Strategy Director

SYNTHESIS IS A CREATIVE DATA CONSULTANCY

We help future proof business by making sense of the world’s data.

We partner with industry leaders like Netflix, 2K, Amazon Music, Meta, LEGO to define their audiences and how their needs will evolve over the short and long term.

We do this through our unique synthesis of deep human understanding and robust data science. Our team brings together diverse specialists from computer science, digital anthropology and engineering, to digital forensics, script writing and humanities.

WHY SYNTHESIS?

Since our launch in 2017, we’ve been reimagining the world of marketing and strategy. Building deep global partnerships, especially entertainment & sports, F&B, and beauty categories.

We answer complex, future-facing questions by detecting early signals of change and surfacing opportunities to win in new horizons. Our specialised solutions are rooted in strategic foresight and tested in data science to give our partners the confidence to act.

Example challenges we’ve worked on recently include:

• Landscaping US sports fandoms.
• Growing fandom for K-Content in LatAm.
• Emerging preferences of Japanese Gen Z travelers.
• Identifying the future of Young Adult content.
• Defining go-to-market strategy for wearables entrant.

ENTERTAINMENT & SPORT LEAD STRATEGIST: NYC BASED, WORK WITH GLOBAL TEAM

As a Entertainment & Sport Lead Strategist, you will need to be a builder, working closely with the team to deepen relationships with Americas-based clients and grow the New York office.

You will be a natural leader who concerns themselves with the big questions shaping the future of entertainment and sport audience engagement such as: how do streaming services acquire and retain sports fans? how should live events evolve to engage audiences IRL and online?

Where is our next audience growth opportunity? How can we best attract casual listeners to engage more?

You will be working closely with our multi-disciplinary team (data-scientists, product developers, strategists and creatives) in Singapore as well as our teams in North America and Europe to deepen relationships with global clients and grow our global offer and team.

Alongside our team is our dataset that drives our insight and foresight. You will be working closely with our data and proprietary AI-enabled platforms to generate hypotheses before crafting the data into human-led and data-backed audience growth pathways and activation strategies.

Day to day, the role will be anchored in growing new and existing client partnerships, establishing Synthesis at the heart of the global entertainment and sports community as well as project delivery. You will have a hand in boldly stretching our technical and creative outputs to ensure that Synthesis thinking, workflows and technology are ahead of the curve, differentiated from the competition and delivering strongly to the sharpest insights and marketing professionals in the region.

YOUR CORE FOCUS

Commercial data-driven storytelling: You will craft persuasive, memorable data-driven narratives and insights. You will have a knack for reframing and digging into client problem statements in order to understand the root cause of their questions and identify appropriate routes to interrogate. The success of your work will hinge on your ability to persuasively communicate findings and recommendations in clear, compelling narratives, influencing the next steps of senior stakeholders.

Growing our Audiences offer in the Entertainment & Sports industry. Working closely with our leadership to evolve our market-leading audience growth proposition. This includes leading commercial knowledge transfer from our clients to the Synthesis team, keeping ahead of the curve on growth pathways, audiences and fandoms, segmentation needs, and how these can be leveraged to improve Synthesis proprietary data tools.

Act as a trusted advisor for world leading clients, serving as the day-to-day lead and decision-maker. Your role will require you to deeply understand our client’s business, run projects end-to-end and have a ‘nose’ for what’s next through foresights and innovation that will be most useful and inspiring for their audience growth strategy. You will help grow a deeper partnership with key partners.

Business development: Working together with the leadership team, you will play a crucial role in establishing and growing client partnerships with existing and new clients. This means writing proposals, pitching, helping design approaches for new and existing clients and brainstorming cross-sell ideas to grow clients across the business.

ABOUT YOU

You’ll have 10 years experience working in research, innovation, trends and foresight, strategy and planning, management consultancy, or a related role.

• Startup mentality. You are excited about the prospect of joining an early-stage team in New York for an international startup. You have experience working at an agency in growth mode, and significant experience of working with globally distributed teams.
• Storyteller and vision setter. You have experience working with senior teams in Marketing, Innovation & Business Strategy teams for clients like Netflix, Amazon, Spotify. You bring presence, clarity, and confidence to senior stakeholder conversations and workshops. You influence senior stakeholders by distilling ambiguity into sharp narratives, guiding decision-making in areas filled with uncertainty. You know how to create belief, manage resistance, and challenge thinking with diplomacy and conviction.
• Human data. You have an unwavering focus on the human behind the data and a passion for looking at data in a new light. For you is Google Search analysis about keyword volumes, or is it about drivers of curiosity and needs?. We are looking for candidates who default to the latter. You are comfortable embedding AI-enabled workflows to accelerate analysis, insight generation and drafting—knowing when to trust, validate and override AI outputs
• Strategic thinker, meticulous executor. You can lead a tight research project, including confidently leading analysis, elevating the quality of thinking and output, whilst also having eyes on the project management for multiple projects at once.
• Innovator and experimenter. Systemisation helps us scale, but risks becoming stale. You are passionate about streamlining and keeping things simple, whilst always keeping your eyes open to refine and evolve Synthesis’ frameworks, workflows, and proprietary tools to ensure they scale across pods and markets. You create safe environments for others in the team to experiment.
• Multidisciplinary team player. You know how to bring the right team together to win. Your thinking is led by the attitude of ‘we win so I win’. Experience working across timezones with globally distributed teams is an advantage, as is experience working with a team of Data Scientists, Statisticians or Engineers. You will support the growth of junior strategists through coaching, capability-building and in-the-flow-of-work feedback

ABOUT WORKING HERE

We are a diverse team, we value creativity, ‘plussing’ and teamwork. To help create this environment, we offer a flexible working and supportive environment. This includes the following benefits:

• The starting salary for this position is US$ $140,000. This can increase commensurate with experience.
• Profit share bonus scheme.
• Flexible working hours.
• 20 days paid vacation per annum public holidays whole company wellness week between Christmas and New Year.
• 12 weeks paid maternity leave or 4 weeks paid paternity leave.
• 100% health insurance coverage plus wellness allowance.

The office is based in a studio, within a lively co-working hub, overlooking McCarren Park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The role will require a minimum of three days a week in the office, regular domestic travel and occasional international travel.