Regional Planning Lead

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The purpose of this document is to help prospective team members better understand the role and responsibilities with the position of Regional Planning Lead at OpenDoor, WPP’s bespoke global operating model for Amazon.

At WPP, we’re constantly reinventing the future of creativity on an ever-broader canvas, bringing together unrivalled talent, resources and skills to provide an integrated offer of communications, experience, commerce and technology.

Over the last decade, we have developed a dedicated global client practice with the mission of accelerating WPP’s impact for our largest clients by bringing them the best of WPP. Each team is custom-built around a client’s specific needs and challenges, providing easy access to the right capabilities. And that’s why we’ve built OpenDoor for Amazon.

We are searching for a visionary and highly experienced individual to join our OpenDoor team as a Regional Planning Lead. This is a full-time position based in London. This role is the most senior Planning position for Europe and is pivotal in driving strategic media direction for Amazon's cross-channel marketing efforts across the region, the London hub and the locales. As the Regional Planning Lead, you will be responsible for shaping the communications strategic vision, ensuring high-quality execution and fostering a collaborative environment within the Regional Planning team. This role is part of the Prime Video EU Regional Hub team who oversee central discovery and planning for Europe (all channels) and coordinate with the locale teams for activation and reporting.

Prime Video is Amazon’s global streaming destination, offering a vast selection of movies, series, documentaries, and live sports. The Prime Video marketing division leads all communications for the platform, promoting major tentpole titles such as Fallout, The Boys, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and the upcoming highly anticipated series Elle, Blade Runner 2099 and God of War. Prime Video also delivers exclusive live sports coverage, including the Premier League, NBA, and major tennis tournaments like the US Open. Prime video is made up of multiple verticals including SVOD, TVOD, Channels, TV by Prime. OpenDoor serves as Prime Video's media partner across all territories except North America and Latin America, playing a significant role in Amazon’s global marketing efforts and helping to drive engagement and growth worldwide.

You will act as a trusted advisor to senior clients, providing strategic and practical guidance and influencing their thinking on media plans and investment, always aligning with their business objectives.  You will also champion a culture of innovation and excellence within the team, driving continuous improvement and pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

At WPP Media, we believe in the power of our culture and our people. It’s what elevates us to deliver exceptional experiences for both our clients and each other. In this role it will be critical to embrace WPP & WPP Media’s shared core values:

• Be Extraordinary by Leading Collectively to Inspire transformational Creativity.
• Create an Open environment by Balancing People and Client Experiences by Cultivating Trust.
• Lead Optimistically by Championing Growth and Development to Mobilize the Enterprise.

Media planning vision and leadership:

• Develop and champion the OpenDoor Prime Video EU planning vision
• Establish clear planning standards, principles, and best practices for the team, setting clear and practical benchmarks while proactively driving continuous improvement to deliver improvements and growth results for clients
• Develop ‘portfolio management’ and playbook approaches for titles, including identifying and optimizing necessary levers for titles to breakthrough into broader culture
• Identify, evaluate and articulate innovation in media planning to the clients and OD team, exploring new channels, technologies, and approaches to maximize campaign effectiveness
• Oversee the development and execution of comprehensive role for communications and media execution across all channels (digital and traditional), ensuring they are data-driven, to standard, innovative, and aligned with best practices
• Possess a strong understanding off marketing/media mix modelling utilization, including a deep understanding of concepts such as decay curves/ad stock, sufficiency curves and diminishing marginal returns
• Maintain a deep understanding of the European media market landscape, trends, media owners, and emerging opportunities
• Ownership of translating the strategic approach into planning practices for specific client briefs and pitches.

Client Relationship & Consultancy:

• Act as a consultant with both clients and internal teams to improve the work and develop the thought leadership of yourself and others.
• Operate as a senior client contact for comms and craft planning, whilst ensuring that teams are delivering on a day-to-day basis.
• Build and maintain strong relationships with key stakeholders at Amazon, understanding their business objectives and providing strategic guidance on media planning.
• Proactively identify opportunities to improve client satisfaction and drive business growth.
• Influence senior client stakeholders on media planning strategy and investment decisions.

Campaign management & effective communication:

• Oversee campaign management, ensuring quality control and output is of the highest standard. Act as point of escalation for issues.
• Successful E2E management of multi-market campaigns (brief, RTB, execution and reporting) alongside the Client Team.
• Develop a skilled understanding of commercial practices and of the wider agency.

Comms planning and storytelling:

• Own planning presentations including defining the inputs needed and working with the wider teams to compile work and meet deadlines.
• Lead brainstorming and idea creation for campaigns. A passion for innovation and challenging the status quo with a positive, constructive approach.
• Start to independently problem solve, including integrating and questioning data and insights and find solutions based on knowledge and experience.
• Drive adoption and best practice utilisation of WPP Open and other cutting-edge tools to standardize best in class planning, ensure leading organization and track campaign performance / identification of optimization opportunities.
• Assist in the development and execution of data-driven marketing campaigns across the Amazon business, bridging Amazon and WPP technologies and capabilities as required.

Team Management:

• Lead Regional Planning team
• Lead and mentor a team of media planners, providing guidance, support, and development opportunities.
• Set the direction for training and development initiatives within the planning team, ensuring that team members have the skills and knowledge to excel
• Raise the floor - by identifying where the requirements (and potential skills gaps) are and working with heads of dept. to develop and deliver training solutions across the agency (e.g. Media Smarts, planning meetings, cross functional sessions)
• Raise the ceiling – by identifying where new solutions and products could be delivered and working with heads of dept. to create the roadmap for them.
• Foster a collaborative and inclusive team environment, encouraging knowledge sharing and innovation.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Extensive experience in media planning, with a proven track record of success in designing, developing and executing effective campaigns.
• Demonstrated experience leading and developing high-performing media planning teams, including setting strategic direction, fostering a collaborative environment, and mentoring team members at all levels.
• Advanced understanding of media channels (digital and traditional), channel ecosystems and planning best practices, with regional, multi-market European expertise.
• Experience managing portfolios of products within a category and building distinctive comms planning approaches for each product / product typology.
• Strong knowledge of the client sector/industry which is shared to build strategies and plans.
• Excellent communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills.
• Demonstrated ability to lead and mentor a team.
• Comfortable presenting both directly from platform (OS, Architect etc.) and developing a story from data but delivered outside of the platform (Telmar etc.).
• Can confidently answer client questions and liaise with internal teams on best solutions to use. Uses critical questioning and maintains a broad perspective when analysing information to gain a deeper understanding of the problem and wider impact.
• Consistently delivers communications to influence and educate all levels of seniority, appropriately judging the demands of the situation.
• Experience in management of large multi-market and networked teams essential.
• Deep technical full-funnel media capability, with strong data and analytics literacy.
• Strong reputation as a responsible, accountable leader with international media management experience, and a willingness to go deep with their teams.
• Strong and vocal in strategic communication with the ability to communicate with all stakeholders at varying levels of seniority from C-suite down.
• Solutions oriented and high levels of organisation.
• An empathetic and thoughtful leader comfortable with working through detailed, written communications.

BONUS POINTS

• Entertainment experience. Especially Film and TV.
• Large scale multi-country annual planning experience.
• Familiarity with Amazons way of working (e.g. narratives over PowerPoint) and their leadership principles
• Familiarity with Amazon Ads
• Understanding of Amazon's ecosystem
• Designs differentiated communications (content focus, style, presentation etc.) for various internal and external audiences.
• Applies knowledge of client, audience, channel, market and category to effectively deliver compelling multi-media plans.  Translates learnings and trends to create marketing communication strategies that are effective with clear measurement. 
• Application of purchase journey thinking and visualization of how the media plan works channels. 
• Provide actionable insights during mid and post-campaign reports to improve in-flight optimizations and future campaign brief recommendations.