Senior Account Director

About VMLY&R

VMLY&R is a global brand and customer experience agency that harnesses creativity, technology, and culture to create connected brands. The agency is behind award-winning campaigns for blue chip client partners including Colgate-Palmolive, Caltex, Monash University, Ford, Pizza Hut and Defence Force Recruitment (DFR). VMLY&R is made up of more than 12,000 employees worldwide. Locally there are more than 200 of us within our 5 offices in Australia and New Zealand.

VMLY&R AUNZ Highlights:

There are many things that make VMLY&R AUNZ an awesome place to work, but we think these are worth a special mention:

• Birthday Leave – a paid day off to celebrate your Birthday each year;
• Summer Days – 5 paid afternoons off each year during daylight savings time;
• Loyalty Leave – a paid day off each year to celebrate your work anniversary;
• Employee Assistance Program access and 24/7 support;
• LinkedIn Learning access for all employees.
  
  

About the Role

As Senior Account Director (SAD), you will be responsible for the running of key client accounts and accountable for creating a team and relationships where best in class creative work can flourish. This role is responsible for the financial management and profitability of your business, ongoing client satisfaction, organic growth, and team development.

Key Responsibilities 

The Senior Account Director is responsible for creating an environment where your teams are empowered to produce great work.

Key to this will be:

• Excellent leadership and management skills
• The ability to inspire, motivate and develop those around you
• The ability to carve out and realise strategic and creative opportunities
• Contribute to and champion the agency point of view and product
• Ability to see the bigger picture
• The ability to define culture
• Specific Responsibilities Knowledge
• You will need to demonstrate excellent knowledge and experience of the industry, around marketing and communication strategies and their execution.

You will possess an excellent understanding of what makes for good strategic and creative work and actively contribute to and progress the agency agenda in this field.

You will also need to develop a deep knowledge of your client’s business assuming the role of partner to key senior clients, working collaboratively with clients to achieve their business and communications objectives.

Processes

The Senior Account Director is responsible for defining the client practices and processes that facilitate and enable great strategic and creative work to flourish.

This includes:

• Setting Account Plans: working with senior management you will be required to set out a plan for your account, covering strategic, creative, relationship, team, and financial objectives for the business, that you will be responsible for delivering.
• Finance: working with the Finance Director you will be responsible for leading, setting and monitoring performance against forecast
• Setting the long-term strategic direction: you will be responsible for leading the long-term strategic direction of the business working closely with senior planners and clients to ensure alignment around a common plan.
• Setting the creative standard: working with the ECD/CD’s you will be responsible for setting and achieving a strong creative standard on your accounts. This will include inspiring and empowering those around you in contributing to this.
• Oversee the team in development and execution of work: you will support the team in the development and production of creative work, contributing to the processes and acting as problem solver as required.
  
  

Growth & Development  

The Senior Account Director is responsible for developing and growing your accounts both financially but also strategically and creatively. This will involve:

• Becoming a partner to your client, working hand in glove with them to develop the business going forward.
• Growing the business. You will be constantly seeking ways of growing your client’s business.

In addition, you will also be required to grow and develop the agency teams around you through culture. As a Leader in the agency, you will be required to contribute to the development and growth the of agency culture, both internally among staff but externally as well, where you will be the ambassador for the agency.

Relationships

You will be expected to develop strong and enduring relationships with senior clients, and senior agency personnel.

Key to this will be developing strong relationships with:

• Clients: you will be expected to have strong relationships with senior clients and throughout client teams. This relationship should be founded on honesty, openness, and trust. You should be perceived as a long-term partner to your clients with shared goals and objectives.
• Internal Stakeholders: you will be required to have strong relationships throughout the agency, but most importantly at a senior level with key operational personnel to ensure smooth running of the agency, management and creative. You will work collaboratively with your Planning Director, ECD to define and achieve strategic and creative excellence.
• External stakeholders: you will be required to develop strong relationships at a senior level with key external stakeholders related to your business, but also within the Y&R Group.
  
  

Required Experience/Skills/Capabilities 

• 6+ years’ experience
• Solid understanding of all aspects of advertising processes
• Dynamic leadership, management and team building skills.
• Strong relationship building skills and consultative approach.
• Demonstrated influence management skills.
• Ability to delegate effectively and obtain leverage where appropriate.
• Ability to translate broad marketing goals into technical/analytical applications; and synthesize analytic results into relevant and strategic marketing recommendations.
• Superior project management and implementation skills
  
  

VMLY&R is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, colour, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

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