Social Planning, Insights & Data Lead

Established in 2004, OLIVER is the world’s first and only specialist in designing, building, and running bespoke in-house agencies and marketing ecosystems for brands. We partner with over 300 clients in 40+ countries and counting. Our unique model drives creativity and efficiency, allowing us to deliver tailored solutions that resonate deeply with audiences.  As a part of The Brandtech Group, we're at the forefront of leveraging cutting-edge AI technology to revolutionise how we create and deliver work. Our AI solutions enhance efficiency, spark creativity, and drive insightful decision-making, empowering our teams to produce innovative and impactful results. Role:  Planning, Insights & Data Lead Location: Durban, South Africa, Hybrid   About the role:    The Planning, Insights & Data Lead is a senior individual contributor role at the heart of OLIVER's Strategy & Social function. You'll own the full insights and measurement cycle — from audience research and cultural forecasting to measurement architecture, experimentation and performance reporting — across multiple markets. Working closely with Strategy Directors, brand leads, paid media, CRM and data engineering teams, you'll act as the primary analytics partner to senior client and internal stakeholders, ensuring data shapes strategy rather than follows it. This role requires the ability to synthesise complex, multi-source data into clear, actionable recommendations — and to communicate those recommendations with confidence to senior audiences.     What you will be doing:    Lead the insights and planning agenda across social and the wider strategy function: audience research, cultural and trend forecasting, competitive benchmarking, shopper and commerce insight, and cross-channel performance analysis. Translate multi-source data — platform analytics, first-party data, shopper data, market research and paid measurement — into strategic recommendations that inform brand strategy, content pillars, channel strategy, localisation and creative briefs. Design and maintain executive dashboards and performance packs (real-time, weekly, monthly, quarterly) that connect content and activation metrics to business outcomes — including brand metrics, consideration, penetration and sales uplift where available. Own measurement architecture and governance: taxonomy, tagging, UTM standards, metadata and data pipelines that enable comparable, reliable cross-market insight. Lead the design and evaluation of experiments and pilots — format tests, distribution experiments, paid and content mix tests, incrementality studies — setting hypotheses, selecting metrics, running analysis and defining scaling or sunset decisions. Surface early trend signals and opportunity frameworks to editorial, creative and strategy teams, enabling timely briefs and informed market bets. Act as the primary analytics partner to senior client and agency stakeholders, pres...