Havas Edge is seeking a Global Strategy & Planning Director for a 2-month fixed-term contract. This strategic leadership role ensures consistent, high-quality strategy across all markets for one of the world’s most recognized brands, driving integrated thinking across data, media, and insights while operating remotely within UAE working hours.
What You'll Do
- Steers all strategy conversations on the account, from brand-level positioning to campaign-level direction
- Ensures strategies are validated using a combination of Havas proprietary tools and syndicated sources before they reach the client
- Establishes and maintains a shared strategic standard across all markets
- Identifies where thinking is weak before it ships
- Brings a command of media principles deep enough to guide, challenge, and elevate the work of planners and strategists across markets
- Understands how reach, frequency, channel sequencing, and audience targeting interact across a full-funnel architecture
- Ensures the strategic layer connects meaningfully to activation at every level, working alongside central and market planning leads rather than replacing them
- Understands how success is defined and measured across brand, campaign, and channel levels
- Is conversant in methodologies including MMM, attribution modelling, and incrementality
- Uses measurement literacy to ensure measurement thinking is embedded into strategy from the start, not retrofitted at the end
- Contributes to investment discussions across markets, channels, and funnel stages
- Brings a view on where budgets should be prioritised based on evidence, including performance data, brand health signals, and channel effectiveness
- Supports annual and quarterly planning with sound allocation logic, in close collaboration with planning leads
- Works in close partnership with centrally and globally based Data, Analytics, and Insights teams to ensure strategy is intelligence-led at every stage
- Translates research into strategic direction
- Holds the account to a standard of evidence
- Acts as the connective tissue across Havas strategy teams worldwide
- Aligns workstreams, closes gaps between markets, and guides the development of strategists and planners across the network
- Builds and maintains a proactive pipeline of cultural, category, and media trends that feed directly into the client relationship
- Positions Havas as a strategic partner with a point of view, not just a planning function
What We're Looking For
- Minimum 10 years of experience in media strategy, media planning, or a combined strategy and insights role within a media or integrated agency environment
- Demonstrated experience managing global accounts or multi-market structures at a senior level
- Proven command of media planning principles across channels, from brand-building formats to performance and conversion media
- Fluency with syndicated tools such as GWI, YouGov, Statex, or equivalent
- Working familiarity with measurement methodologies including MMM and attribution
- A track record of leading senior client conversations and presenting strategy with conviction
- Strategic authority: the confidence to own a position, challenge weak thinking, and hold a standard under pressure
- Media depth: a working command of how media actually works across offline, digital, and performance environments
- Measurement literacy: understands how success is defined and tracked, integrates that understanding into planning decisions
- Budget intelligence: understands how investment should move across markets, funnel stages, and channels
- Coordination and influence: able to lead through others, rallies large, distributed teams around a shared goal
- Analytical depth: comfortable with data and research at scale, converts it into strategic direction
- Communication and storytelling: structures complex thinking into presentations that move decisions
- English fluency required
Nice to Have
- Additional languages are an asset
Technical Stack
- GWI
- YouGov
- Statex
- MMM (Marketing Mix Modelling)
- attribution modelling
- incrementality analysis
Team & Environment
- Large, integrated account with market-level strategists, planners, and central global planning leads
- Global strategy team with distributed market-level teams and central planning leads
Benefits & Compensation
- Remote candidates are welcome provided they operate on UAE working hours
- Equal opportunity employer with zero tolerance for discrimination
- Commitment to offering equal opportunities irrespective of age, sex, race, ethnicity, disability and other non-relevant factors
Work Mode
- Remote work allowed within UAE time zone
We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome applicants irrespective of age, sex, race, ethnicity, disability and other factors that have no bearing on an individual’s ability to perform their job.
