The Athletic is seeking a contract Senior Strategist to lead RFP responses and proactive proposals. This role is ideal for someone who has experience identifying insights, inspiring ideas, and authoring proposals that help drive revenue for key advertisers.
Strategy is a team sport, and you will be an expert collaborator responsible for developing innovative, cross-platform marketing programs for advertisers in partnership with Sales, Planning, Program Management, Account Management, Editorial, and Creative teams. You will lead brainstorms, develop briefs, and create proposals that leverage compelling solutions for our advertising partners.
Success requires a passion for big ideas expressed through media, a love of advertising, and a high standard for creating visual presentations. Previous experience in strategy or integrated marketing at a media company is essential.
This is a maternity leave coverage between 10/12/26 - 3/25/27.
Responsibilities
- Develop a broad understanding of all of The Athletic’s properties and media products.
- Develop packaging of ad products in advance of specific sports seasons and events including pricing, messaging, and promotion.
- Serve as the primary point of contact for RFPs and, in response, develop and present compelling proposals that detail customized digital/social/audio sponsorship solutions and work with Sales to close deals.
- Lead brainstorm meetings, manage information coming from various teams, maintain timelines and hit deadlines.
- Ideate, collaborate and project manage offerings across relevant departments to create integrated programs for clients.
- Creatively pull together all elements for pitch collateral (e.g., idea descriptions, screenshots, mock-ups, research, custom templates, etc.).
- Utilize research and data to articulate and support strategies and creative ideas.
- Attend sales calls to pitch advertising ideas when necessary.
Key Skills
- Research, Insights, and Creative Brief Development: You have used proprietary tools, third-party resources and/or desk research to uncover meaningful insights, human truths and whitespace opportunities that lead to a compelling way in for creative and media.
- Creative Briefing: You have participated in writing a creative brief, briefing creative teams, and being an inspiring strategic partner to creative teams.
- Media Strategy: You have participated in responding to client RFPs and making recommendations for how to use media to bring ideas to life in ways that meet clients' campaign objectives. You are familiar with the media landscape and eager to become an expert at guiding smart media decisions.
- Client Deliverable/Proposal Development: You are experienced in owning and creating client-ready visual proposals that are polished and inspiring.
Requirements
- You have 5+ years of cross-platform Advertising experience (ad sales marketing, creative strategy, integrated marketing)
- You have a deep understanding of the current social, branded content, digital, mobile and audio landscapes
- Experience working on RFPs in a media environment
- Strong ability to turn information into insights
- Capacity to distill research into industry/client-relevant implications.
- Desire to work in collaborative sales and marketing processes, including the interaction and strategy required in an advertising sales environment
We are excited to learn more about you and your experience. To keep our hiring process as fair and authentic as possible, we ask that you submit your own work and not use GenAI tools to generate substantive content during the application and interview process. If you are a candidate for a technical role, we will let you know what specific tools you are permitted to use for your technical assessment.
Skills Required
- 5+ years of cross-platform advertising experience, including ad sales marketing, creative strategy, or integrated marketing
- Deep understanding of social, branded content, digital, mobile, and audio landscapes
- Experience responding to RFPs in a media environment
- Strong ability to turn information into insights
- Ability to distill research into industry- and client-relevant implications
- Experience in strategy or integrated marketing at a media company
- Experience developing creative briefs and briefing creative teams
- Experience creating polished, client-ready visual proposals
- Willingness to collaborate in sales and marketing processes within an advertising sales environment
What We Do
Here for every sports story that matters. -- The Athletic (http://theathletic.com) is a subscription-based media publisher of smarter sports coverage for die-hard fans. Founded in 2016, The Athletic’s all-star team of writers have produced thousands of quality stories for subscribers free of ads, pop-ups and auto-play videos. The Athletic now offers in-depth local coverage in 47 North American pro sports markets along with premium national coverage across MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, NCAA & more. Readers can count on original, authentic storytelling written by talented local and national sports journalists like Ken Rosenthal, Pierre LeBrun, Seth Davis, Stewart Mandel, Shams Charania and many more. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.
