Senior Account Manager / Account Director, Leading Agency

Senior Account Manager/ Account Director, Integrated Agency, to £40,000 (great benefits)

This is a new role within an established team who are part of Scotland’s best known and loved integrated agencies. Our client is a leading UK agency who provide an an array of impressive, award winning creative campaigns to some brilliant global organisations. Working across some B2B and B2C campaigns, we are looking for a well established Account Manager or Senior Account Manager - or even a (junior) Account Director to join the team for a flagship account - with the support of a lovely Senior Account Director. This may be ideal for an existing Senior Account Manager who is ready, willing and able to take the step to Account Director!

As Senior Account Manager, the main aim of your role is to lead (and support your Senior Account Director in leading a major account within the agency), ensuring that they are profitable and growing. You are a strategic thinker, organised and can think on your feet. Day to day you will typically be working on a number of different campaigns across this client so the role is very varied an includes anything from ATL for trade or consumer, internal comms/workplace comms, strategic projects, content, social, film/digital/content - pretty much everything integrated / advertising.

You will lead support in strategy alongside the AD and the Strategy team, and be the key point of contact for your clients – leading meetings, ensuring delivery over and above every time – all on time and within budget. In addition to this, you will regularly be involved with pitches for new business, approaching these with both a creative and commercial mindset.

We’re looking for someone who can interrogate and challenge insights and briefs to really get to the bottom of what is needed, so you will definitely have a proven track record of achieving this! Our client is ideally looking for someone who has both B2B and B2C experience and there are extra points if you have experience of large corporate accounts (e.g. financial services or energy).

A Senior Account Manager will manage Account Manager(s) and/or an Account Executives, and be responsible for their development – as well as being part of a wider team. You will also build on the fantastic agency relationships with these established clients, building trust and being indispensable to the client’s marketing departments!

What we’re looking for in a Senior Account Manager:

• Strategic thinking and driver for clients and the internal teams
• Shows passion and knowledge about their client’s business
• Excellent communication skills, particularly advanced listening, providing clarity and consistency to clients and internal teams
• Ability to manage, delegate and develop within the team
• Team player, jumps right in, sets examples - not afraid to get your hands dirty
• Excellent organisational/project management and forward planning skills - a proven track record
• Excellent commercial acumen, ensuring client growth year on year.
• Eye for creativity and how to challenge it
• Attention to detail
• Shows initiative and is pro-active, at a client and project level
• Understanding of all marketing channels and their role in the communications mix with a focus on ATL / advertising
• Understanding of media channels and ability to recommend appropriate channels
• Understanding of role of research and planning
• Excellent finance and forecasting skills
• Right-hand person to a Senior Account Director and key part of the overall team
• Someone who can manage and develop an Account Manager and/or an Account Executive
• Build positive relationship with strategy, creative, production and studio departments
• One of the key leaders and strategic thinkers on your client accounts, shaping your team to deliver great work and results
• Builds real and trusting client relationships
• Plays a key role in the team’s new business strategy, being part of a tender or pitch team
• A voice of the agency within the industry
• Continually seeks to add value to client relationships and proactively suggests new ways that the agency can impress clients and further cement relationships
• Helps to lead client accounts within the agency, with overall responsibility for the client-agency relationship
• Responsible for managing your own key accounts and projects
• 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.
• Supporting Strategists in writing inspirational creative briefs and going on to direct the strategic development of creative work, presenting and selling this effectively to clients.
• Ensuring the profitability and growth of client accounts.
• Identifying, developing and converting new business opportunities with existing and future agency clients.
• Managing the work, performance and professional development of team members.
• Leading and inspiring those outside of the core team, including creative teams and those in other agencies working on the same account.
• Fully understanding clients business and market and keeping on top of new developments and trends
• Add value to clients/agency business – and to the overall team and agency
• Support for Agency’s creative ethos – actively seek to help develop award winning work
• Make ideas work – through communicate, interrogation, discussion, debate – anything to get to the best one
• Ability to judge and sell good creative work
• Investigate added value opportunities for client accounts – be proactive, be speculative, be nosey
• Ability to deliver projects smoothly on time and on budget
• Adapting process where appropriate and makes good judgement calls
• Supports the team with problem solving and difficult situations
• Assist the Senior Account Director in forecasting future income streams and making sure projects and overall clients are profitable and prepped for growth
• Knowledge of all aspects of the agency process model and competent in progressing work within this framework such as:
• Preparing schedules and quotations
• Briefing planning, creative, production, studio - and proofing work as required
• Attending client meetings, shoots and recordings
• Ensures that client campaigns have appropriate results measurements/systems in place from the outset
• Input into writing effectiveness and marketing awards papers as appropriate
• Understanding of research and tracking, making recommendations
• Taking learnings from previous campaigns into future planning and discussions for future campaigns
• Projecting and cementing future opportunities and growth in every project

To be considered for this amazing opportunity, it is essential that you have:

- Minimum of 4 years’ integrated agency experience, min 1 year @ SAM level
- Solid and proven track record in the strategy and delivery of large campaigns
- A genuine passion for agency life and advertising in general
- A marketing / business degree (or equivalent work experience)

Salary is purely dependent on skills & experience to £40,000 + benefits.

The best thing about working for this organisation - apart from the great clients you get to work on - is the team you’ll be joining (feedback internally assures me that the environment is full of kind, funny and clever peers along with genuinely lovely, understanding clients). Additionally, you will have a defined career path - training and new qualifications are funded and encouraged. A lovely social scene. Brilliant and very cool office to work in (hybrid / 3 days per week). My client is an “employer of choice”.

FURTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION:
Gilchrist Recruitment Partnership are a specialist recruitment agency and recruiting partner within the Marketing, Digital communications/PR, Creative & Design and Advertising industry for Scotland, both agency and client side.
When submitting your application, please outline your current salary, salary expectations and notice period. It is also essential that you are already legally permitted to work in the UK with the associated paperwork if you are not a UK citizen.
If you are not currently living in Scotland, please explain/outline your plans and timelines for relocation to Scotland. We are a Scottish based recruiter who generally do not represent “remote” opportunities - thus you will be either living in Scotland or have solid plans to relocate.
We cannot guarantee a response to each individual application, made necessary by the level of response we receive. We will contact only those candidates we wish to shortlist. Apologies in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.
We aim to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to ensuring that no applicant receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of gender, age, disability, religion, belief, sexual orientation, marital status or race.
Unless clearly stated otherwise, the advertised position is a permanent contract.