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Associate Director, Strategy

Kansas City, MO

You connect things. 

You connect insight to idea. Obscure culture into specific opportunity. Data points into brand action. Disparate signals into a path forward.

You lead. 

You are the “hub” of all strategic activity within the agency, partnering closely with creative, account, media, social, and innovation teams. You inspire, guide, and lobby for the right idea – for the brand, for the business, for the humans.

You work high and low.

You must execute high-level brand strategy and day-to-day planning. You must have foresight and be in the weeds. You must love writing a clear, succinct product brief, then jumping to an overarching brand challenge, all before your second cup of coffee.

You push the thinking.

You see past the noise to find the more human idea. You ask better questions. You get messy and deep into a creative idea to make it come to life. You persuade internal teams and the client to make the brave idea happen. You love great advertising. But you push for the business idea that makes for great advertising.

You’re a person of action. 

You’re not interested in sitting in your own head, deciphering cultural radio static. You understand a large worldview, but you can quickly get to the practical. You operate in real time, quick, lean, and collaborative. You’re responsible for generating a product that is thoughtful, yet wholly relatable.

Responsibilities

  • Contributes to best-practice solutions for the overall strategic process at Barkley.
  • Leads and participates in strategy development for clients and new business
  • Responsible for generating the Red Thread, or the actionable strategic idea, in any brand engagement
  • Contributes to best-practice solutions for the overall strategic process at Barkley, may begin to manage / mentor Strategists 
  • Becomes an invaluable resource for clients in terms of overall strategic guidance
  • Writes and presents micro and macro-level creative briefs for all initiatives
  • Lead integrated idea teams in idea sessions and workshops
  • Recommends and manages research that will aid in the consumer insight-gathering and strategic process
  • Monitors and interprets cultural and social trends relevant to client business
  • Presents insights/implications/opportunities in client and new business
  • Finds creative, differentiating ways to gain insights, using known tools (qualitative and quantitative), as well as unique and new approaches

Qualifications

  • Sample work will be requested in the interview process
  • Exhibit high-level writing and presentation skills
  • Must demonstrate deep experience in insight and research practices
  • Excellent reasoning ability: Ability to define problems, collect information, establish facts, draw valid conclusions, and make creative leaps
  • Bachelor’s degree is preferred
  • 8+ years of direct work experience in the strategy field

BarkleyOKRP’s Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion

  • We believe being radically diverse and inclusive is the key to becoming one of the world’s great creative idea companies. By embracing everything that makes our partners who they are and what makes them unique to the world around them, we create the conditions and capacity to help creative, original thinking thrive. 
  • BarkleyOKRP is committed to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging as part of our corporate strategic goals, supported by a formal DEI+B program, Employee Resource Groups, Director of Diversity leadership and agency commitment to The Brand Lab, Creative Accelerator, Fellowship, MAIP, and BLAC. 

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