VML & Ogilvy | Social Strategy Lead, Japan

Purpose:

The Social Strategy Lead plays a senior leadership role across social strategy and intelligence within WPP Content Studio Japan.

This person helps shape how social is understood, planned, measured, and evolved across Content Studio clients, including BAT, Nestle, and future WPP Japan clients.

This is not an executional planner role, but a leadership role for someone who can set direction, read culture, interpret platform signals, guide strategy teams, and help clients understand what brands should do on social and why.

The role sits at the intersection of social strategy, culture, data, platform behavior, creator ecosystems, AI-enabled workflows, and measurable business impact.

The Social Strategy Lead works closely with the Content Studio Lead, who owns business and account leadership. Together, they ensure the studio delivers work that is strategically sharp, creatively strong, operationally realistic, and commercially valuable.

What Success Looks Like

• WPP Content Studio Japan has a clear, credible, and differentiated social POV.
• Every client has a clear social strategy across always-on, campaign, creator, paid, organic, owned, and earned.
• Social listening and performance data turn into real creative and business decisions.
• Teams stop reacting to trends blindly and start using signals intelligently.
• Clients see WPP Content Studio as a senior social strategy partner, not just a content delivery team.
• AI and WPP.open become practical tools inside strategy, insight, ideation, reporting, and learning loops.
• Social work becomes more platform-native, culturally relevant, measurable, and easier to scale.

Key Responsibilities

1. Social Strategy Leadership

• Lead social strategy initiatives across key WPP Content Studio Japan clients.
• Set clear platform roles across Meta, TikTok, X, LINE, YouTube, emerging channels, and client-specific ecosystems.
• Connect organic, paid, owned, earned, creator, and community activity into one clear strategic system.
• Translate business goals into social priorities, content principles, channel roles, and measurement frameworks.
• Ensure always-on and campaign work ladder up to a clear brand and business objective.
• Act as the senior social strategy POV across key client conversations and internal decision-making.

1. Social Intelligence, Culture, and Listening

• Lead the studio’s social intelligence and listening capability.
• Turn social signals into actionable insight, not trend noise.
• Oversee how teams read audience behavior, platform shifts, category conversations, creator movements, and cultural tensions.
• Build repeatable intelligence outputs for clients and internal teams.
• Use social data to identify opportunity spaces, risk areas, content territories, creator angles, and community behaviors.
• Ensure Japan-first cultural nuance is embedded into social strategy, especially for regulated or sensitive categories.

1. Platform and Content Direction

• Guide teams on what works natively across different platforms and why.
• Define format strategy by platform, audience, behavior, and objective.
• Shape recommendations around hooks, storytelling, creator formats, community mechanics, captions, social commerce, search behavior, and shareability.
• Partner with creative teams to push ideas beyond generic calendars and campaign cut-downs.
• Ensure content is designed for the feed, the algorithm, the audience, and the brand.

1. Creator and Community Strategy

• Define the strategic role of creators across client work.
• Guide creator archetypes, casting logic, briefing angles, collaboration models, and success metrics.
• Partner with casting, PR, media, and account teams to ensure creator work is more than talent selection.
• Build community-aware thinking into social plans, including conversation drivers, UGC mechanics, participation loops, and earned potential.
• Help clients understand when to use creators, when not to, and how to measure value beyond reach.

1. Measurement, Reporting, and PDCA

• Define KPI frameworks across organic, paid, creator, campaign, and always-on content.
• Ensure reporting answers what worked, what failed, why, and what to do next.
• Partner with analytics and media teams to connect performance data with creative decisions.
• Establish learning loops that improve briefs, formats, creative rules, posting rhythm, and content investment.
• Push the studio away from passive reporting and toward active optimization.

1. AI and WPP.open Enablement

• Use AI and WPP.open to improve strategy quality, speed, and scale.
• Help design AI-enabled workflows for insight mining, persona development, content territory building, platform adaptation, reporting, and post-campaign learning.
• Partner with the Chief Content Architect to codify useful agentic workflows.
• Set clear human review points so AI supports judgment but does not replace it.
• Help strategy teams build better prompts, better frameworks, and better decision systems.

1. Client and Stakeholder Leadership

• Join senior client conversations as the social strategy lead.
• Present social POVs clearly and confidently to clients, regional teams, and internal leadership.
• Help clients navigate platform changes without hype or panic.
• Translate complex social behavior into simple business-facing recommendations.
• Support new business and organic growth by showing how WPP Content Studio can lead modern social thinking.

1. Team Leadership and Standards

• The Social Strategy Lead works closely with strategy and planning talent across WPP Content Studio Japan to elevate strategic quality and collaboration.
• This includes close collaboration with social strategists, content planners, social analysts, and related strategic roles across client teams.
• The role is responsible for setting the standard of strategic thinking across the studio, ensuring that every planner and strategist works from a shared understanding of social behavior, platform roles, audience insight, creator ecosystems, and performance learning.
• The Social Strategy Lead is accountable for developing the strategy team’s capability, reviewing strategic outputs, mentoring talent, and ensuring planners and strategists are proactive, culturally sharp, data-aware, and able to guide both clients and creative teams with confidence.
• Create clear ways of working between strategy, creative, media, analytics, account, and production teams.
• Build a culture of curiosity, speed, accountability, and practical excellence.

What This Role Is Not

• Not a community manager.
• Not a content calendar operator.
• Not just a trend hunter.
• Not a reporting-only role.
• Not responsible for running the business alone.
• Not the person who fixes every executional issue.

This person sets the social direction and ensures the studio acts intelligently.

Skills and Experience Required

• +5 tears of strong senior experience in social, digital or content strategy, or platform-led brand strategy.
• Proven ability to lead strategy across multiple brands or business units.
• Deep understanding of Japan social behavior and major platforms.
• Strong knowledge of Instagram, TikTok, X, LINE, YouTube, creator ecosystems, paid/organic dynamics, and emerging formats.
• Hands-on experience with social listening, performance reporting, audience insight, and cultural analysis.
• Ability to connect data, culture, platform behavior, brand goals, and creative ideas.
• Confident client-facing presence with senior stakeholders.
• Experience leading or mentoring strategy, planning, intelligence, or content teams.
• Comfortable using AI tools, prompt systems, WPP.open, and automation to strengthen strategy work.
• Strong deck, storytelling, presentation, and simplification skills.

Personal Attributes

• Clear, calm, and decisive.
• Culturally curious and platform-native.
• Strategic but practical.
• Strong enough to challenge weak thinking.
• Collaborative without being passive.
• Comfortable leading through influence.
• Able to simplify complexity for clients and teams.
• Obsessed with making the work sharper, not just faster.

Language Skills

• Japanese: Business fluent or native-level preferred.
• English: Business fluent.
• Must be comfortable presenting and writing across both Japanese and English working environments.