Senior Director, Head of Brand Intelligence

Brand Intelligence at Code and Theory sits at the intersection of discovery, understanding, and business impact. The practice translates research, data, and cultural signal into the strategic calls clients act on.

You'll lead the team and shape the practice's evolution. The operating infrastructure is in place; your mandate is to deepen the rigor, push the methods, and embed intelligence as a strategic asset, not just a research function, inside the agency and across client work.

You'll be the senior voice for behavioral and cultural intelligence inside C&T and in front of clients. You'll make the case for what depth, structured method, and AI-augmented research actually do for strategy, positioning, and business outcomes. This requires leadership weight, deep expertise, and the ability to move intelligence from informational to actionable.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Lead and develop the team. A strong team of researchers and analysts is in place. Grow their capabilities, develop their careers, and hire for strategic gaps. Set the standard for rigor in discovery, synthesis, and recommendation. Create conditions for breakthrough work.
• Drive discovery forward. Shape how the practice uncovers human truth. Push methods beyond validation into real discovery. Behavioral research designed for insight, not confirmation. Prototype approaches that capture behavior in context: journey moments, in-platform, real-world environments. Leverage AI to enable qualitative depth at scale. Partner across the agency to test and scale what works.
• Translate signals into strategy. Own the interpretive layer between data and decision. Use AI-assisted synthesis to identify patterns, tensions, and contradictions across studies and contexts. Connect behavior (what people do) with culture (what it means) and situation (why it changes). Frame findings as strategic implications clients can act on.
• Activate insight at scale. Make sure intelligence shapes decisions, not just informs them. Advise clients at the senior table on positioning, audience strategy, brand performance, and growth decisions. Translate research and analytics into commercial moves. Build the tools, dashboards, and frameworks that make insight usable and living, not static reports.
• Embed intelligence across the agency. Connect the work to strategy, creative, CX, and engineering teams. Make sure behavioral and cultural insight gets to the front of the brief. Build the relationships and systems that put intelligence at the center of how C&T thinks and builds for clients.
• Lead externally. Keynotes, bylines, conference moments, original POV. Build the public voice of a practice positioned to lead the market in differentiated behavioral and cultural intelligence.

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

• Extensive years of experience building strategy and intelligence work at senior levels. You've led teams, shaped practices, and translated research into business outcomes. You bring leadership weight and credibility to a complex, cross-functional role.
• Strategic thinking grounded in human insight. You understand how people decide and behave, and you know how to turn that into strategy that moves business. You've built expertise across research, data, and cultural signal, whether as a strategist who learned research or a researcher who learned strategy. You don't pick a side; you integrate them into coherent recommendations.
• Behavioral and cultural grounding. Academic or applied: behavioral economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, semiotics, cultural studies. You read culture structurally, not as trend-spotting. You understand why people behave as they do, not just what they do.
• Structured method and strategic thinking. You bring clarity to ambiguous problems. You frame hypotheses, design research to test them, and translate findings into strategic recommendations clients can act on.
• AI-fluency in research. Demonstrable experience developing AI-enabled workflows that accelerate analysis, enable new methods, or deepen synthesis. You see AI as a tool for depth, not replacement for rigor. If you're earlier in that journey, you can show real experiments and a clear point of view on where it goes.
• C-suite credibility. You hold your own with CEOs, CMOs, and CFOs. You speak the language of business impact, not just research. You frame intelligence in terms of decisions and outcomes.
• Cross-functional leadership. You've worked across strategy, creative, CX, and tech teams. You've made intelligence shape decisions inside complex organizations, not just land as input.
• Team leadership track record. You've built, led, and developed senior teams. The teams that stayed. You develop people, not just manage them.

ABOUT US

Born in 2001, Code and Theory is a digital-first creative agency that sits at the center of creativity and technology. We pride ourselves on not only solving consumer and business problems, but also helping to establish new capabilities for our clients. With a global client roster of Fortune 100s and start-ups alike, we crave the hardest problems to solve. We have teams distributed across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. The Code and Theory global network of agencies is growing and includes Kettle, Instrument, Left Field Labs, Create Group, Current, and TrueLogic.

Striving never to be pigeonholed, we work across every major category: from tech to CPG, financial services to travel & hospitality, government and education to media and publishing. We value the collaboration with our client partners, including but not limited to Adidas, Amazon, Con Edison, Diageo, EY, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lenovo, Marriott, Mars, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, and TikTok.

The Code and Theory network is comprised of nearly 2,000 people with 50% engineers and 50% creative talent. We’re always on the lookout for smart, driven, and forward-thinking people to join our team.

The target range of base compensation for this role is $190,000 - $230,000. Actual compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, and location.