Senior Integrated Strategy (Johannesburg)

Job description

Role purpose – and a Statement of Intent

Base Five is hiring the person who will lead its Strategy department. Not a senior pair of hands – a department lead. The craft master. The person who builds strategists. The strategist who fronts the room when the agency is pitching for work it fully intends to win.

• The craft. Every strategy that leaves Base Five carries your standard. You own the Base Five storytelling signature – how our strategies are reasoned, written, designed, argued and proven – and you are the last set of eyes before the room.
• The team. You build the department: who we hire, how they are trained, what good looks like at each level, and how a junior becomes a strategist on evidence rather than tenure. The junior strategist growth path in this agency is a written commitment – you are the person who honours it.
• The pitch. You are the lead strategist on new business. You shape the story, build the argument, direct the team's workstreams and stand up in front of the client. Conversion is a number you own, not one you contribute to.

The vision

• Base Five is an integrated media agency – strong traditional (ATL) capability and advanced digital and performance excellence, delivered as one system – with deep sector expertise in financial services and insurance, telecommunications, gaming, education and automotive, and a growing government and parastatal practice.
• Our positioning has shifted from continuous new-client acquisition to retention, long-term relationships and client satisfaction as the engines of growth: clients must experience us as a strategic media partner that drives tangible business impact, not a supplier of reach and impressions.

Our differentiator is media storytelling matched by execution – the most beautifully reasoned, beautifully told strategies in the industry, proven true in market by disciplined implementation and honest PCAs. The strategy department carries this flag. You lead that department

Where you fit – the strategy department you are building
The department is being built deliberately, and this role is the keystone of the plan:

• You lead the department – setting the craft standard, owning the seat on the accountability chart, and reporting into the CEO. Your arrival also relieves the COO of strategy quality assurance: premium-grade documents must leave the department without executive rescue.
• The integrated media strategist (Khutso Phahladira) is your senior craftsperson and your first succession candidate. Her role specification names you explicitly as her daily masterclass: she shadows your client advisory, studies how you run the department, and works to an agreed mentorship rhythm with you. Her 24-month path to Senior Integrated Media Strategist is a signed agency commitment, and delivering it is your accountability, not hers alone.
• Two junior integrated media strategist seats fill as the workload grows, each on a documented 24-month milestone path to strategist – also signed commitments of the agency, also yours to honour.
• Two strategy interns per cycle – a deliberate pipeline into the junior seats, structured mentorship practice for your strategists, and part of how the agency contributes to South African talent.

Headcount grows against workload, retained revenue and your case for it. If you want a bigger department, you build the argument, win the work that funds it, and hire the people – that is the job.

What Manco and CSO mean (so the destination is concrete)

• Manco is the agency's management committee – the senior leaders (CEO, COO, Client Operations Manager and, in time, the CSO) who own the agency's direction, P and L decisions, key hires and client-leadership relationships. A path to Manco is a path to co-owning where Base Five goes, and it carries commercial benefits from profits.
• Chief strategy officer (CSO) is the executive who owns the strategy product end-to-end: the craft standard of every strategy that leaves the building, the storytelling signature, the department's people and growth, the pitch win rate, the awards programme and the agency's strategic reputation in the industry.

The agency's stated intent is to fill the CSO seat from within. This role is the most senior strategy seat in the building and the strongest claim on it – earned on evidence of craft, leadership, client standing and commercial contribution, in open company with the strategists you are here to grow.

Core responsibilities

6.1 Owning the strategy department

• Own the strategy seat on the accountability chart: its roles, its numbers, its people and its output quality.
• Set the department's capacity plan – who works on what, how briefs are allocated, and when the answer to the business must honestly be "not without another pair of hands".
• Build and maintain the department's operating documents: the strategy process, the 5 Base Framework application, templates, quality gates, review cadence and onboarding for new strategy hires.
• Run the department inside EOS – Scorecard, Rocks, weekly L10 contribution, quarterly People Analyzer for each team member.
• Protect the department's margin: scope discipline, realistic timelines, change requests raised before work is done.

6.2 Owning the craft standard and the Base Five storytelling signature

• Define, document and continuously raise the Base Five storytelling signature – how a strategy is built as a narrative from business problem to insight to idea to channel architecture to measurement, and how it looks and sounds on the page.
• Act as the final quality gate: no strategy, pitch document or PCA narrative goes to a client without meeting the standard you set.
• Run craft sessions as a fixed rhythm – work reviewed openly, feedback given generously and specifically, one craft behaviour practised per cycle.
• Guard the creativity of the department's thinking. Rigour without imagination produces competent, forgettable media plans; imagination without rigour produces work that cannot be defended. Your job is to insist on both, every time.
• Keep the method alive and current – new channels, new data, new measurement thinking absorbed into the framework rather than bolted onto it.
• Personally author the agency's most senior and most complex integrated strategies – flagship clients, category-defining briefs and anything where the agency's reputation is on the table.
• Direct the strategies authored by others: shaping the argument early, interrogating the insight, testing whether every channel has a real and reasoned role, and confirming the measurement framework connects media KPIs to business KPIs.
• Hold the integration signature – the demand-and-capture story: how TV and radio bursts and OOH presence build demand and lift search and social response, and how paid search, social and programmatic capture and convert it. Managed synergy, never a media mix assembled by habit.
• Ensure every strategy is implementable: the planner and the Head of Implementation must be able to build from it without reinventing it.

6.3  Authoring and directing flagship strategy

• Personally author the agency's most senior and most complex integrated strategies – flagship clients, category-defining briefs and anything where the agency's reputation is on the table.
• Direct the strategies authored by others: shaping the argument early, interrogating the insight, testing whether every channel has a real and reasoned role, and confirming the measurement framework connects media KPIs to business KPIs.
• Hold the integration signature – the demand-and-capture story: how TV and radio bursts and OOH presence build demand and lift search and social response, and how paid search, social and programmatic capture and convert it. Managed synergy, never a media mix assembled by habit.
• Ensure every strategy is implementable: the planner and the Head of Implementation must be able to build from it without reinventing it.

6.4 Building and growing the team
This is not a secondary duty. It is half the seat, and it is measured.

• Hiring: define the roles, write and refine the specs, run the strategy-side interviewing, and make the calls on who joins the department – with the CEO and COO.
• Structure: design the department's shape as it scales – seats, levels, what each level is trusted with, and what earns progression from one to the next.
• Development plans: own a documented growth plan for every person in the department, with observable milestones, and run the quarterly reviews against them honestly.
• Two signed commitments you inherit on day one. The integrated media strategist's 24-month path to senior, and the junior strategist's 24-month path to strategist, are written, signed agency contracts – not aspirations. Daily mentorship, the ATL apprenticeship, structured advisory exposure, staged and rehearsed step-ups, joint craft reviews, honest scheduled recognition: the agency has promised these, and you are the person who delivers them. Failure to honour them is a failure of this seat.
• Succession: deliberately season the integrated media strategist toward department leadership – her specification names you as her leadership model and expects her to progressively take on department functions as you season her for them. A department lead who cannot be absent is a department lead who has not built anything.
• Interns: shape the intern cycle into a genuine pipeline, and use teaching as the mechanism that seasons your strategists.
• Culture: hold a department where standards are high, feedback is normal, curiosity is loud, and people are safe enough to say "I don't know yet".

6.5  Leading new business and the pitch

• Act as lead strategist on new business: interrogate the brief, define the strategic proposition, and own the story the pitch is built on.
• Run pitches as projects inside a disciplined process – workstreams allocated, timelines set, contributors briefed, rehearsals scheduled, documents finished early enough to be made beautiful.
• Present in the room. You are the strategic authority the client meets and the reason they believe the thinking is real.
• Work with the CEO and Client Service on pipeline: which opportunities to chase, what we lead with, how we are positioned, and where the agency's integrated proposition is strongest.
• Own tender and panel strategy responses where required – including public sector and parastatal submissions, where the strategic quality of the response is a scored component.
• Run honest post-pitch reviews on wins and losses, and feed what you learn back into the method.
• Own pitch conversion as a departmental number, reported and tracked.
• Be the senior strategic voice clients rely on: QBRs, annual planning, category shifts, and the difficult conversations that hold a relationship together.
• Turn retained clients into deeper relationships – identifying where the agency's thinking can be worth more to the client, and shaping the case for it.
• Coach the team's client-facing confidence: strategists must grow into rooms, and you prepare them, rehearse them and debrief them. Nobody is handed a room they have not been prepared for.

6.6  Client advisory, retention and senior counsel

• Be the senior strategic voice clients rely on: QBRs, annual planning, category shifts, and the difficult conversations that hold a relationship together.
• Turn retained clients into deeper relationships – identifying where the agency's thinking can be worth more to the client, and shaping the case for it.
• Coach the team's client-facing confidence: strategists must grow into rooms, and you prepare them, rehearse them and debrief them. Nobody is handed a room they have not been prepared for.

6.7  Strategy stewardship – Protecting the thinking to the PCA
At Base Five the strategist's accountability runs from the brief to the PCA. A strategy that is not protected through execution is just a beautiful PDF. The department works to six documented stewardship checkpoints on every campaign – you own the standard, you enforce completion, and you carry them personally on the accounts you lead:

• Implementation briefing – the planner, campaign managers and analysts briefed personally on every approved strategy, so execution decisions serve the strategy even when nobody from Strategy is in the room.
• Flow-plan review – flow plans and media schedules reviewed against the strategy before client release: architecture, weights and phasing must still tell the story the client bought.
• Launch checkpoint – at go-live, confirmation that what is flighting matches strategic intent: messages, environments, sequencing.
• Mid-flight strategic review – at interim-report stage, performance interrogated through a strategic lens. Is the demand-and-capture logic working? Hypotheses, not observations.
• PCA strategic narrative – what was promised, what the thinking predicted, what the market proved – told honestly, including when the answer is uncomfortable. This is where storytelling earns its credibility.
• QBR strategic recap – the strategy chapter of every client quarterly business review, led with authority.
• Checkpoints are logged per campaign on the department scorecard – stewardship is measured, not assumed – and 100% completion is the departmental standard you hold your team to.

6.8  Industry voice, awards and ecrognition

• Build the case-study pipeline deliberately: verified results, proof and narrative captured while campaigns are live, not reconstructed at entry deadline.
• Own award entries – selection, authorship and quality – as a departmental Rock, not an afterthought.
• Establish Base Five voices in the industry conversation: your own thought leadership, and creating the platforms and opportunities for your team to be heard.
• Treat strategy as a product with a price: an integrated media strategy commands R80 000 – R120 000 standalone. You protect that value by protecting the craft, and you help shape how it is scoped, packaged and sold.
• Input into cost estimates, scopes of work and retainer design where strategy is a deliverable, so what is promised is what can be delivered profitably.
• Identify and develop new strategic products and services the department could credibly offer as capability grows.

6.9  Commercial ownership of the strategy product

• Treat strategy as a product with a price: an integrated media strategy commands R80 000 – R120 000 standalone. You protect that value by protecting the craft, and you help shape how it is scoped, packaged and sold.
• Input into cost estimates, scopes of work and retainer design where strategy is a deliverable, so what is promised is what can be delivered profitably.
• Identify and develop new strategic products and services the department could credibly offer as capability grows.

6.10  Weekly EOS reporting and leadership rhythm
Every week, in the EOS rhythm, you report:

• Departmental scorecard numbers – strategies delivered on time and to standard, pitch throughput and conversion, stewardship checkpoints met, craft sessions held, development actions completed.
• Department pipeline and capacity (Red/Amber/Green) with movement since last week.
• Risks – client, capacity, quality or people – with your proposed plan attached.
• Rock progress: on track / off track, for you and for each of your reports.
• Team development progress: milestones evidenced, coaching delivered, support needed.

The standing rule applies hardest to you: leadership is never surprised – they hear it from you first, early, with a plan.

Who we are hiring – experience, capability and character9.1  Experience

• Approximately 8–12 years in media strategy, communications strategy or integrated planning, with at least 3 years leading strategists, a strategy team or a department.
• A genuinely integrated track record – demonstrable ownership of both ATL (TV, radio, OOH, DOOH) and digital and performance strategy. Digital-only or traditional-only backgrounds will not carry this seat.
• Proven new-business and pitch leadership, with wins you can talk through: the brief, the strategic idea, the room, the outcome.
• Experience across at least some of our sectors – financial services and insurance, telecommunications, gaming, education, automotive – and comfort in regulated, considered-purchase categories.
• Deep South African market fluency: our audiences, our media landscape, our measurement currencies, our media owners.
• Relevant tertiary qualification in marketing, media, communications, business or a related field.

9.2  Advantageous

• Public sector, parastatal or panel and tender experience – Base Five has been appointed to the IDC panel of service providers and this practice is growing.
• Award entry authorship, or a track record of work that has been recognised.
• An existing industry profile: speaking, publishing, teaching or association involvement.
• Experience working inside EOS or a comparable operating system.

9.3  Character – and this matters as much as the CV

• A builder. You are energised by a department that does not fully exist yet. A polished, fully staffed team elsewhere would bore you.
• A teacher. You get visible satisfaction from someone else's work getting better because of you, and you give feedback that is both generous and unflinching.
• A storyteller. You care how a strategy reads, looks and lands – not only whether it is correct.
• Commercially serious. You understand that craft is what justifies the fee, and that the fee is what funds the team.
• Honest under pressure. You raise the problem early, you say the uncomfortable thing in the PCA, and you never let leadership be surprised.

Value-aligned. The Add Value Code is not wall decoration here – it is the People Analyzer, applied quarterly, to you as much as to everyone else

Key performance indicators

• Craft standard: every strategy leaving the department meets the documented Base Five signature – assessed on portfolio review, not impression.
• Strategy quality and impact: client business outcomes moved; strategy-led accounts retained and deepened.
• Pitch leadership: pitches led, pitch process discipline maintained, and conversion rate against the agency baseline.
• Team growth: documented growth plans in place for every team member; milestones evidenced on schedule; the junior strategist commitment honoured.
• Department build: hires specified, motivated and made against workload and revenue; succession capability visibly developing.
• Method and codification: the signature, templates and quality gates documented, adopted and kept current.
• Stewardship: strategic checkpoints and PCA narratives delivered on every campaign the department is accountable for.
• Recognition: case studies built, award entries submitted, industry visibility created for Base Five and its people.
• Commercial discipline: strategy scoped, priced and delivered profitably; scope creep managed through change requests.
• EOS discipline: weekly scorecard reported without fail; 80%+ quarterly Rock completion; issues raised early – nobody surprised.
• Values: measured quarterly against the add value code on the people analyzer, like everyone else at Base Five.

Posted on 20 Aug 09:20, Closing date 19 Oct