Senior Manager, Strategy, India

About WPP Media:

WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands. With exceptional talent, trusted data and intelligence, and world-class partnerships, all united by our pioneering agentic marketing platform, WPP Open, we help clients navigate change, capture opportunity, and deliver transformational growth.

WPP Media is WPP's AI-driven media operating unit, bringing together media, data, and partnerships to deliver creative personalisation at scale. Connected through WPP Open and powered by Open Intelligence, clients see exactly where, how, and why their media investment is working.

About the role:

The Strategy group is focused on unlocking client business growth by developing audience, category, market and media insights. Key responsibilities include using audience and media tools to identify insights, translating them into media strategy and go-to-market recommendations, and working closely with planning and activation teams to develop responses to campaign and business briefs.

This will be a dedicated strategy role for one of WPP Media’s top global clients: Google. The role will independently lead strategy for an assigned business, while also contributing to larger brand, cross-business and portfolio-level strategic projects in partnership with the wider strategy team.

This role reports to the Director/Sr. Director (Google).

Measures of success:

In three months:

• Demonstrate hands-on ability to use tools such as TGI, WPP internal platforms and GWI to analyse audiences, media behaviour, affinities and consumption patterns and translate the findings into actionable strategic implications.
• Meet the key client on your independent brand and build a 1:1 rapport on strategic requirements.
• Understand how a strategy moves from audience and business insight into planning, buying, partnership and activation, and proactively identify where strategic inputs can improve the final media recommendation.

In six months:

• Independently manage defined strategic assignments and develop strategic responses to client requirements and briefs, with senior strategy guidance where required.
• Contribute meaningfully to Brand AOPs, quarterly planning and campaign strategy by bringing together audience data, category dynamics, competitive activity and media behaviour.
• Create integrated channel recommendations across digital and offline media rather than planning channels in silos.
• Develop point-of-view documents and strategic narratives on relevant audience, category, platform and media trends.
• Partner with various teams to ensure the strategic recommendation is reflected consistently in channel architecture, media roles and campaign execution.

In twelve months:

• Be visible as key POC of your team within the agency as well as with clients.
• Drive annual, half-yearly and quarterly planning, ensuring above benchmark scores for strategy on client feedback.
• Drive award-winning strategy work through innovative approaches, new emerging platform test and learns, and use of AI on business problems.
• Build reusable strategic frameworks and learnings that can improve planning across multiple campaigns and businesses.
• Contribute original thinking to broader Google strategy projects, including new audience opportunities, emerging platforms, evolving media behaviour and category shifts.

Skills and Experience:

• Hands-on expertise in tools like TGI, GWI, Comscore. The candidate should be able to independently work with the tools, extract relevant data, identify meaningful patterns and translate the output into strategic audience and media recommendations.
• Strong understanding of audience segmentation, media consumption analysis, affinity analysis, reach/penetration analysis and the ability to use these to build differentiated audience strategies.
• Proven contribution to Brand AOPs and quarterly business reviews with senior client stakeholders; working on pitches will be a bonus.
• Ability to work with multiple data sources and reconcile different signals into one clear strategic recommendation.
• Ability to articulate the role of media platforms differently based on tasks, such as launch brands vs challenger brands vs brands looking at premium audiences vs small town India.
• Strong depth of understanding on media platforms and tactics, such as TV vs. CTV vs. Sharechat vs Instagram.
• Strong communication, presentation and strategic storytelling skills; comfortable developing clear, insight-led presentations and presenting recommendations to internal teams and client stakeholders.
• Ability to simplify complex research, media and audience information into a sharp strategic narrative with a clear so what and recommended action.
• Strong problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, with the ability to convert an ambiguous business or marketing challenge into a structured media strategy problem.

Mandatories:

• 4-6 years relevant experience in a media agency with at least one exposure to the tech/smartphone category.
• Hands-on working knowledge of TGI and GWI is mandatory. Candidate should have personally used these tools for audience/media analysis rather than only consumed outputs prepared by research or planning teams.
• Ability to clearly articulate the role of both online and offline media channels and how they can work together within an integrated media strategy.

Life at WPP Media & Benefits:

Our passion for shaping the next era of media includes investing in our employees to help them do their best work. WPP Media employees can tap into the global WPP Media & WPP networks to pursue their passions, grow their networks, and learn at the cutting edge of marketing and advertising. Benefits include competitive medical, group retirement plans, vision, and dental insurance, significant paid time off, preferential partner discounts, and employee mental health awareness days.

WPP Media is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without discrimination or regard to characteristics.

We have adopted a hybrid approach, with teams in the office around four days a week. If you require accommodations or flexibility, please discuss this with the hiring team during the interview process.