Global Strategy & Planning Director (2 month FTC)

Agency :

Job Description :

Havas Media Middle East 

Location: Open to location - Remote candidates are welcome provided they operate on UAE working hours.   

The Context 

At Havas, we believe desirable brands create desirable results. Desire is the force that makes brands noticed, chosen, and shared. It powers creativity, shapes culture, and drives business outcomes. Through Converged.AI, our operating system that unites creativity, media, data and technology, we help brands grow with intelligence and purpose.   

This role sits at the centre of that ambition, on one of the world’s most recognised brands. 

The Role 

As Global Strategy Director, you are the strategic authority across all markets. Your primary mandate is consistency: ensuring that every strategy developed globally is coherent, evidence-based, and built to the highest standard of thinking. 

This is a large, integrated account with market-level strategists, planners, and central global planning leads already in place. Your role is not to carry the work alone. It is to connect it, elevate it, and hold it to a common standard. You provide direction, create the conditions for strong thinking, and make sure what gets to the client reflects a single, coherent strategic voice. 

What You’ll Be Doing 

​Strategic Consistency & Governance:

• Steers all strategy conversations on the account, from brand-level positioning to campaign-level direction.
• Ensures strategies are validated using a combination of Havas proprietary tools and syndicated sources before they reach the client.
• Establishes and maintains a shared strategic standard across all markets. 
• Identifies where thinking is weak before it ships. 

Media Strategy & Planning Leadership:

• Brings a command of media principles deep enough to guide, challenge, and elevate the work of planners and strategists across markets.
• Understands how reach, frequency, channel sequencing, and audience targeting interact across a full-funnel architecture.
• Ensures the strategic layer connects meaningfully to activation at every level, working alongside central and market planning leads rather than replacing them. 

Measurement Literacy & Integration into Planning:

• Understands how success is defined and measured across brand, campaign, and channel levels. Conversant in methodologies including MMM, attribution modelling, and incrementality.
• Uses that literacy to ensure measurement thinking is embedded into strategy from the start, not retrofitted at the end. 

Budget Guidance & Investment Logic:

• Contributes to investment discussions across markets, channels, and funnel stages.
• Brings a view on where budgets should be prioritised based on evidence, including performance data, brand health signals, and channel effectiveness.
• Supports annual and quarterly planning with sound allocation logic, in close collaboration with planning leads. 

Insights Integration 

• Works in close partnership with centrally and globally based Data, Analytics, and Insights teams to ensure strategy is intelligence-led at every stage.
• Translates research into strategic direction.
• Holds the account to a standard of evidence. 

Global Coordination & Team Development 

• Acts as the connective tissue across Havas strategy teams worldwide.
• Aligns workstreams, closes gaps between markets, and guides the development of strategists and planners across the network.
• The scope of this account is significant — success depends on this person’s ability to lead through others, not despite them. 

Thought Leadership & Client Inspiration 

• Builds and maintains a proactive pipeline of cultural, category, and media trends that feed directly into the client relationship.
• Positions Havas as a strategic partner with a point of view, not just a planning function. 

The Experience We’re Looking For

• Minimum 10 years of experience in media strategy, media planning, or a combined strategy and insights role within a media or integrated agency environment. 
• Candidates from a pure insights or brand strategy background will not be the right fit for this role. 
• Demonstrated experience managing global accounts or multi-market structures at a senior level.
• Proven command of media planning principles across channels, from brand-building formats to performance and conversion media.
• Fluency with syndicated tools such as GWI, YouGov, Statex, or equivalent.
• Working familiarity with measurement methodologies including MMM and attribution. 
• A track record of leading senior client conversations and presenting strategy with conviction. 

Skills for Success 

• Strategic authority: The confidence to own a position, challenge weak thinking, and hold a standard under pressure. 

• Media depth: A working command of how media actually works across offline, digital, and performance environments. Able to guide planning conversations and raise the quality of work across a distributed team. 

• Measurement literacy: Understands how success is defined and tracked. Integrates that understanding into planning decisions rather than treating it as a separate workstream. 

• Budget intelligence: Understands how investment should move across markets, funnel stages, and channels. Brings a considered view to allocation discussions. 

• Coordination and influence: Able to lead through others. Rallies large, distributed teams around a shared goal through clarity, credibility, and trust. 

• Analytical depth: Comfortable with data and research at scale. Converts it into strategic direction rather than using it to decorate a slide. 

• Communication and storytelling: Structures complex thinking into presentations that move decisions. 

• Languages: English fluency required. Additional languages are an asset. 

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Contract Type :

Here at Havas across the group we pride ourselves on being committed to offering equal opportunities to all potential employees and have zero tolerance for discrimination. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome applicants irrespective of age, sex, race, ethnicity, disability and other factors that have no bearing on an individual’s ability to perform their job.