VP, Group Account Director

About the Role

As a VP, Group Account Director at Monks, you'll serve as a senior leader of the agency relationship for a Portland-based global sports wear company. This is a new engagement, so you will be accountable for the setup, health, growth, and success of the business, providing strategic counsel to senior client stakeholders while leading an integrated agency team to deliver ambitious, high-quality work against the client’s business, brand, and marketing objectives.

We are looking for a collaborative and commercially minded client leader who builds trusted relationships, sees the bigger picture, and knows how to turn complex business challenges into opportunities for great work. You'll bring strategic thinking, strong judgment, curiosity, and a passion for building high-performing teams and partnerships. You're comfortable navigating a fast-moving global organization and can connect the dots across business, brand, sport, culture, product, digital, and consumer experience.

Responsibilities:

• Play an instrumental role in the wider global business of this dedicated account, through collaboration and craft.
• Lead senior client relationships, serving as a trusted strategic partner and primary escalation point for key stakeholders.
• Collaborate with team members across the globe to ensure consistent client experience and knowledge sharing
• Set the vision and direction for the client partnership, aligning agency priorities, capabilities, and deliverables to broader business, brand, and marketing objectives.
• Develop a deep understanding of the client’s business, consumers, category, competitive landscape, and organizational priorities to proactively identify challenges and opportunities.
• Provide strategic counsel to senior client stakeholders, helping translate business needs into meaningful marketing, creative, and consumer opportunities.
• Lead multiple integrated programs and workstreams, ensuring consistency, connectivity, and quality.
• Partner with senior client stakeholders and agency teams to translate business and marketing objectives into clear, inspiring strategic and creative briefs.
• Champion the strategic and creative product, creating the conditions for teams to produce ambitious, culturally relevant work grounded in client objectives.
• Lead, mentor, and develop the account management team, establishing clear expectations, ways of working, and opportunities for professional growth.
• Partner across strategy, creative, production, operations, and other disciplines to build integrated teams around client needs.
• Maintain executive-level visibility across major initiatives, proactively identifying risks, dependencies, resourcing needs, and opportunities while empowering teams to lead day-to-day delivery.
• Own the commercial health of the business within your scope, partnering with agency leadership on scopes of work, staffing, budgets, forecasting, and resource planning.
• Identify and cultivate organic growth opportunities by anticipating evolving client needs and connecting them to capabilities across the agency.
• Establish strong account governance and ways of working that enable effective communication, decision-making, escalation, and collaboration across complex stakeholder groups.
• Represent the client’s business internally, ensuring agency leadership and cross‑functional teams understand key priorities, challenges, opportunities, and organizational dynamics.

About You

The essentials:

• 12+ years of progressive experience in advertising, marketing, integrated communications, or a related client‑services environment, with significant experience leading complex, high‑profile client relationships.
• Experience working with sports, apparel, footwear, lifestyle, retail, or other culturally relevant consumer brands.
• Experience operating at a Group Account Director, VP, Business Lead, or comparable senior client leadership level.
• Proven ability to build trusted relationships with senior and executive‑level client stakeholders and provide credible strategic counsel.
• Strong understanding of integrated marketing and the ability to connect individual programs and channels to broader brand, marketing, and business objectives.
• Demonstrated success leading large‑scale, complex programs across multiple disciplines, workstreams, stakeholders, and agency partners.
• Strong commercial acumen, including experience managing scopes of work, staffing models, budgets, forecasting, resource planning, and account growth.
• Proven ability to identify and develop organic growth opportunities within existing client relationships.
• Experience building, leading, mentoring, and developing high‑performing account teams.
• Ability to evaluate and strengthen strategic and creative briefs and provide clear, actionable direction to strategy, creative, and cross‑functional teams.
• Excellent executive communication, presentation, negotiation, and relationship‑building skills.
• Strong judgment and the ability to navigate ambiguity, competing priorities, organizational complexity, and sensitive client situations.
• A collaborative leadership style with the ability to influence stakeholders across disciplines, organizations, and levels of seniority.
• Ability to balance the immediate needs of the business with a longer‑term view of the client relationship, team, and growth opportunity.

Not a must, but a plus:

• Experience supporting large‑scale global consumer brands with complex organizational structures and multiple internal and external agency partners.
• Familiarity with product launches, seasonal marketing calendars, integrated campaigns, and high‑volume consumer marketing ecosystems.
• A strong understanding of consumer culture and an interest in the intersection of sport, style, entertainment, technology, and culture.
• Experience working within an integrated agency model or coordinating across multiple specialist agencies and capabilities.

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What We Offer

Benefits

• Excellent, full coverage medical, dental and vision insurance - more about our coverage here!
• Generous PTO and 15 company‑wide holidays
• 401k with company contribution
• Paid parental leave
• Work‑life balance with an emphasis on personal well‑being
• Career growth in a disruptor space & entrepreneurial opportunities within the Monks network
• A globally diverse & inclusive culture with employee resource groups such as S4 Melanin, Pride.Monks, Cultura.Monks, and more!
• Authentic commitment to DEI efforts and sustainable growth. (Why Sir Martin Sorrell signed The Climate Pledge here!)

This role is subject to our Return to Office (RTO) policy. If you reside within a commutable distance of one of our office locations, you will be expected to work from the office a set number of days per week. The specific details, including the number of required office days, will be in accordance with the company’s then-current RTO policy, which is subject to change from time to time.

Monks has provided a compensation range that represents its good faith estimate of what Monks may pay for the position at the time of posting. Monks may ultimately pay more or less than the posted compensation range. The salary offered to the selected candidate will be determined based on job-related factors, but not based on a candidate's sex or any other protected status.

Salary Range: $195,000-205,000 USD About Monks

Monks is the global, digital-first, data-driven, unitary operating brand of S4Capital plc, where our culture centers on how we show up for the work and for one another. That begins with the commitment to strive for mastery - taking deep pride in our craft and creating work that sets the bar. In everyday execution, we drive momentum by choosing bold action rather than waiting for certainty. Above all, our teams are stronger together, bringing diverse perspectives into a unified team that communicates with clarity, trust, and mutual respect.

This commitment to craft and innovation translates directly into widespread industry acclaim: Monks was named a Contender in The Forrester Wave: Global Marketing Services and a leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Global Digital Marketing Agencies. It ranks among Cannes Lions' Top 10 Creative Companies ) and remains the only partner featured in AdExchangers Programmatic Power Players list every year ). Named Adweek's first AI Agency of the Year (2023) and The One Show's inaugural AI Pioneer Organization (2025), Monks was also awarded Business Intelligence Group's 2026 Excellence in Artificial Intelligence Award in the Human-Machine Interaction Team category. Additionally, Monks.Flow earned AI-based Marketing Solution of the Year at the 2026 AI Breakthrough Awards and a 2026 Global Generative AI Award in the Agentic Marketing Innovation category. Finally, Monks achieved a record-breaking number of FWAs and continues to hold the most of any partner.

We are an equal-opportunity employer committed to building a respectful and empowering work environment for all people to freely express themselves amongst colleagues who embrace diversity in all respects. Including fresh voices and unique points of view in all aspects of our business not only creates an environment where we can all grow and thrive but also increases our potential to produce work that better represents and resonates with the world around us.

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