Account Director

Core Leadership Priorities

• Portfolio Management: Oversee the day-to-day health, performance, and delivery of a portfolio of proprietary B2B conferences, trade shows, and experiential activations across foundational B2B and B2C accounts.
• Strategic Growth: Drive account growth, retainer and staffing models, operational performance, and financial efficiency in alignment with client objectives and agency targets.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Partner closely with Creative, Strategy, Integrated Production, Operations, Finance, Analytics, and Project Management leaders to ensure ideas scale effectively into live, digital, or hybrid environments.
• Team Leadership: Build, mentor, and manage high-performing account teams, creating clarity around roles, priorities, standards, and accountability.
• Hands-On Leadership: Lead at the right altitude while staying connected to delivery. Manage up and down, remove barriers, support the team during critical moments, and model a team-first approach where no task is beneath the role. This is a highly hands-on role that requires the flexibility to operate strategically while stepping into day-to-day delivery when business needs require it. 

What You'll Do

Portfolio & Client Leadership

• Own the overall health, direction, and performance of an assigned portfolio, balancing client partnership, team capacity, delivery quality, financial outcomes, and growth.
• Serve as a senior, trusted advisor to client leaders by understanding their business objectives, marketing priorities, organizational dynamics, and measures of success.
• Set the account vision and translate it into clear annual and program-level priorities for clients and internal teams.
• Lead senior-level client conversations, business reviews, workshops, presentations, and escalations with confidence, clarity, and sound judgment.
• Build durable relationships across client organizations, anticipate needs, navigate complex stakeholder environments, and protect long-term partnership health.
• Provide oversight across multiple workstreams while ensuring clear ownership, decision-making, communication, and accountability at the day-to-day level. 

Strategic Growth & Business Leadership

• Develop and lead account growth strategies that expand relationships, services, and revenue while delivering meaningful value for clients.
• Shape retainer, staffing, and operating models that support client needs, team sustainability, and agency financial targets.
• Connect experiential recommendations to broader client business and marketing objectives across B2B and B2C audiences.
• Identify emerging opportunities, whitespace, and innovation informed by client needs, audience behavior, industry trends, and marketplace insights.
• Contribute senior account leadership to new business efforts, agency capabilities, proposals, pricing strategies, and pitch development.

Integrated Program & Delivery Oversight

• Provide senior oversight across the full experiential lifecycle, from strategy and concept development through planning, production, execution, measurement, and optimization.
• Ensure strategic and creative ideas can scale into operationally sound live, digital, or hybrid experiences without losing the integrity of the vision.
• Partner with Project Management and functional leads to establish scopes, workbacks, governance, staffing plans, decision rights, and operational roadmaps.
• Anticipate portfolio and program risks, resolve complex issues, and lead escalations before they affect quality, profitability, timelines, or client confidence.
• Establish consistent standards across programs for communication, documentation, quality control, reporting, and post-event learning.
• Be prepared to step into critical workstreams, client conversations, onsite delivery, and problem-solving whenever the business requires it. While this is a Director role, the expectation is that all team members remain connected to the work and support successful delivery before, during, and after execution.

Financial & Commercial Management

• Own portfolio-level financial performance, including revenue visibility, forecasting, staffing and utilization considerations, budget oversight, reconciliations, and profitability.
• Provide senior review and approval of estimates, scopes of work, retainers, change orders, commercial assumptions, and client proposals.
• Monitor financial performance and delivery efficiency, taking corrective action when scope, staffing, timing, or cost creates risk.
• Partner with Finance, Production, and Operations leaders to improve forecasting accuracy, protect margin, and create commercially sustainable ways of working.
• Balance strong client stewardship with disciplined scope and change management, ensuring teams protect both the relationship and the business. 

Team Leadership & Culture

• Lead, coach, and develop account talent across levels, with clear expectations, regular feedback, career development, and succession planning.
• Create an environment of collaboration, accountability, inclusion, transparency, and continuous improvement.
• Delegate effectively while maintaining visibility into the work, enabling team members to grow without sacrificing quality or control.
• Work fluidly across levels, managing up to agency leadership and down through account and cross-functional teams to align priorities and accelerate decisions.
• Model calm, decisive, team-first leadership, especially during high-pressure planning periods, live events, and client escalations.
• Assess capacity and capability needs proactively, escalating constraints and recommending staffing or operating-model changes before they become delivery risks.
• Balance strategic thinking with hands-on leadership, adjusting altitude based on the needs of the client, team, and business. 

Required Experience

• 10+ years of account leadership or client service experience within an experiential marketing, event marketing, sponsorship/activation, or integrated marketing agency.
• Demonstrated success leading complex experiential portfolios that may include conferences, trade shows, sponsorships, activations, tours, hospitality, employee experiences, and hybrid programs.
• Demonstrated experience serving as a senior client partner across complex stakeholder organizations, including presenting recommendations, navigating ambiguity, influencing senior decision-makers, and remaining closely connected to teams through high-pressure planning and event delivery.
• Proven experience leading and developing account teams, including managers and senior managers, while directing cross-functional teams across Strategy, Creative, Production, Operations, Project Management, Finance, Analytics, and field execution.
• Strong commercial experience across portfolio budgeting, forecasting, scopes of work, staffing plans, retainers, change management, reconciliation, profitability, and resource efficiency.
• Experience identifying and converting organic growth opportunities, contributing to new business, and expanding integrated agency services.
• Deep understanding of live-event planning and production, staffing, vendor management, logistics, risk management, onsite execution, and post-program measurement.
• Experience working across both B2B and B2C programs required. 
  
  Who Will Thrive in This Role
• You think beyond individual projects and understand how client relationships, team structure, delivery models, and financial performance connect across a portfolio.
• You can operate confidently with senior clients and agency leaders while staying approachable, practical, and connected to the team doing the work.
• You bring a clear point of view, make decisions with incomplete information, and know when to escalate, align, or act.
• You balance strategic leadership with executional fluency and can quickly diagnose what is needed to move a program forward.
• You are commercially minded and comfortable protecting scope, margin, and team capacity without weakening client trust.
• You develop people, create clarity, and hold teams accountable while fostering an environment where people can do their best work.

• You are collaborative and low-ego. You understand that seniority does not remove you from the work, and you step in when the team or client needs you.

  Preferred Qualifications

• Agency-side experiential marketing leadership experience.
• Experience overseeing national or multi-market programs, proprietary conferences, trade shows, sponsorships, tours, festivals, hospitality, or large-scale event portfolios.
• Experience leading integrated campaigns across experiential, digital, social, content, communications, and measurement. You act with confidence as the client liaison working closely with our internal teams to ensure the client voice is represented during planning.
• Experience supporting large enterprise clients and complex matrixed stakeholder organizations.
• Experience partnering with field teams, staffing agencies, production vendors, venues, and partner agencies.

• Bachelor’s degree in marketing, communications, business, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience.

   

Important Note

This is an experiential marketing leadership role. Successful candidates will combine senior account and portfolio leadership with meaningful hands-on experience delivering live events, activations, conferences, sponsorships, trade shows, hospitality programs, tours, or other brand experiences. This role is not limited to