Account Director Job In London

About Pulse Creative

Pulse Creative is our embedded agency for News UK, formed through a WPP-backed joint venture between The&Partnership, m/SIX, and Wunderman. Pulse Creative work on some of the country's most-loved brands including The Times, Times Radio, The Sun, talkSPORT and Virgin Radio.

The agency houses more than 40 experts in everything from creative, design, digital content creation, UX, and development, to comms planning, brand strategy, account handling and media planning and buying, Pulse Creative represents the collaborative, integrated agency model of the future.

About News UK

News UK is the proud owner of a stable of news and media brands that span the most popular to the most respected, cover the highbrow to the lowdown, provide the first flash and the last word.

News UK is constantly reinventing the business of storytelling, always striving to find new ways of educating, entertaining, engaging and empowering our audiences.

News UK's award-winning stable of brands include The Times, The Sunday Times, Times Radio, The Sun, talkSPORT, talk TV, Virgin Radio and many more.

About The Times

The Times is a faithful recorder of the times for more than 200 years. It is authoritative, credible, responsible, trusted and a part of the nation's cultural heritage. A premium British brand recognised the world over.

But The Times is also a fast-moving, highly creative, multi-channel media operation which has a long heritage of modernity, of being first, of breaking through, of creating change.

It is an informer, an entertainer, a campaigner, an innovator, and an agenda-setter that has always had the capacity to surprise.

The Role

Our new Account Director working on The Times and The Sunday Times should be the champion of delivering great work (at pace), on time and on budget for our clients. Clients will view you as someone they inherently trust, who is passionate about The Times brand, meets their expectations and with whom they can have an honest dialogue about making the work better.

Your wider agency team will view you as a digital and social expert, a go-getter, who keeps everyone on track and communicates brilliantly whilst striving for the best creative product that the agency can produce.

You will be a digital first thinker, super organised, smart and comfortable owning multiple projects and driving them forward.

This role is 4 days a week in office.

Key skills

Client relationships:

• Develop, maintain and extend client relationships. Become your client's partner

• Develop a deep understanding of the client's business. Understand their pressures, products, goals and motivations, both on a project and business level

• Manage client expectations in relation to project objectives, timelines, and budgets. Be upfront, clear and honest at all times.

Digital and social:

• Manage and optimise digital and social campaign strategies whilst collaborating with the wider agency and marketing teams to ensure audience and creative consistency across all channels.

• Create and implement tailored campaigns for each social media platform - in particular Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn - capitalizing on their unique features and audience demographics.

• Supervise the development of a wide range of content formats, including video and interactive formats, whilst ensuring alignment with the brand's voice and objectives.

• Keep up-to-date with the latest social media platform developments, trends, and emerging formats, effectively leveraging this knowledge to drive campaign success.

• Track and analyse key performance indicators to assess campaign effectiveness and make data-driven adjustments.

• Implement and manage paid advertising campaigns on social platforms, targeting specific audience segments to enhance visibility and engagement.

Excellence in project management:

• Being the day-to-day manager of your specific projects, the client's first port of call

• Interpreting, questioning and challenging (where necessary) client briefs

• Overseeing project timelines, working with a PM

• Ensuring client feedback is clear and understood

• Using healthy paranoia to ensure work is always correct and without error

• Driving quality control across the board to ensure the work is on brand

• Great attention to detail, understanding of social, digital, CRM and video production process

• Escalating to senior management when required

Financial Management:

• Ensure all projects are thoroughly costed against budget and communicated to the client

• Maintain a close eye on overburn

• Managing project estimates, client POs all the way to reconciliation.

Agency and partner relationships:

• Build strong working relationships with creative, planning and the wider account team

• Help to drive the culture of the agency - become integral to its identity

Skills and attitude:

• A friendly, positive team player, solution focussed

• A natural communicator

• Proactive - never waiting for opportunities, always hunting them down and enjoys working at pace

• Inquisitive, always questioning

• Taking pride in delivering the absolute best work we can as an agency

• An organiser, someone who keeps everyone on track

• Numerate

• Interested in the industry. Who's doing great work? What's the latest innovation?

Qualifications:

• Experience in a social/digital first agency would help

• Demonstrate working very closely with clients and working with multiple stakeholders.

• Good knowledge of project management and how to deliver TLL comms (e.g. print, digi, CRM)

Join Pulse to work on The Times and be part of a top agency working on a renowned brand that shapes public discourse and delivers exceptional journalism to millions of readers. If you are a strategic thinker, customer-centric, and passionate about leveraging CRM to enhance subscriber experiences, we would love to hear from you. Apply today and make a significant impact on The Times' customer communications and Times+ program.