Creative Strategist

Location: In the NYC Office

⬆ Reporting Into: Account Directors, Chief Creative Officer

Compensation: $86,400-$91,200. This is a 1099 Independent Contractor position.

Start Date: 09/01/26

The Role

VMGROUPE is seeking a Creative Strategist to join our A-Team and own the strategic intelligence behind the creative solutions we develop for leading and high-profile brands.

You will champion VMGROUPE Brand Therapy sessions and client onboarding workshops, leading each room with curiosity, precision, and confidence. Through incisive questions and guided exercises, you will uncover the beliefs, tensions, ambitions, audience truths, business priorities, and cultural opportunities that define a brand’s path forward. You will transform those discoveries into guiding principles, strategic territories, creative briefs, and thought starters that shape every campaign and project. This role leads strategic roadmap development, research and analysis, competitive audits, category benchmarks, perceptual maps, audience frameworks, cultural intelligence, and creative opportunity mapping. Your work will give our creative teams a clear foundation for Brand Building, Big Idea Campaigns, websites, social ecosystems, and integrated initiatives. You will report to VMGROUPE’s Creative Directors and Account Directors, collaborating closely with our Chief Creative Officer, art directors, designers, copywriters, producers, social strategists, performance teams, and account leads. Your work also supports ongoing social, digital, and performance marketing strategy.

You Are

You are a hybrid strategist, researcher, creative thinker, and trusted advisor.

You know the difference between information and insight. You can identify the tension that gives a campaign energy, the truth that gives a brand authority, and the creative territory that gives a team room to make. You are analytical, strategic, and deeply creative, with exacting taste and an active desire to learn. You identify the question beneath the brief, connect signals across culture, consumer behavior, brand history, and business performance, then translate complexity into a focused creative direction. You know how to challenge familiar thinking while maintaining trust in the room. You are comfortable moving between a client workshop, a research deck, a creative brainstorm, a cultural reference, a line of copy, and a rough visual prototype. You learn new tools quickly and use the right medium to make an idea tangible, including Adobe Creative Suite, image and video compositing, generative AI, copywriting, and presentation design. You do what the work requires.

What You’ll Do

• Champion VMGROUPE Brand Therapy sessions, onboarding workshops, and strategic discovery processes.
• Develop workshop agendas, exercises, questionnaires, interview guides, and facilitation tools that uncover meaningful brand and business truths.
• Ask incisive, thought-provoking questions that move clients beyond surface-level answers.
• Lead stakeholder interviews and synthesize diverse perspectives into a unified strategic direction.
• Translate audience research, cultural signals, social behavior, competitive activity, and business data into actionable insights.
• Build strategic foundations, including brand positioning, audience frameworks, value propositions, messaging architecture, strategic territories, and campaign platforms.
• Develop competitive audits, category benchmarks, perceptual maps, trend reports, and white-space analyses.
• Identify the cultural tensions, consumer motivations, and category conventions that can inform distinctive creative work.
• Develop strategic roadmaps that connect business goals to clear creative actions.
• Translate strategy into inspiring creative briefs, content pillars, visual and verbal thought starters, campaign territories, and directional plans.
• Partner with creative teams from concept development through final execution, protecting the strategic integrity of the work throughout the process.
• Evaluate creative ideas against audience relevance, brand truth, business objectives, platform behavior, and cultural context.
• Present strategic recommendations with clarity, authority, and persuasive storytelling.
• Lead productive client conversations, challenge assumptions, resolve ambiguity, and build alignment across stakeholder groups.
• Monitor cultural, category, platform, and consumer shifts relevant to our clients’ businesses.
• Collaborate across account, creative, production, social, performance, media, and external partner teams.
• Develop and evolve VMGROUPE frameworks, methodologies, workshop formats, and intellectual capital.
• Contribute strategic thinking to new business pitches, proposals, scopes, and high-profile agency initiatives.

What You’ll Bring

• 6+ years of experience in creative strategy, brand strategy, marketing strategy, planning, or brand management.
• Agency experience, preferably across luxury, beauty, fashion, fragrance, jewelry, hospitality, spirits, real estate, or culture-led brands.
• A portfolio or collection of case studies that clearly demonstrates your strategic role in shaping brands, campaigns, digital experiences, or social ecosystems.
• Proven experience leading client workshops, discovery sessions, stakeholder interviews, and strategic presentations.
• Strong command of qualitative and quantitative research, audience segmentation, cultural analysis, competitive intelligence, and trend interpretation.
• Fluency across digital, social, content, integrated marketing, CRM, and customer journey strategy.
• A clear understanding of how strategy guides art direction, copywriting, design, content, production, media, and performance.
• The ability to distinguish a compelling insight from an interesting observation.
• Exceptional writing, editing, verbal communication, facilitation, and presentation skills.
• Advanced proficiency in PowerPoint or Keynote.
• Working familiarity with Adobe Creative Suite, generative AI tools, image editing, video editing, compositing, or other creative prototyping platforms.
• Strong client leadership, relationship management, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• The ability to manage multiple high-priority accounts and strategic workstreams within a fast-moving agency environment.
• The resourcefulness to learn unfamiliar tools and disciplines when the work demands it.
• Authorization to work lawfully in the United States.

How You Will Be Successful

Strategic Agility

You move from ambiguity to a clear, focused, and actionable direction.

Insight Discipline

You identify the human truth, business implication, and creative opportunity within the research.

Creative Translation

You develop strategy that gives creative teams a fertile place to begin and a strong foundation to build from.

Consumer Instinct

You understand what people value, desire, resist, remember, and respond to.

Client Leadership

You lead rooms with confidence, curiosity, command, and emotional intelligence.

Cultural Fluency

You keep the work relevant, informed, and connected to the world around it.

Change Leadership

You adapt quickly, challenge stagnant thinking, and help teams move forward with clarity.

Strategic Integrity

You protect the central idea from the first conversation through final execution.

Key Things to Know

• This is a full-time independent contractor position.
• This is a New York City-based role.
• Approximately 90% of the role takes place in person across our office, client workshops, sets, shoots, and productions. Remote flexibility is available when the work and schedule allow.
• Onboarding takes approximately 30 days. By month two, you are expected to demonstrate your distinct perspective, build trust across the team, and begin leading meaningful strategic work.
• This role supports multiple clients and project types at once. Pace, organization, responsiveness, and attention to craft are essential.

Who We Are

VMGROUPE is a 360° creative agency built as an extension of the brands we serve.

Headquartered in New York and hyper-international in perspective, we specialize in beauty, fashion, jewelry, fragrance, fine food, wine, spirits, real estate, and hospitality.

We create desire through brand strategy, identity, campaigns, content, storytelling, digital experiences, social, and growth. Our work spans emerging brands, global names, physical environments, and resort villages.

We build brands. We build experiences. We build worlds people want to enter.

We are strategic thought leaders, juggernauts, and polymaths with a deep respect for craft. Our culture holds rigor, taste, diversity, curiosity, ambition, and a Gen Z sense of humor in equal measure.

We elevate brands. We push luxury forward.

We are DOPE AF, and the work has to prove it.