you? Please share with your network, and get someone working!

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PLACED: Head of Strategy, NYC

Are you whip smart with a constant curiosity? Passionately interested in culture, ideas and behavior? Mighty creative is born in this boutique NYC ad agency seeking top-tier Strategy talent.

Independent, creative advertising agency with a mission to change the way the world feels about advertising by filling it with ideas that are smart, funny and respect people’s time and intelligence. The agency’s ability to make ads that people notice and love has translated into business results for myriad national brands. As a very powerful, all knowing department of one, please be collaborative, entrepreneurial, and comfortable working on nimble and fast-paced teams. This person is capable of exceptionally performing the core skills of interrogation, distillation and inspiration. Your ability to derive consumer insight will be directly responsible for positively impacting the quality of creative work. A strong writer and thinker, you are a confident presenter, able to articulate insights and ideas in a clear, human way. Poised in tough strategic debates, you partner well with Creatives and Account to deliver effective briefs, help guide new business, and craft thoughtful and imaginative research initiatives. You should be brand-loving and relationship-building while displaying a flexible and challenging intelligence in a playful and family-style atmosphere. Client list includes brands across CPG, apparel, spirits, financial, e-comm, etc. Your previous experience should be well-rounded and integrated, as work spans traditional and digital mediums; 10-20 years experience with creative agency experience preferred.

Sounds great?! Please shoot your resume/portfolio to [email protected].

Not for you? Please pass this on to a friend, and get someone working!

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PLACED: Senior Strategist, Integrated/Digital, $90-100K, NYC

Break free from thinking-by-department. Get closer to making. Work with clients striving to recalibrate their business around digital. Agency values, not rules.

This funky, award-winning digital agency brings together product design, brand communications and social content to help businesses thrive. We’re looking for sensational talent in the Strategy space to take on a pivotal role in their growing practice.  These guys are also a little weird, extremely collaborative, and sometimes communicate entirely in gifs with the account, design and technology teams.  We’re now looking for a curious, passionate, jargon-free strategist with 5+ years experience. A kid at heart, you feel free to use your imagination and to make a fool of yourself in front of clients, all in the spirit of fun. This is a unique opportunity to help iterate around off-line gaming silliness that translates to shareable online content.

Here’s what we need in you:

  1. You grew up digital – This isn’t about spending every waking hour on Snap. It’s about showing that you’ve played with a lot of the digital world, that you’ve experimented and learned – sometimes for work, sometimes for the sake of it.
  2. You can tell a story – You understand narrative structure and can shape and reshape our content and work to ensure that is impactful and human. You can also package and present a compelling story.
  3. You grasp the fundamental concepts of the industry – You know how an insight differs from an observation, how a strategy differs from principles and tactics, and how ideas differ from executions. And you can show work that consistently and surprisingly delivers to these concepts.
  4. You can work with fellow digital grown-ups – You’ll be part of an eclectic mix of designers, technologists, strategists, producers and analysts, trying to achieve something new and powerful together.
  5. You love this stuff – Stories of innovation, trends and topics that inspire you both online and offline. We want a person who keeps the team inspired, curious and open-minded. You talk Creator speak, know what makes great content and have active social channels of your own.

The skills you’ll bring: (Few people are experts in all of the areas below; let us know which are your strengths.)

  1. Strategy – You’ll be able to show examples of how you’ve wrestled to understand business problems, to find provocative insights, and to create strategies that have ideas.
  2. Ideas – You’ll have them and help the team have them.
  3. Digital marketing – You’ll be able to turn SEO and web analytics thinking into ideas.
  4. Social media and content – You’ll understand what’s happening online and why; you’ll be able to research it all and create content that sticks.
  5. Communications and experience planning – You’ll know how to orchestrate an idea so that it doesn’t just launch and… then nothing. And you’ll be able to develop people-centric experience plans or customer journeys.

Sounds great?  Shoot your resume/work samples to [email protected]. Not for you?  Share your network and change someone’s life!

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ON HOLD: Senior Strategist, Experiential; $90-120+K, NYC

This buzz-worthy experiential shop leverages human connection to impact people in smart, meaningful ways. To do that well, they need both bright brains and big brawn. You’ll be part of a network of production experts delivering the best in experiential, retail, digital environments, live media and social disciplines. This shop is a fast moving, forward-looking organization that is always looking for fresh, relevant ideas while exploring new solutions for engaging audiences through experiences that generate shareable content.

A strategic ally, the agency is a sought after partner, crafting real world experiences that resonate over shared, earned, and owned media for the world’s best brands and agencies. You can approach every challenge from a holistic perspective; combining activation, content generation, digital experiences (on and offline), environmental and traditional elements, you’ll collaborate in crafting magical concepts and campaigns that are at once bold and deeply effective. A strong grasp of channel and communications strategy will be helpful in showing clients how your ideas can come to life.

As Senior Strategist, you can straddle the line between data guru, idea generator, problem solver and brand interpreter. You have the skills to gain a full understanding of each brand—conducting assessments of competitive landscape, social media implication, cultural relevancy and target consumers, while extracting key insights that inspire and bring original ideas to our clients. This person will be a critical part of creative ideation, brief building, and ongoing strategy process, supporting production and client service to ensure that execution stays on-track and on-strategy. The ideal candidate must demonstrate a strong understanding and insight into experiential marketing, and be passionate about culture and the lifestyles embedded in it, in order to inspire new ideas and engender industry innovation leadership.

Collaborating across departments, this Strategist understands that a great idea is nothing if the client doesn’t understand and get behind it; you craft presentations that are as good as the ideas themselves. What’s more, you can effectively bring these presentations to life in a room full of clients. In addition to elevating the creative output for existing clients, you love the thrill of the pitch and are driven to lead teams of designers, writers, producers and account folks toward victory. You can think in large scale, overarching ideas, but can also focus on the nuances that turn a good solution into a great one.

Ideally, you are so immersed in culture that it is part of your daily life–not just your job. And it wouldn’t hurt to be a super duper writer with a creative soul and 4+ years of Account/Brand Planning experience.

Sounds great? Shoot your resume/portfolio to [email protected]. Not for you? Please share with your network, and get someone working!

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ON HOLD: Senior Strategist, $90+K; Brand Strategist, $75K; NYC

Join an agency helping ambitious brands thrive in contemporary culture, creating whatever it takes to make that happen. This proudly diverse independent agency values resourcefulness and tenacity just as much as creativity and intelligence. They’re unapologetically ambitious, but also a tight-knit crew. Here you will be a part of a team of people who aspire to do nothing less than transform what this industry can become. Here you will have the opportunity to put your fingerprints on culture at large.

Founded by strategists, which means that strategy was and always will be at the core of everything they do, Strategy and Creative at is an extremely close partnership across every aspect of everything they make. Strategists regularly take on everything from big brand campaigns to strategic consultancy projects to music strategies to growth strategies for start-ups to treatments for documentary films. They’re a motley crew that hails from backgrounds in brand strategy to product design to digital start-ups to the music industry. They live and breathe the culture in which we live, and aspire to have every iota of the work do the same.

YOU are smart, clever, passionate, nice, friendly, open, unassuming, and modest yet confident. You are someone creatives want to hang out with, account people can rely on, and clients will engage with and take advice from. You are a close-knit partner with your teammates and clients alike in the creation of breathtakingly original and incisive solutions to a massive array of huge brand challenges. You are able to identify big ideas, develop them with creatives, and nurture them through collaboration with potential agency partners and clients. You are not only the specialist at gathering vital information, but you share that information with varied audiences within the agency.
You are proactive and have a hands-on mentality, handling your own projects and taking responsibility from beginning to end. One of your greatest strengths is your pen game; you are a skilled writer with a knack for selling a good story, whether written or verbal.

The Strategist is responsible for helping drive client strategy for current and new clients, and is focused on helping brands resonate in culture. A deep thinker and seasoned research veteran, (s)he ultimately assures the outstanding quality of the strategic and creative products the team produces. You will need at least 3-6 years of experience in strategy and, more importantly, you don’t just want to be a part of creating amazing work: you want to be a part of continuing to build an amazing agency. You know how to identify and understand the wants, needs, and motivations of key audiences for your brand(s), and you can effectively tell stories that enroll teammates into that understanding. Your approach to research and insight mining is not just gathering information, it’s also being able to draw something surprising from it. You enjoy the distillation process – relying on a mix of resourcefulness, intuition, and natural curiosity to decode cultural experiences. You can be both big-picture oriented and detail-oriented in the same day, and have the ability and desire to make daily tactics as interesting and strategic as the next big idea. You’ll be expected to demonstrate, evangelize, and live the core values of the agency daily.

Sounds great?! Shoot your resume/portfolio to [email protected].
Not for you? Please share with a friend and help get someone working!

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