Business Director - Consumer PR in London

Department: Consumer PR

Location: London

Contract type: Initial 12-Month Fixed Term Contract

Full Time/Part time: Full Time - Hybrid Working

Reporting into: Managing Partner

About Ogilvy

Ogilvy UK has been creating iconic ideas that deliver impact at scale for clients ever since David Ogilvy founded the company in 1948. The agency specialises in bringing together brand advertising, customer experience marketing, PR, influence and consulting, all fuelled by Behavioural Science. Our world-class award-winning creative campaigns deliver solutions for clients including Sainsbury’s, Lloyds Banking Group, Madri, Unilever and Mondelēz International.

The Role

As the Business Director on the European and Global FMCG portfolio business within Consumer PR, you will lead client partnership, strategic counsel and integrated delivery across the portfolio, designed to provide the client with fully focused, senior leadership on some of the world’s most iconic FMCG brands. The role sits at the intersection of earned-first thinking, culture-led marketing, and integrated agency delivery, ensuring that PR, social, influence and advertising work together to create impact at scale across diverse markets.

Your remit will span from ideation to development of cutting-edge strategies tailored to diverse market nuances and brand objectives. You will lead the charge on defining compelling creative narratives and content frameworks, ensuring brand consistency and breakthrough engagement. Subsequently, you will oversee flawless execution, transforming strategy into impactful activations across various platforms and geographies.

This role demands a holistic leader capable of driving innovation, navigating complex client relationships, and delivering measurable results within a dynamic, multi-market agency environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Client leadership & stakeholder management

• Act as the senior day-to-day client lead for European and Global teams, building trusted, long-term partnerships
• Provide strategic counsel across brand, reputation, partnerships and cultural activation
• Lead complex, multi-market stakeholder management across global, regional and local teams
• Ensure the FMCG Brand has consistent, senior-level leadership fully embedded in the brand business
• Lead the creation of global and European communications toolkits, frameworks and playbooks that balance global brand consistency with local market nuance
• Embed earned-first thinking into all toolkits
• Partner closely with creative and strategy leads to shape culturally relevant, insight-led ideas
• Oversee market engagement across Europe and priority global territories, acting as a central connector between the brands global teams and local markets
• Ensure clients are consistently informed on market trends, cultural shifts, competitor activity and emerging opportunities
• Champion local market insight, ensuring work is adaptable, relevant and executable across diverse regions

• Lead the communications strategy and delivery for global brand moments and events, ensuring alignment across markets
• Play a central role in developing and activating brand partnerships, embedding them seamlessly into toolkits and campaign narratives
• Work with market and agency leads to bring partnerships to life in locally relevant, culturally resonant ways

• Directly manage a London-based team, working alongside creative and strategy leadership
• Foster a collaborative, high-performance team culture grounded in integration and shared ownership

What makes this role different

• 100% dedicated to the FMCG portfolio, allowing for deep brand immersion and long-term strategic thinking
• Operates at true global scale, balancing global brand stewardship with local market realities
• Deeply partnership-led, with collaborations embedded into brand strategy
• Strong emphasis on earned-first, culture-first marketing, influencing how integrated campaigns are built from the ground up
• Sits within a fully integrated agency model, requiring constant collaboration across discipline

Skills for Your Growth to Client Partner

• C-Suite Partnership & Business Acumen: Transition from a practice leader to a C-suite strategic advisor.
• Integrated Solution Leadership: Evolve from leading a single capability to orchestrating the agency's full suite of services.
• Enterprise Commercial Strategy: Shift focus from departmental P&L management to owning the entire client commercial relationship.
• Relationship as the Core Product: Move from a role where the craft is the primary product to one where the strategic client relationship itself is the core deliverable.

Personal Qualities

• Extensive and proven experience in a senior leadership role within a top-tier agency.
• Strategic yet pragmatic
• Culturally curious and globally minded
• Confident, collaborative and calm under pressure
• Energised by complexity, scale and partnership-driven work
• Demonstrated track record of P&L ownership and delivering significant, year-on-year business growth.
• Proven success in leading and winning multi-million-pound new business pitches.
• Exceptional leadership skills with experience in shaping departmental culture and developing senior talent.
• Outstanding commercial acumen and sophisticated negotiation skills.

How we help you Thrive

• 25 days annual leave + 1 Volunteer Day
• Enhanced Maternity, Adoption and Shared Parental Leave
• Flexible Working Model with core working hours: 10am – 4pm
• Wellbeing and Health: Up to £25.00 per month towards physical or online exercise class membership, Unmind membership, LifeWorks tool and annual eye tests.
• Season Ticket Loan and Cycle to Work Scheme
• Life Assurance

We are an equal opportunity employer and we’re committed to creating an inclusive, welcoming environment for everyone who wants to work at Ogilvy. For us, diversity, equity and inclusion is integrated into everything that we do. We believe that for creativity to flourish, everything about how we work must have diversity at its core.