The Role
You will be responsible for directing the consumer insights practice for your assigned brand. This will include a deep investigation into culture, brands, and people, with a specific focus on the automotive culture, larger competitive landscape, and potential buyers, influencers, and other market drivers. Your purpose is to understand consumers as real people making real decisions and choices in real life. To succeed, you’ll need to figure out what matters and motivates them, how they connect with relevant brands, sub-brands, and cultural icons, and how marketing communications may influence their decision-thinking. This will help you to yield richer insights as a jumping off point for innovative and breakthrough thinking in your approach to marketing communications and media planning. As a key player in the department, you will also work with the department head to expand the evolving Decision Road practice and to identify new ways to integrate the department’s capabilities with other marketing disciplines within Canvas.
Key Duties & Responsibilities:
- Develop a deep understanding of the category in which the brand competes, allowing for a closer connection between audiences and our communication strategies.
- Seek insights from both primary and secondary research to understand attitudinal (qualitative) and behavioral (quantitative) aspects of the consumers’ relationship with both brands and potential communications channels.
- Master the use of all available planning and insights tools, including Linnaeus, MRI/Simmons, GWI, VideoAmp, and others.
- Proactively mine all available resources for any information that can lead to a better understanding of the consumer, the brand, or the communication challenges at hand.
- Develop a tight, collaborative relationship with the Canvas brand strategy and channel planning teams.
- Maintain an intimate understanding of each target audience’s thoughts and behaviors, especially with respect to potential communications channels.
- Support Canvas and your clients in continuing to evolve and enhance consumer insights and the value it affords Canvas and its clients (new tool development, for example).
- Develop and maintain a close working relationship with agency partners.
- Develop compelling stories using analysis and data from a variety of credible sources; create effective presentations with clear narratives that drive to a specific point-of-view or recommendation.
- Craft Activation Briefs as required for your assigned brand and new business and ensure that resulting recommendations and actions remain on strategy.
- Lead ideation sessions that bring activation ideas to life through media channels; inspire teams to bring creative thinking to how we use existing and new media vehicles.
- Provide in-depth insight for both Canvas and client strategists specific to emerging trends that will affect our clients’ businesses.
- Develop relevant thought-leadership pieces that bring fresh insights to our clients and the agency.
UNDERSTAND (35%)
MANAGE (15%)
CREATE (50%)
Qualifications:
- Demonstrated leadership through influence
- Expertise in synthesis of qualitative and quantitative findings to deliver compelling storytelling to inform, influence and shape strategy and ideas
- Exceptional communication (written & verbal) and presentation skills
- An eye for effective presentation design
- Proactive with an ability to think on your feet
- Resourceful and scrappy, able to solve problems with whatever resources are available
- Ability to work independently as a self-supported team-of-one when necessary
- Capacity to learn and master new software tools and platforms
- Intellectually curious and inquisitive
- Service-oriented
- Committed to truth and objectivity
- High-level of personal accountability
- Strong work ethic; self-starter with proven ability to drive projects from start to finish in a timely manner
- Willingness to try new things that just might (or might not) work
- Ability to prioritize and handle multiple tasks with flexibility
- Ability to build and maintain strong internal and external relationships
- A collaborative team player who can work within a matrix structure
- Essential: Unflagging positive energy
Experience & Education:
- Six to eight years’ experience at an agency or in a consumer-focused role (for example, strategic/account planner at a creative agency or connections planner at a media agency)
- Previous experience working in the automotive industry is a PLUS
- Facility with all relevant data sources (1st, 2nd, 3rd party)
- Strong consumer quantitative/syndicated research expertise
- Client presentation history
Skills Required
- Six to eight years of experience at an agency or in a consumer-focused role
- Experience synthesizing qualitative and quantitative research findings into strategic storytelling
- Strong consumer quantitative and syndicated research expertise
- Facility with first-party, second-party, and third-party data sources
- Exceptional written, verbal, and presentation skills
- Client presentation experience
- Ability to lead through influence and collaborate within a matrix structure
- Ability to work independently and manage projects from start to finish
- Ability to learn and master new software tools and platforms
- Previous automotive industry experience
What We Do
Named “Most Innovative Agency” by Campaign US, Canvas Worldwide is an independent media agency that provides ingenious solutions for brands looking to challenge the status quo. And as a mission-based agency, our rallying cry, "Challenge the Comfortable," is our team philosophy to push outside our comfort zones to solve problems in new ways – because there can be no greatness without enduring a bit of discomfort. Canvas was created to embrace the rapid pace of change in the industry with the belief that future viability means reimagining what's possible. This fresh, strategic approach to media marketing services has produced an environment in which it’s possible to fearlessly try the unusual. Under the “Challenge the Comfortable” banner, the Canvas team dedicates itself to getting outside of our comfort zones and resisting the conventional. Launched in 2015, we are dual-headquartered in Los Angeles and New York, with regional offices in Chicago, Dallas, Denver and Atlanta. Canvas Worldwide services clients such as Hyundai, Kia, Genesis, Starz, MGM Studios, McDonald's and more. At Canvas, assumptions are left behind, everything is questioned, and in the process, the unexpected—sometimes even magical—happens daily. So, if you’re bold enough to Challenge the Comfortable… then we want YOU to come work for the most innovative agency in the country!
