VP Director, Account Planning- Healthcare Advertising

Job Description

The Account Planning team at this healthcare advertising agency uncovers breakthrough customer insights, and helps our teams to turn them into big creative marketing ideas. Planning is part of the creative organization (and tightly integrated with creative) and reports to the SVP/Head of Planning.

The ideal Vice President/ Director candidate has at least 8 years experience developing and applying breakthrough customer insight in a marketing, creative agency or professional services firm, as well as exceptional thinking, communication and influence skills, leadership, and energy. Most importantly, we seek candidates with enthusiasm for pushing the frontier of how marketing can evolve to meet the needs of an ever more powerful consumer

Detailed Description

The VP/ Director is the customer insight "lead" for designated clients, with 3 primary responsibilities:

• Leveraging customer insight to help the team come up with great creative marketing ideas
• Identifying high impact opportunities for developing breakthrough customer insight
• Creating innovative approaches for coming up with customer insight

Additional responsibilities for this position include:

• Proactively determining where and how in-depth insight about the consumer's attitude and behavior can help make our clients' marketing more successful and where the opportunities are
• Identifying key customer insights from existing client data and translating them into relevant marketing program implications
• Applying innovative research and "listening" methodologies to create relevant, breakthrough customer insights
• Partnering with our cutting edge primary researchers, internal analysis group and client data/research organizations to maximize their work's customer insight and marketing program application value
• Optimizing the impact of customer insight in the creative/program development process by inspiring and partnering with creatives on your team
• Expertly applying the company's Active Branding approach to marketing program development, and inspiring your teams to embrace a "pull" approach to marketing
• Leading team brainstorms that efficiently produce breakthrough insight and maximize team contributions
• Building productive collaboration and enabling successful teamwork
• Creating demand for account planning's contributions by demonstrating its impact
• Managing 2 mid-level planners

Qualifications

• At least 8 years' experience working in marketing and/or strategic services organizations - e.g., general advertising agency account planning group; management consulting firm; brand strategy firm; large DM firm strategic planning/account planning group
• Qualitative research expertise and experience applying innovative qualitative research techniques
• Familiarity with interpreting and applying quantitative research
• Undergraduate degree in a discipline like history, American studies, political science, anthropology/sociology, journalism, or psychology
• Graduate degree is also a plus (e.g., MBA, Masters)
• Familiar with segmentation, analytics and media research tools (e.g., MRI) a plus
• Exceptional customer insight skills
• Intuitive ability to understand what makes consumers "tick"
• Ability to discern the customer insight and "human truth" from mounds of data
• A passion and empathy for the consumer's perspective
• Avid follower of how marketing is evolving to meet the needs of the ever more powerful consumer; you can tell the difference between YouTube and an inner tube
• Ability to challenge the team to uncover "what's in it for the customer"
• Passionate about applying cutting edge qualitative methodology to the development of insight
• Experience applying insight to marketing program development
• A knack for helping creative teams understand an insight and translate it into creative magic
• Passion for working with creative people
• Exceptional writing, communication and influence skills
• An inspirational, compelling personality and way of working