Account Director

Socket.dev; Toronto; On-site; CAD 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Academy is seeking an Account Director to lead client success, mentor the Accounts team, and bridge between clients and internal teams to ensure work hits the mark. This senior role reports to the VP, Client Services, requiring 8–10 years of agency experience across multiple categories and creative mediums, with hands-on leadership and cross-functional collaboration.

The role involves managing multi-project pipelines, budgets, and client expectations while driving growth for our partners.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of advertising agency experience in an account management related role.
• Proven leadership and the ability to mentor a team.
• Excellent communication with senior level executives.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain strong relationships with senior clients and act as primary point of contact.
• Lead work across cross-functional divisions (Production, Influencers, social content, paid media, activations).
• Oversee planning, scheduling, and execution of projects, budgets, and timelines.
• Develop scoping and budgets, manage estimates vs actuals, and project revenue with finance.
• Demonstrate leadership in production, with partners and vendors for asset creation.
• Provide growth plans, feedback, mentorship, and guidance to junior team members.

Skills

Leadership

Client management

Strategic planning

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

At Academy, our Account Director role is all about leading the charge for our clients' success and being a role model for the Accounts department through growing, developing and mentoring the team. You’ll be the bridge between our team and the companies we partner with, ensuring that all our work hits the mark and exceeds expectations. We are looking for someone who embraces the messy path to excellence, can manage multiple projects while keeping the big picture in focus, and loves to be part of a collaborative team.

This is a senior role at the agency reporting to the VP, Client Services, and requires 8 - 10 years of experience and a proven ability to deliver across a variety of categories and creative mediums.

On a day-to-day basis, the Account Director will be responsible for:

Client Management

• Build and maintain strong, long-lasting relationships with senior clients by understanding their high level business objectives, needs, and challenges. Taking this into our work and to ensure client satisfaction. Act as a primary point of contact for clients, ensuring their enthusiasm and satisfaction of working with Academy is maintained.
• Ability to speak to and lead work across in cross functional divisions (ie. Production, Influencers, always-on social content, paid media and activations)
• Resolving promptly any high level concerns, issues or roadblocks that might arise.
• Understanding client preferences and styles in the way they work, including documentation, status formats, deck builds, etc.

Championing Effectiveness

• Client mapping of the business inclusive of swot analysis, understanding KPIs, tracking performance, and strategically providing guidance to clients on how Academy’s service offering can support their business goals
• Collaborate with clients to develop and implement effective briefs and campaigns that align with their objectives. Coordinate with internal teams, such as creative, strategy, and production, to ensure timely and successful delivery of campaigns.
• Monitor campaign performance in collaboration with internal teams. Lead the preparation of detailed reports and presentations to communicate results, insights, and recommendations for optimization to clients.
• Advocating and acting as a steward for the client and their brand at the agency.
• Being on top of the latest trends for social and the client's landscape

Project Management

• Oversee the planning, scheduling, and execution of projects. Manage budgets, track project timelines, and ensure all deliverables meet our high standards and client expectations.
• Ability to effectively and collaboratively work on multiple projects in different phases of the production or creative process.
• Ensuring there is clarity in the work and the job that needs to be done. Making sure everyone knows who is responsible for what, when and why.

Financial Management

• Manage multi-million dollar book of business across multiple clients
• Manage client clients by scoping project effectively and ensuring equitable distribution of support across agency, production and partnership needs
• Strong ability to develop scoping and budget documents and manage estimates versus actuals to deliver programs on time and within budget.
• Working closely with finance team members to project revenue and track project progress.
• Collaborate with finance and business teams in building processes, workflows and finding efficiencies

Production

• Demonstrate an ability to spearhead projects that consist of heavy production, both traditional paid media and digital/social media content creation
• Work directly with Producers on estimates, timelines, contracts, legal and more for smooth and efficient asset creation
• Work directly with agency partners, vendors and contractors on asset/content delivery

People Management

• Demonstrate strong leadership skills and team management skills with ability to supervise, delegate, and mentor team members
• Managing and leading direct reports and junior team members;
• Collaborating with VP Client Services to provide growth plans, feedback, mentorship and guidance through learning opportunities
• Comfortable providing real-time guidance and direction to working team members

New Business Development

• Assisting with scoping, pitches and onboarding new clients to the organization

What we're looking for:

• 8+ years of advertising agency experience in an account management related role
• Proactivity
• Strategic foresight and ability to build plans and strategies based on the agency priorities
• Leadership and the ability to lead teams through work challenges
• Excellent communication skills, including with senior level executives
• Willingness to travel and be on-site for client meetings/events/activations as needed (weekends included as needed)
• Hyper attention to detail
• Critical thinking and good judgment. Can reliably act in the best interest of the company
• Hunger to learn and grow

• Because you want to make your mark on a high-potential, evolving agency.
• Because you want to make work that matters.
• Because you believe social-first work can be smart, strategic, and creatively world-class.
• Because you want to lead a team that punches above its weight - and has fun doing it.