Head of Strategy, Ogilvy One UK

Our vision is to inspire brands and people to impact the world. We achieve this by breaking down the barriers that restrict talent and ideas, we call this Borderless Creativity. We get, create and scale ideas that are dynamic, have a branded point of view, and will connect brands and businesses with people through paid, owned, and earned media.         

Which is why we have teams our teams which combine across five capabilities: Advertising, Growth and Innovation, Experience, PR and Influence and Health. In the UK alone we are over 900 people – a combination of different skills, points of view and passions all under one roof.  

Ogilvy have been recognised for decades as one of the most creative businesses in the world. In 2024 we were named Cannes Lions Network of the Year. In 2023 and 2024 we were WARC’s most Effective and most Creative agency – the only time an agency has retained both accolades two years running.

About Ogilvy One

Ogilvy One is one of our five businesses. It is both a market offer and a group of specialists within the wider Ogilvy UK community. Relaunched in 2024, Ogilvy One creates valuable relationships by design. Focussed on driving brand, business and customer value by designing personal, data-driven relationships at the intersection of creativity and technology. Most customers say that brands don’t “get them”, so Ogilvy One help brands build a new kind of relationship with their customers – led by creativity, powered by data and super-charged by AI. All for an audience of One.

Strategy at Ogilvy

Ogilvy is the home of Borderless Creativity.

The strategy team is the start point for making that intention a reality. We’re a diverse bunch of thinkers – Brand Strategists, Data Analysts, Experience Design, Insight, Social Content, CRM and PR and many more. We come from all sorts of backgrounds to solve all sorts of problems as specialists and as an unstoppable borderless bunch.

We all share the responsibility to help nurture the next generation of strategist thinkers and to nurture inclusivity in our team.

About this role:

This role has a number of dimensions:

• Leading the Ogilvy One strategy crew, a team of around 15 specialists. This includes being the line manager to the more senior people in that team and in turn supporting them to be excellent line managers for the rest. You will conduct career conversations, set objectives, monitor and manage performance and hire people as and when they are needed. You will also manage quality and consistency of the strategic output of this team
• The strategic lead for Ogilvy One London. You will be a partner to the CEO and the ECDs in Ogilvy One as well as our data sciences team, helping to set the direction of the business, set ambitions, contribute to global thought leadership or lead UK only thought leadership in this space and, of course, lead the strategy for new business opportunities (mainly in the UK but also contributing to EMEA and Global pitches with peers in other markets)
• Contribute to the Ogilvy UK Strategic Leadership team. This is the small group of strategic leaders, chaired by our CSO, which reflect our businesses and specialism. We come together to manage resourcing, effectiveness, inspiration and mutual support as we build the best strategy team in the UK.
• Client leadership. Everyone at Ogilvy has a hands on client role. You will be invested in Ogilvy One’s largest clients, providing client counsel where needed, and you will provide senior strategic support to one or two – to be discussed when we meet.

A bit about you

First and foremost you must love your job. If you think strategy is the best job, not only in agencies but quite possibly in the world, this could be for you. You have the desire to set the agenda within the industry on the value of creativity in CX, and have the ability to motivate and drive a large team of strategists towards innovative future facing CX / CRM outcomes.

There’s a lot to juggle in department leadership and you must be comfortable with managing a diverse workload and changeable priorities. You must be a team player too – as a lead office in the global network, we are often called on for group duty. One of the joys of Ogilvy is that it is a truly global network and working with international colleagues is hugely rewarding.

We need a leader for Ogilvy One with vision about the future of customer experience. Someone who has proven ability to drive creative excellence from the Ogilvy One strategic approach. We are right at the intersection of brand , consumer and technology and you will need to be expert in all three. We work with platform and technology partners to create useful and magical experiences and we need you to be able to see the now and next potential of those partnerships.

You will work closely with data sciences and while we need you to bring the magic to their science and not be a data expert, you will need to speak the same language.

Getting up and running fast in this role is key, so we expect you will already have proven experience and capability in this space. You will also have successfully led teams – both in the day-to-day and project teams around a challenge or a pitch. You’ll have experience pitch winning for large global & local brands – not just in a discrete assignment, but as the strategy partner that the net new clients bought into at the pitch to be AOR.

Recent UK market experience is also key as we double down on growing our domestic reputation.

A bit about us

In return we can promising you a rewarding, stretching and fun career. You will get to nurture a team of strategists who are at the top of their game, to work in a business with is thriving and an agency with a stellar reputation here and around the world.

You will get to make the best work of your life on clients that are part of the our lives now and shaping the lives we’ll lead tomorrow.

You will be part of a supportive, inclusive and ambitious leadership team who are each other’s biggest fans.