VML & Ogilvy | Senior Social Strategist (WPP Content Studio), Japan

The Role 

You are a hands-on strategist who can turn a brand problem into social work people would choose to spend time with. You find the audience behavior that matters, give social a clear job and build a plan the team can make. 

You own strategy workstreams across client brands, from always-on content to campaigns and creator work. You work with the Social Strategy Lead and with creative, account, media, production and analytics teams. You lead client conversations on your assignments and help junior strategists improve through direct feedback. 

You know the platforms from the inside, but you can also zoom out to the brand idea and the wider customer journey. You understand how organic content and paid social move people from discovery to action, and can explain why a plan should perform. 

What You Will Lead 

Social Strategy and Planning 

• Turn business and brand briefs into audience insight, a clear social role and useful creative briefs.
• Build always-on and campaign plans with distinct jobs for channels such as Instagram (Meta), TikTok, X, LINE and YouTube, where relevant.
• Give organic, paid, owned and earned work distinct roles across the funnel, with creators and communities where they serve the idea.
• Stay involved from strategy through content planning and production so the idea survives execution.

Performance, Data, and AI 

• Use social listening, platform data and client research to find opportunities and test assumptions.
• Lead paid social planning for your assignments: objectives, audiences, placements, budget split, creative variants and test design.
• Work with media and analytics teams to read performance, improve creative and targeting, and make clear recommendations on spend.
• Set KPIs for each stage of the funnel, with a baseline and a learning goal. Know when reach, engagement, traffic, conversion or cost per result matters.
• Build agentic workflows with AI and WPP.open that turn client briefs, audience signals and performance data into strategic choices, then carry those choices into creative briefs, channel plans, content guidance and next tests, with human review.

Content and Channels 

• Partner with creatives to shape platform-native ideas, hooks and formats that work in feeds and paid placements.
• Write channel guidance and examples that make the strategy useful to creators and production teams.
• Apply a current understanding of Japanese audience behavior and platform conventions.
• Define the role of creators and influencers in the plan and how their contribution will be judged.

Client Leadership and Teamwork 

• Lead the strategy and paid social planning workstream for assigned projects, present your thinking and handle client feedback clearly.
• Work with account, creative, media, creator and analytics partners to make one coherent plan.
• Mentor junior strategists through briefs, reviews and specific feedback on their work.
• Keep decisions, deadlines and handovers clear when several projects are moving at once.

What You Bring 

Experience 

• Strong social strategy experience across brands, with independent ownership of campaigns or always-on programs.
• Work that shows the path from insight and brief to live content and what it achieved.
• Experience leading paid social and performance marketing plans, with a working knowledge of how campaigns are set up, bought, optimized and measured across the funnel.
• Working knowledge of major social platforms in Japan, organic social and creator partnerships.
• Ability to connect brand strategy and the wider customer journey to the work social can do best.
• Confidence presenting recommendations to clients and working across disciplines.

Craft 

• Sharp at finding the useful insight, writing a single-minded brief and making a clear deck.
• Able to guide content ideas without flattening what makes them native to a platform.
• Comfortable with listening, analytics and paid platform results, and able to turn a report into the next action.
• An instinct for building useful agentic workflows, with the judgment to check and improve their output.

Mindset 

• Close to social culture without chasing every trend.
• Collaborative, practical and open to challenge.
• Calm under pressure and comfortable moving between strategy and detail.
• Generous with junior teammates and accountable for your own work.

Language Requirements 

Able to work effectively with Japanese and English-speaking teams and clients.