Team: Client Services

Line Manager: Senior Account Director / Chief Executive

Reports: May include Graduate Trainees, Account Executives, Account Managers, Senior Account Managers (as required)

Role type: Permanent

 

The role in brief

 

The Account Director, with the support of the wider account management team, is primarily responsible for the overall profitability of their accounts. Their main focus is growing and nurturing client relationships: ensuring agency deliverables meet client expectations, as well as going above and beyond, constantly searching for new opportunities to drive relationship growth. The AD is always solving problems and thinking strategically, working with all key agency functions (research and planning, senior management, account handling, studio), and external suppliers, to maintain a consistently high quality of work, achieving desired project results, upholding agency values working towards a common purpose: making the complicated simple.

 

This role includes:

  • Developing the agency’s relationships and responsibilities with clients, building and implementing strategic account plans & actions plans for each of them
  • Assist the SAD with the process of understanding all clients’ businesses, making themselves indispensable to the client marketing teams
  • Reporting to the Senior Account Director / Chief Executive, responsible for managing staff within their teams (SAMs, AMs, AEs, Grad Trainees, if relevant), being accountable for their performance and providing them with professional development opportunities

 

Responsible for

 

  • Lead client accounts through effective and regular communication and problem solving, working alongside senior management and team members to nurture and grow the client-agency relationship
  • Staying on the pulse, and seeking out, client objectives and broader marketing plans, working with senior management to develop proactive, strategic proposals that exceed client expectations, beyond pure project-related requirements
  • Working alongside senior management on new business pitches and proposals, and other marketing initiatives for the benefit of the agency
  • Responsible for building client development plans for each account under their control, and working with the SAD to enact the plans
  • Working with planners to interrogate client briefs, by challenging and asking questions, to develop communications briefs that meet business needs in an effective and accountable way
  • Writing inspirational creative briefs in association with the planner and going on to direct the development of creative work, presenting and selling this effectively to clients
  • Working with team members to ensure project deadlines and budgets are met
  • Managing the financials of each project and account, ensuring profitability
  • Reporting key financial and team data to the agency’s senior leadership team
  • Maintaining a detailed awareness of relevant market trends affecting their accounts, and developments in the wider advertising and communications industry
  • Managing the work and performance of team members (where relevant)

 

Personal requirements

 

Below is an overview of the experience, skills and knowledge that are required to effectively carry out the duties and responsibilities of the role. These elements will form the basis of selection for the role.

 

Education

  • Must be educated to degree level

 

Experience

  • Minimum of 5-years in an agency environment with a proven track record of working in a successful account team
  • Experience managing a junior/s team member

 

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

  • Commercially and creatively astute
  • Effective negotiators and communicators, both written and verbally
  • Able to inspire a team, the wider agency, clients, and other external partners
  • Highly organised, with strong attention to detail and time management skills
  • Persuasive, able to sell work and ideas, and respond positively to feedback
  • Knowledgeable and passionate about client’s businesses, and where and how advertising and marketing contributes to success
  • Flexible, and able to solve problems
  • Resilient and positive in difficult situations
  • Can take charge when necessary, be decisive and then build support for those decisions.
  • Responsible and accountable for their own and others’ work, delegating effectively to balance a varied and demanding workload, and appreciates that the team working well can achieve much more than any individual
  • Knowledgeable and passionate about their client’s business, and where and how advertising and marketing contributes to its success

 

 

 

OUR PURPOSE

 

We make the complicated simple.

We develop brilliantly clever, creative, and simple solutions for marketing people working in complex, international businesses.  We are recognised as experts in strategic B2B marketing, trusted by some of the largest companies and most sustainable brands in the world operating at the interface of digital transformation in engineering, energy and technology. Our mission is to challenge clients to maximise the impact of their campaigns and activities by disrupting and changing behaviours of their customers to reduce carbon emissions at scale.

 

VALUES

We share a set of values and behaviours which have enabled us to reach this position as a team, and which we aspire to deliver every day:

 

  1. Compassionate
  • We care about our clients, and we care about each other.
  • We go the extra mile to make things easier for others – simplifying briefs and proposals, clarifying timings, collaborating, and maintaining an open dialogue.
  • We create an environment in which our colleagues will thrive and produce their best work, and through which our clients will instinctively turn to us first for help.

 

  1. Resilient
  • We have the ability to bend, not break, under pressure, and emerge stronger.
  • As we strive to grow, and take on even greater challenges, we will continue to learn how to flex and be agile.
  • And we help our clients to be resilient when they themselves are under pressure, supported by clear and simple objectives, strategies, processes and timelines.

 

  1. Supportive
  • We help and empower each other to achieve much more than we could as individuals.
  • We encourage and enjoy open collaboration, feedback, and viewpoints from every perspective – as a team, and in our process of working with clients.
  • We take responsibility for making other people’s lives easier, without having to take over.

 

  1. Confident
  • We’re confident in our abilities, processes and experience, but we should never be cocky.
  • We’re not out to impress clients with how smart we are.
  • We will always be ready to ask questions, and to express our considered views and opinions as simply as possible, and we’ll encourage and trust others to do the same.
  • It’s essential that we will always maintain a hunger to learn and to share, further building our knowledge and expertise, our methods, and our confidence.

 

  1. Thorough
  • We keep everything as simple as possible to enable us to work quickly, but we will always build in quality checks, giving ourselves time to get things right.
  • We set a clear direction, and take collective personal responsibility for delivering, always taking the strain off our clients wherever we can.
  • We aim high, and then do it on the fly.

 

  1. Respectful
  • We recognise individual contributions, whilst always working as a team with common goals. Mutual respect and trust for each other is fundamental.
  • We treat suppliers and partners in exactly the same way.
  • And we will always be respectful to our clients, taking time to understand their objectives, their perspectives, and their opinions.