Experience Strategist - Experiential Marketing Agency

The Department

GPJ is the world's premier event and experience marketing agency. We work with leading global companies who are looking for innovative experiential marketing solutions to motivate their customers and create value for their brands through live experiences. To maintain our position at the forefront of change requires strategic thinking that pushes us to imagine, design, build, and manage the most innovative, successful, and award-winning experiential marketing programmes in the world. Great strategy is the springboard to game changing creativity.

The Strategy Department is responsible for supporting GPJ in three areas: Clients, Creative and Culture.

• Clients
  • Lead the origination of knowledge and insight for our clients; to provide our client account teams with supportive rigour for GPJ’s consultative process.
  • Oversee the development and management of GPJ approaches to experience planning – a combination of creating bespoke and using trusted methodologies.
  • Assist the client account teams to implement ongoing action plans designed to achieve long term growth.
  • Ensure that GPJ is continually delivering measurement and evaluation systems to underpin effectiveness. Lead the development of data and research capabilities.
  • Build effective client relationships, able to understand and respond to the client's agenda to help unlock future client opportunities.
• Creative
  • Oversee the creative planning function with creative brief development, including audience insight generation; distilling client briefs to clear business challenges/purpose and single-minded propositions, to inform the development of the creative process.
  • Act as a guardian for our client’s business interests, understanding how they intersect with audience needs and where value can be achieved.
  • Provide expert support in audience and industry trends helping to design audience centric solutions and audience journey planning.
  • Collaborate with creative/digital leadership to ensure we are at the forefront in understanding trends in brand architecture, engagement technologies, especially in relation to the event and experience industry.
• Culture
  • Ensure the inclusion of strategic rigour in projects, fostering a culture of human centricity, effectiveness and continuous improvement across the agency.
  • Support the development of new agency tools and capabilities.
  • Creative problem solving for projects, processes & account strategy.

Job Purpose

An Experience Strategist helps create user-centred, 360-degree experiences. Considering factors including event portfolio planning, audience insights, client objectives, past event learnings and budget parameters. You will contribute to experiential strategies, narratives, and progressive audience journeys to drive action toward behavioural and business outcomes. Working with both the local strategy team and as part of a global GPJ network to service our portfolio of global client accounts.

Key Responsibilities

• Client Responsibilities
  • Develop knowledge of client’s overall business and marketing strategies, plans, goals and objectives.
  • Assist Senior Strategists and Account Leads to establish event marketing strategies and plans consistent with and supportive of the client’s overall business and marketing objectives.
  • Monitor, measure and analyse ongoing performance of our clients’ event portfolios.
• Research and Analysis
  • Analyse the broad landscape of client and sector specific event activity to identify event and audience opportunities.
  • Research and identify event producer opportunities aligned to client marketing and business objectives.
  • Monitor, measure and report on ongoing performance of client’s events portfolio.
  • Audit experience journeys onsite, including insight and inspiration gathering and competitive analysis.
• Experience Design and Planning
  • Inform creative development team based on strategic rationale and insights.
  • Keep a finger on the pulse of industry, maintaining up-to-date knowledge of new and emerging technologies and best practices in experiential marketing.
  • Bring strategic experience mapping to life to plan customer journeys with content, theme and message integration.
  • Collaborate with global GPJ colleagues to share knowledge and deliver consistent client brand experiences.

About you

• You have the ability to work on personally managed timelines and balance work to meet deadlines.
• You have self-confidence balanced by humility. A sense of humour and sense of fun.
• You’re committed to producing high-calibre, exciting, authentic work, motivated by the idea of elevating what’s been before.
• You’re a positive, proactive presence, who shows eagerness to learn and develop in a fast-paced environment.
• You demonstrate absolute attention to detail and take pride in your work.
• You’re a hard working, results-driven, self-starter, and one that gets things done.
• You’re a skilled researcher who uses data to understand client priorities and ambitions.
• You’re curious and inquisitive to always question why.

Your Background, Skills & Experience

• The ideal candidate will preferably be educated to degree level or equivalent, with qualifications in a related field.
• The right candidate should have had a minimum of 2-3 years experience in marketing strategy, planning and management. This might include experience in event marketing, media planning, market research and analysis, and/or marketing consulting.
• Excellent communications skills – speaking and writing are essential.
• Familiarity of an agency environment and agency/client relationships is an advantage.
• Applies critical thinking and has good analytical skills.
• Ability to think ‘out of the box’ and approach situations in an innovative way.
• Broad client/sector experience consistent with our portfolio of progressive and sector defining client brands.
• An interest in and knowledge of best-practice physical and digital brand experience activations.
• Progressive understanding of the creative process, especially in respect of event and experiential branded environments.
• Able to transform research into actionable insight. Has clearly formed opinions.
• Confident presentation skills, comfortable presenting to senior colleagues and clients.