Senior Director, Experience Strategy

Sr. Director, Experience Strategy

CIVIC

NYC, 3x in office, 2X remote

OUR COMMUNITY

We’re CIVIC. Since 1999, we’ve led the way in cultural marketing, providing integrated solutions to top-tier brands including Ford, Audible, HBO Max, Verizon, The Stonewall Inn, NBCUniversal, Peacock, among many others. We are an Ad Age Small Agency Award winner for 2024 & 2025.

We are known for big ideas: creating long-term brand platforms designed to impact culture, address the biggest societal issues, build loyalty, stimulate word of mouth and generate client revenue.

Our broad suite of integrated marketing services includes:

• Brand strategy, concept and creative development
• Live events and brand activations
• Content development and execution via Civic Studios
• PR/media relations and social media marketing
• Executive and internal communications
• Growth marketing and partnership development

At Civic, we believe business is the world’s most powerful platform for positive change. We believe our community can build bridges between companies and communities, and we empower our employees to help amplify underrepresented voices. Our goal is to build a more inclusive and equitable future in tandem with our clients and partners.

YOUR ROLE IN THE COMMUNITY

As Sr. Director, Experience Strategy, you will lead experiential strategy across a major professional services client, helping translate complex business, technology, transformation, and thought leadership priorities into compelling live, digital, and hybrid experiences.

This role sits at the intersection of business strategy, audience insight, creative development, and experience design. You will be responsible for shaping strategic narratives, experience frameworks, audience journeys, demo strategies, and program approaches that help high-level clients communicate complex ideas in clear, memorable, and engaging ways.

You will serve as a senior strategic partner to clients, account leads, creative directors, designers, producers, and content teams. You should be comfortable leading conversations with senior clients, reading the room in complex stakeholder environments, and helping align diverse perspectives around a clear strategic direction.

This role is right for someone who is curious, entrepreneurial, highly strategic, and highly hands-on. You should be able to quickly understand unfamiliar industries, distill complex information, reframe business challenges into higher-value opportunities, and turn strategic intelligence into actionable creative direction.

We seek thinkers. Writers. Challengers. Doers. Strategic leaders who can operate at a senior level, but still get close to the work.

Key Responsibilities

This person will lead the development of experiential strategies that guide how a major client shows up across a large portfolio of annual events, activations, executive convenings, demos, thought leadership moments, and branded experiences.

Responsibilities include:

• Lead the development of event, activation, demo, and experience strategies that align with client business objectives, audience needs, and broader brand priorities.
• Translate complex business, consulting, finance, accounting, technology, transformation, and professional services messages into clear, compelling narratives and audience journeys.
• Develop strategic frameworks that create consistency and coherence across different event types, formats, audiences, and stakeholder groups.
• Serve as a senior strategic partner to clients, helping reframe challenges, guide decision-making, and challenge assumptions when necessary.
• Lead strategic conversations with senior clients and internal teams, with the ability to read the room, synthesize feedback, and move teams toward alignment.
• Act as a generative thought partner to the creative team, helping identify how abstract business concepts can become tangible experiences, environments, demos, content moments, and audience participation.
• Partner closely with creative directors, environmental designers, producers, account leads, and content teams to ensure strategies translate into cohesive and effective creative work.
• Conduct industry, brand-specific, audience, community, and competitive research to understand key audiences, marketplace patterns, best practices, and the broader cultural or business context.
• Anticipate how audience expectations, cultural shifts, business priorities, and event behaviors may evolve, and use those insights to inform strategic recommendations.
• Create and present executive-level strategy decks that clearly articulate the opportunity, audience, narrative, experience approach, creative implications, and business value.
• Build relationships and gather learnings from a variety of client stakeholders and internal agency teams.
• Define strategic success measures and evaluation frameworks that connect experiential strategy to audience engagement, content comprehension, stakeholder alignment, brand perception, and business impact.

QUALIFICATIONS:

• 9-10 years of experience in creative strategy, experience strategy, experiential marketing, B2B strategy, or a related strategic role.
• Deep experience developing strategy for live experiences including events, activations, demos, thought leadership platforms, or innovation showcases.
• Experience with well-known thought leadership events a big plus: Aspen Ideas Festival, CES, Dreamforce, Davos, WSJ events, Fortune events, etc
• Strong executive presence, with the ability to lead senior client conversations, read complex rooms, and align multiple stakeholders.
• Excellent writing, presentation, and synthesis skills.
• Ability to quickly understand complex business, technology, transformation, consulting, finance, accounting or professional services topics and translate them into clear strategic direction.
• Strong creative instincts, with the ability to generate experience ideas and partner productively with creative, design, content, production, and account teams.
• Experience building strategic frameworks that can scale across multiple events, audiences, and workstreams.
• Strong understanding of experience design principles, audience journeys, event strategy, and experiential best practices.
• Comfort working in ambiguity, navigating evolving inputs, and turning incomplete information into actionable strategy.
• Ability to balance ambition with feasibility, helping teams develop work that is strategically sharp, creatively compelling, and executable.

BONUS SKILLS:

• Experience with B2B, professional services, consulting, finance, technology, or enterprise audiences.
• Experience translating technical thought leadership, business transformation, or complex product / service offerings into compelling audience experiences.
• Experience developing demos, innovation showcases, executive briefing experiences, or interactive content moments.
• Familiarity with environmental design, content strategy, digital / interactive experiences, or emerging technology storytelling.

CIVIC COMMUNITY AND CULTURE BENEFITS:

• A positive, fun, supportive and diverse team environment, with opportunities for advancement and a commitment to staff development and growth
• Competitive salary and incentives
• Full benefits package including dental and vision, and retirement plan with employer match
• Best-in-class parental leave benefits
• Paid time off and encouragement to take time off for self-care
• Hybrid work schedule

Civic is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age or veteran status.