Client Account Director

We're looking for an Account Director to join Bountiful Cow's Client Leadership team, taking senior day-to-day ownership of a varied portfolio of clients across several very different categories.

This is a genuinely broad client leadership and commercial management role. Rather than spending most or all of your time on one huge account, you'll own a patch of clients, moving between different businesses, audiences and commercial challenges.

You'll be the most senior day-to-day contact for many of your clients, taking responsibility for the overall health, quality and success of those relationships.

You'll work closely with Bountiful Cow's planning, strategy and activation specialists, making sure everyone is working towards the right objectives, challenging recommendations where necessary and ensuring the agency consistently delivers on its promises.

It's a role that combines exceptional client relationships, commercial awareness and operational leadership. You'll need to understand your clients' businesses, anticipate their needs, identify opportunities to grow relationships and make sure everything runs smoothly, from the initial brief through to delivery and reporting.

You'll also provide leadership to the teams working across your accounts, creating clarity, accountability and momentum while supporting the development of more junior colleagues.

The clients

You'll work across a diverse patch of clients, likely to include a number of the following types of businesses:

• Pet healthcare & subscription: A large, fast-moving pet healthcare business, combining consumer brand building with subscription and customer acquisition. It's a genuinely full-funnel challenge, with an always-on client and a mix of brand and performance activity.
• Wealth management & financial services: A major wealth management and financial advice business, with a greater emphasis on above-the-line media, awareness and consideration. The customer journey is longer, so trust, brand building and demonstrating longer-term effectiveness are particularly important.
• Children's consumer technology: A fast-growing children's audio technology business spanning hardware, DTC e-commerce, content, repeat purchase and subscription. It's a strong consumer brand with plenty of scope for distinctive creative work alongside more performance-focused activity.

It's a varied mix of categories, audiences and commercial models. You'll need to enjoy switching between them, understanding what matters to each business and building strong relationships with clients who have very different priorities, challenges and expectations.

About Bountiful Cow

Bountiful Cow is a growing independent challenger media agency, with a team of around 35 based in Covent Garden and approximately £60m in billings.

The agency offers clients media, creative and strategic services designed to fuel business growth through Relative Advantage™.

Relative Advantage is about challenging the conventional norms within a client's category, finding the spaces competitors have overlooked and identifying ways for challenger brands to outsmart rather than simply outspend their competition.

Bountiful Cow operates fully transparently, making money only from its clients. That gives its teams the freedom to plan and buy in the interests of those clients while remaining highly competitive in the market.

It's also part of the7stars Group, combining the autonomy, agility and creativity of a smaller agency with access to specialist expertise across Partnerships, Production, Trading, Ad-tech, Data Analysis and an IPA effectiveness-accredited team.

The culture is underpinned by three values:

• No Sacred Cows: The question you shouldn't ask is probably the one you should.
• Don't Follow The Herd: We're here to do things differently to the way everyone else does it.
• No Bulls**t: Always tell the truth, no matter how uncomfortable.

What you'll be doing

You'll take overall responsibility for the client relationships, commercial health and quality of delivery across your accounts.

You'll be the person who knows what's happening, where the opportunities and risks lie and what needs to happen next. You'll bring together the right people, challenge thinking when necessary and make sure both your clients and the agency are set up for success.

That includes:

• Acting as the senior day-to-day lead for your clients, building trusted, long-term relationships and becoming an indispensable partner to their businesses.
• Getting under the skin of your clients' businesses, commercial objectives, markets and competitors, using that understanding to identify opportunities and add value.
• Taking ownership of the overall client experience, ensuring the agency consistently meets expectations, delivers against commitments and provides exceptional service.
• Leading client meetings, regular status updates and quarterly business reviews, making sure conversations translate into meaningful actions and measurable progress.
• Building relationships with senior client stakeholders, understanding their priorities and becoming a trusted source of advice and support.
• Confidently managing expectations, navigating difficult conversations and resolving issues before they affect the client relationship.
• Acting as the client’s advocate internally, ensuring their priorities are understood and reflected in the work delivered.
• Proactively identifying opportunities to strengthen relationships, bringing relevant ideas, capabilities and solutions to clients rather than waiting to be asked.
• Taking ownership of the commercial health of your accounts, ensuring profitable delivery, strong financial management and sustainable client relationships.
• Managing account budgets, retainers, scopes of work and contractual commitments, ensuring the agency delivers against its commercial agreements.
• Maintaining accurate financial forecasts, purchase order trackers and other commercial documentation, identifying potential issues before they become problems.
• Working closely with internal teams to understand resource requirements and ensure the time and expertise invested in each account are commercially appropriate.
• Identifying opportunities for organic growth, additional projects and expanded services, working with colleagues to develop compelling proposals.
• Leading commercial conversations with clients, including scopes of work, fee arrangements and contract considerations.
• Understanding the commercial implications of client requests, balancing exceptional service with the needs of the agency.
• Contributing to client retention, account development and the wider commercial growth of Bountiful Cow.
• Maintaining complete oversight of your accounts, ensuring projects, campaigns and deliverables progress smoothly from briefing through to completion.
• Working closely with Bountiful Cow's planning, strategy, activation and specialist teams to ensure everyone is aligned around client objectives, responsibilities and deadlines.
• Making sure client briefs are properly understood, appropriately prioritised and communicated clearly to the relevant teams.
• Overseeing the development of strategies, media plans and recommendations, challenging the thinking and ensuring proposed solutions are appropriate for the client's business.
• Applying your understanding of the media landscape to interrogate recommendations, ask informed questions and ensure the work is strategically sound and commercially grounded.
• Ensuring everything delivered to clients meets Bountiful Cow's standards for quality, accuracy and timeliness.
• Monitoring campaign progress and performance, working with specialist teams to ensure clients receive clear updates, meaningful insight and actionable recommendations.
• Overseeing reporting and quarterly business reviews, connecting campaign results with wider business performance and demonstrating the value of the agency's work.
• Maintaining high standards of account administration, documentation, approvals and processes.
• Anticipating operational challenges, resolving bottlenecks and making sure nothing falls between the cracks.
• Setting the standard for exceptional client leadership, combining commercial awareness, operational excellence and a genuine commitment to client success.
• Creating clarity, accountability and momentum across the teams working on your accounts.
• Building strong relationships with planning, strategy, activation and specialist teams, bringing together the right expertise to deliver the best outcomes.
• Delegating effectively, providing clear direction and ensuring colleagues understand what's expected of them.
• Supporting and developing junior team members, sharing your experience and helping them build confidence and take greater ownership.
• Challenging poor standards, weak recommendations or avoidable mistakes constructively before they affect the client.
• Contributing to new-business pitches and opportunities, bringing strong client understanding, commercial thinking and relationship management expertise.
• Championing Relative Advantage, encouraging teams to challenge conventional thinking and identify better ways to help clients grow.
• Looking for opportunities to improve account management processes, ways of working and the overall client experience.

What we're looking for

You'll need demonstrable experience in a client-facing media agency role, with the confidence and commercial understanding to operate as a senior day-to-day client lead.

The important thing is the combination of exceptional client leadership, strong commercial acumen and the ability to make things happen.

You should enjoy building relationships, understanding what makes different businesses tick and taking responsibility for the success of your accounts.

You'll need to be highly organised, proactive and comfortable juggling multiple priorities. You'll also need enough media knowledge to challenge recommendations, ask the right questions and work confidently with planning and activation specialists.

This isn't a role where you're expected to personally develop every media strategy or build every channel plan. However, you do need to understand the work well enough to ensure it's right for the client, commercially appropriate and delivered to a consistently high standard.

You'll ideally bring:

• Significant experience in a client-facing media agency role, with a track record of leading client relationships and delivering exceptional service.
• Experience managing multiple clients, categories or workstreams simultaneously.
• Strong relationship management skills, including the confidence to engage, influence and challenge senior client stakeholders.
• Commercial acumen, with experience managing retainers, scopes of work, budgets, forecasts and account profitability.
• A thorough understanding of the media landscape, including how different channels, planning approaches and activation disciplines contribute to business outcomes.
• The ability to interrogate media strategies, plans and recommendations, asking informed questions and constructively challenging the thinking.
• Excellent organisational and project management skills, with meticulous attention to detail and the ability to keep multiple workstreams moving.
• A proactive, solutions-focused approach, with the confidence to take ownership, make decisions and resolve challenges independently.
• Experience coordinating teams across client servicing, planning, strategy and activation.
• The ability to identify commercial opportunities, develop existing client relationships and contribute to organic account growth.
• Strong communication and presentation skills, with the ability to translate complex information into clear, compelling client conversations.
• Strong Excel skills and confidence managing financial trackers, forecasts and account documentation.
• Genuine curiosity about clients, their businesses, the media landscape and the wider market.
• A high bar for quality, accountability and execution.

We're open to people from both independent and network agency backgrounds.

The most important thing is that you've demonstrated the ability to take genuine ownership of client relationships, understand the commercial realities of running accounts and bring together different teams to deliver outstanding work.

You’ll ideally already be operating at Account Director level, although a particularly strong Senior Account Manager with substantial client leadership and commercial responsibility could also be relevant.

Perks, benefits & ways of working

Hybrid: 3 days per week in the office

Benefits include:

• 27 days' holiday, increasing by one day with each year of service up to 30 days
• Discretionary summer profit-share bonus and Christmas bonus
• Private Medical Insurance through Vitality
• Life Assurance and Critical Illness cover
• Choice of five gyms
• Employee assistance programme and wellbeing support
• Season ticket loan
• Enhanced family-friendly leave and pay, including extended leave, a Gousto box following the arrival of a baby and access to coaching
• Royal London pension, including an 8% employer contribution up to £35k

It's a role for someone who wants the breadth, autonomy and opportunity to make a genuine impact that come with an independent agency, while still having the specialist resources, training, buying clout and career development opportunities that come with being part of the UK's largest independent agency group.

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