Strategist- Beirut

Our Vision:

Our vision is to inspire brands and people to impact the world. To create big ideas that make a significant contribution to the planet, society, and the bottom line. We believe in today’s world this is the best way for our clients to achieve sustainable growth.   

We achieve this by breaking down the barriers that restrict talent and ideas, we call this Borderless Creativity.        

Which is why our teams work fluidly across 5 capabilities Advertising, Experience, PR, Consulting and Health .   This allows us to not only operate but innovate at the intersection of capabilities and talent.  We believe impact and magic lies at this intersection.   Ogilvy scales this by seamlessly connecting and accessing the deep cultural expertise of 132 offices in 83 countries.   

Our mission: We inspire brands and people to impact the world

How we do it : We innovate and operate at the intersection of people and capabilities

What we do: Borderless creativity

Today, Ogilvy is recognized as the world’s leading creative agency. We are also one of the most effective networks globally 

About Memac Ogilvy:

MEMAC Ogilvy is one of the leading creative networks in MENA with its flagship office in the UAE and a strong local footprint in the GCC and North Africa. It is part of the formidable worldwide WPP & Ogilvy network. It’s the only truly integrated comms network – with Consulting, Advertising- Brand & Content, PR, Experience & Health under 1 P&L and under single leadership. MEMAC Ogilvy is the most integrated modern creative and effective partner for client growth in MENA. We inspire brands and people to impact the world. We deliver on this by combining expert and new capabilities for modern marketing solutions, with solid project management expertise for agile and effective delivery as well as a thorough and passionate People agenda.

The agency is the most awarded Middle Eastern agency in Cannes as well as a big winner at the local award show Lynx. It counts around 500 staff members.

What we're looking for:

We’re on the hunt for Strategist who balances objectivity and empathy. You dive into the deep end to unearth valuable insights that can unlock the potential, not only of what is creatively possible for our client’s brands, but also what is practical and purposeful.

The Strategist should be able to create and nurture a strong relationship with our client from a content delivery and an account management perspective. This position will work very closely with the client to receive, manage and perform communication, and marketing strategy tasks. In MEMAC Ogilvy, Strategy Consultants go beyond performing strategy tasks at the client's request. While they do consult on the client's marketing and communication needs, they also pro-actively suggest new ways for the agency to be relevant to the client. This can only happen if the Consultant gains deep insight into the client's needs, pain-points and growth drivers and reached a level of knowledge that allows them to anticipate communication and marketing strategy needs. The point of this position is to become a close advisor to our client stakeholders on a pro-active and reactive manner, to smoothly manage the flow of tasks coming in from the client side and to parter with both the client and the rest of MEMAC Ogilvy's teams to deliver the best standards of strategy thinking.

If this sounds like you, now all you have to do is convince us that you’re better for the job than anyone else!

To Succeed in This Role, You Need To:

Finding Good problems:

• The ability to interrogate a client’s brief in order to understand and articulate its requirements.
• The capability to rapidly understand the business and communication dynamics of various industries (includes: competition, market trends, communication conventions and international benchmarking).
• The agility to be able to synthesize key data points from within the client and external data to be able to extract valuable insight.

Thinking Big Picture:

• Demonstrate talent for abstract thinking, spotting trends and patterns. Be able to articulate strategic territories and products concepts and be able to write these.

Coming Up with a Plan:

• Create communication roadmaps (aka journeys) that will help the agency deliver on their big idea(s) in a modern, effective and omnichannel way.

Inspire, Collaborate and Ideate:

• Have an innate curiosity and insight into human behavior, an instinct for popular culture and an interest in creative work.
• Draft inspiring creative briefs.
• Make compelling arguments and tell good stories.
• Share great creative work from within the category or outside it as inspiration.

Being Rigorous:

• Conduct deep-dive interviews and/or workshops to extract necessary information.
• Have an insatiable desire to always learn.

Account Management

• Partnering with Ogilvy’s integrated capabilities and discipline experts to identify new business opportunities, scope of work and revenue
• Immersing yourself in the essential dynamics, strategies, and drivers of your client’s business
• Foreseeing opportunities and formulating plans to manage and exploit them to drive/ extend the business
• Putting clients first, interfacing regularly with all client levels and constantly hunting for solutions and big ideas that are innovative and appropriate
• Demonstrating strong collaboration skills with internal teams, using Agency resources creatively to support client’s business. • Effectively navigating teams when there are conflicting priorities
• Monitoring and communicating POV on current marketing and industry issues.
• Demonstrating responsibility and accountability for overall agency performance and flawless execution.

Strategy Consultancy

• Experience in strategic planning, especially strong omnichannel (defined as a seamless experience across all channels relevant to a buyer’s journey) strategy thinking. 
• Have the ability to answer the key questions such as how brands are communicated and experienced through digital interactions and how digital interactions fit into broader customer experiences.
• Comfortable conversing across website, apps, paid media, marketing automation, SEO and content.
• Solid measuring and reporting on performance across campaigns.
• Experience with data-driven channel planning and content optimization; DCO message mapping against audience profiles and behaviors.
• Would ideally also have a some brand planning experience to compliment the digital experience.
• Demonstrated talent for abstract thinking, spotting trends and patterns, an innate curiosity and insight into human behavior, an instinct for popular culture and a nuanced understanding of creative work are critical.
• The ability to work across different groups and disciplines is key to success, as is judgment in pushing the work, elevating the ambition of our client’s brands, and leading their thinking about the potential of their business.
• Manage brand-building strategies around multiple product lines/brand portfolio.
• Development of brand strategies, writing creative briefs, guiding development and presentation of the strategic work.
• Strong command of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies and working knowledge of when and how to apply them to a given communications challenge.
• Performance marketing strategic mindset.

KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES

• All strategic output for this particular client
• The quality of the relationship with this particular client
• The task pipeline coming from this particular client

Requirements:

• 3+ years of experience in a role that required you to think strategically.
• Bachelor’s degree or above.
• Experience of working with others. Confidence in presenting and public speaking.
• A strong understanding and interest in modern marketing.
• Good cultural knowledge of the Middle East.
• Arabic speaker Ideally
• English Proficiency us a must

Memac Ogilvy inspires brands and people to impact the world. We exist to create iconic, culture-changing, value-driven ideas for our clients. 

Borderless Creativity is our lifeblood. We operate, innovate, and create at the intersection of our talented people, across advertising disciplines such as strategic thinking and distinctive idea creation, through a social-first approach — alongside our wider Memac Ogilvy family of Advertising, Experience, Health, Consulting and PR.  Never have there been more opportunities available to communicate incredible ideas, impact culture, and influence consumer behavior. Paid advertising is a consistent, regular and controllable way of getting a business and brand’s core message in front of consumers in a way that no other medium can. Creativity is our greatest differentiator as we transcend the status quo and shift culture.
 

How We’ll Support You

Memac Ogilvy celebrates its people. Fully. Enthusiastically. Unhesitatingly. We’ll empower you with the tools you’ll need to succeed. We’ll give you the autonomy to seek out new paths and better ways of doing things. We’ll support you with colleagues who are experts in their disciplines, drawn from across the Ogilvy network. And we’ll provide opportunities for you to do work of which you’ll be proud, with people you’ll be proud to call your teammates.

Ogilvy is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without regard to race, color, religion or belief, sex, age, national origin, citizenship status, marital status, military/veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, physical or mental disability. We believe in creating a dynamic work environment that values diversity and inclusion and strives to recruit a diverse slate of candidates to help us achieve that goal.