Strategy Director

For 40 years BBH has made the public laugh, cry and their hearts flutter; we’ve made endlines, headlines, history, celebs and number ones in the charts - all to help our clients win at what they do.

The secret to all of that is one thing: BBHers.

So we are looking for the next generation of different thinkers, hustlers, dreamers and makers to make the best work of their lives and keep all this fun going.

Made up of a mixture of healthcare marketing specialists and consumer experts, our health team focuses on building science-backed creative campaigns which target a whole range of specialist audiences, from patients and caregivers to healthcare professionals and payers. We work with a variety of health-focused clients, including pharmaceutical companies like Roche, Genentech, Takeda, Servier, AstraZeneca and Abbvie, as well as charities like St John’s Ambulance and Prostate Cancer UK.

In the spirit of BBH, our health team is passionate about bringing Black Sheep thinking and creativity to the world of healthcare, whilst also offering the specialist knowledge and expertise that’s required to engage with professional medics.

Unlike many other health advertising agencies, we are fully integrated with our consumer colleagues: we are not BBH Health, we are BBH doing Health. This gives us the unique ability to bring the strategic and creative firepower of a world-class consumer agency to the pharmaceutical & health sectors.

Here are 3 reasons to pick BBH strategy.

1. Continue our effectiveness journey

You’ll be joining the IPA Effectiveness Agency of the Year 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. Our CSOs Gregor and Will are Campaign’s No.1 Strategists and won the IPA Grand Prix in 2018 for Audi and in 2020 for Tesco. So there’s a chance to learn and lead the agency to future successes.

2. Lead the charge on the broadest expression of creative strategy

Like John said, our strategy is creativity, whether that’s brand comms, stunts, sites, social, content, experiences, CRM or heavy duty lower funnel stuff. At BBH you will have a chance to deepen your skills across the whole journey, not just comms, and as a leader bring new ones like media, PR and so on into the mix.

3. Join a team of thirty open-minded Black Sheep thinkers

One of our themes at BBH right now is Openness - to new people, backgrounds, processes, ways of thinking, audiences, insights, media channels... the list goes on. We’re trying to build the most open-minded strategy department in the world because empathy is our superpower as strategists and the more inspiration we get from different places, the more exciting our work will be.

A BBH strategist’s job is to make the work work. We are all here to make a difference – above and beyond the competition.

But the Strategy Director is a special role where you get to define the direction of major brands through a mix of data and imagination and develop more junior strategists through supportive and positively challenging leadership.

There is no one mould for a BBH Strategy Director. We aim to create an inspiring, ambitious, diverse and entrepreneurial strategy department with SDs at the forefront. But this role has the following expectations:

- Extensive experience working in health / pharma communications, ideally including DTC & HCP, and Global & US - Leadership on major pieces of business within the health portfolio, from high science pharma to market shaping disease awareness

- Forming powerful partnerships with Business Leads (BL), Creative Directors (CD), Production and agency specialists

- A pitch winner. Can move at speed to deliver new business wins

- Someone who can simplify and set direction, within a complex healthcare context

- Generous, supportive and inspiring but with enough challenge to get the best out of everyone

- Autonomous and entrepreneurial. Can run business independently with their CD and BL and foster senior client relationships

- Consistently aiming for award-winning work and effectiveness accolades (and educating our health clients on the importance of this)

- Building confidence across the whole marketing funnel/customer journey and bringing creative thinking to all problems

- Celebrates and promotes deep audience understanding, pushing the department and agency to think beyond the Soho bubble

- Thought-leadership and ability to spread BBH’s point of view on strategy and brands, through writing, public speaking and influence

Creative

Pushing the work to be as good as it can be no matter the channel, no matter the sector. A keen eye for creative opportunities driven by an understanding of a brand’s touchpoints combined with the authority and thinking to drive large-scale platforms that change businesses.

Culture

A temptation to explore the world around us and consider how business, brands and customers interact with it. Crucially, not just the edges of culture, but to find the diversity in the mainstream too. No bubbles, please.

Commercial

Prove that what we’re doing works. Ultimately, we’re here to increase the value of the brands we serve and we’re proud of the difference we make. Boil down and capture what’s important, change it, measure it, celebrate it.

Client

In the words of another BBH strategist Jim Carroll, “clients want therapy, not solutions.” We expect our strategists to build strong relationships with our clients, understanding their businesses, building confidence in decision-making, and demonstrating how we can help them have an impact.

Excellence – You aim to be the best at what you do.

Black Sheep – You favour the unorthodox, are highly independent-minded and bring a maverick quality to working because outcomes are all that matter.

Simplicity – You turn complexity into simple direction.

You, amplified – You bring your amplified self to have your own distinct style of strategy.

Collaborative – You play the orchestra, collaborating with everyone from the creative teams to the specialists but holding the plan together.

Risky – You push to take bold leaps, even if that means you make mistakes along the way.

Open - To how exploring and understanding how others think and work. Hungry – You are voraciously curious and never stop feeding your mind.

Generous – You are giving of your energy and ideas to continuously improve the work without your ego in the mix.