Senior Integrated Strategy

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. Three accountabilities sit with this role and nowhere else in the agency: 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 visionBase 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.

Requirements

Degree Core responsibilities 6.1 Owning the strategy departmentOwn 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 signatureDefine, 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. Apply by email: tlangelani.manzini@basefive.co.za