Account Director - Planning & Client Team

Bountiful Cow; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working 3 days in office per wk

27 days holiday + service increment

Private Medical Insurance

Job summary

Bountiful Cow, a growing independent challenger agency in Covent Garden, seeks an Account Director to own senior day-to-day client leadership across a diverse patch of accounts. You will shape strategies, interrogate briefs and oversee delivery with a hands-on approach.

You will lead teams, develop opportunities, and ensure high-quality work while collaborating across the7stars Group resources and partners. Hybrid working applies.

Qualifications

• Demonstrable experience in a client-facing media planning role.
• Strong cross-channel knowledge across TV, press, digital and B2B media.
• Ability to lead client relationships and coach junior team members.

Responsibilities

• Act as senior day-to-day lead for your clients with complete account oversight.
• Develop rigorous, distinctive media strategies and plans.
• Coordinate channel plans and oversee campaign delivery and performance.
• Lead new-business pitches and contribute to agency growth.
• Build and present recommendations confidently to clients.

Skills

Client-facing media planning

Cross-channel knowledge

Senior client leadership

Planning ability

Presentations & pitches

Media buying knowledge

Multi-client management

Team coaching

Tools

Telmar

TGI

Telmar/TGI audiences

AI and data tools

Job description

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

This is a genuinely broad planning and client leadership 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 challenges.

You'll be the most senior day-to-day contact for many of your clients, but this isn't an Account Director role where you simply manage the relationship and hand the actual planning down to the team.

You'll stay close to the work: getting under the skin of client businesses, interrogating briefs, shaping strategies and recommendations, presenting plans, overseeing delivery and making sure everything that leaves the agency is of a consistently high standard.

You'll also lead and develop the team around you, including line management of an Account Manager or Senior Account Manager alongside responsibility for the wider junior team working across your accounts.

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 thinking.
• 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 actually drives each business and adapting your planning accordingly rather than applying the same playbook everywhere.

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 be responsible for the quality of the work across your accounts and for setting the standard for the team around you.

That includes:

• Acting as the senior day-to-day lead for your clients, developing exceptional relationships and maintaining complete oversight of your accounts.
• Getting under the skin of your clients' businesses, markets and competitors and using that knowledge to spot opportunities and challenge thinking.
• Taking client briefs and working across Bountiful Cow's teams to develop rigorous, distinctive and commercially grounded responses.
• Building and presenting media strategies, recommendations and plans confidently and persuasively.
• Coordinating channel plans and maintaining oversight of campaign setup, delivery and performance.
• Constantly looking for opportunities to create Relative Advantage rather than defaulting to established category conventions.
• Running regular account stand-ups and creating clarity, accountability and momentum across your team.
• Delegating effectively while remaining accountable for the quality of everything produced across your accounts.
• Coaching and developing junior team members and creating opportunities for them to take greater ownership.
• Challenging weak thinking, poor recommendations or avoidable mistakes before they reach the client.
• Leading new-business pitches and contributing to the wider growth of the agency.
• Acting as the client's advocate internally and ensuring recommendations genuinely serve their interests.
• Building strong relationships with media owners, partners and specialist teams.
• Owning account management processes and documentation, including finance trackers, forecasts, contractual commitments and key account records.
• Using industry planning tools such as Telmar and TGI to develop audiences and support recommendations with robust reach and frequency analysis.
• Grounding recommendations in evidence, campaign learning, competitive intelligence, market insight and effectiveness principles.
• Using AI, data and insight tools to accelerate analysis, uncover opportunities and help identify Relative Advantage.
• Translating campaign performance into meaningful client reporting, insight and clear recommendations.
• Overseeing competitive reporting and campaign analysis while supporting junior members of the team in developing these skills.
• Working closely with Bountiful Cow's Activation teams across AV, radio and digital.
• Briefing and coordinating with Talon to develop effective Out of Home plans.
• Planning and trading print campaigns where required alongside the wider team and the7stars Group trading team.
• Staying ahead of developments across media and proactively bringing relevant thinking, opportunities and recommendations to clients.

What we're looking for

You'll need demonstrable experience in a client-facing media planning role, with strong cross-channel knowledge and the confidence to operate as a senior day-to-day client lead.

The important thing is the combination of proper planning ability and strong client leadership.

You should enjoy getting into the work rather than seeing an Account Director role purely as relationship management. You'll need to be comfortable moving between strategy and execution, keeping an eye on the detail while still being senior and credible enough to lead client conversations.

You'll ideally bring:

• Strong media planning and buying knowledge across channels.
• Experience managing multiple clients, categories or workstreams simultaneously.
• The ability to understand a client's commercial challenge and translate it into a clear media approach.
• Experience building presentations and presenting recommendations confidently to clients.
• The confidence to challenge clients and colleagues constructively when you believe there's a better answer.
• Strong relationships with clients, media owners and internal teams.
• Experience managing and developing more junior team members.
• Genuine curiosity about clients, categories, media and the wider market.
• A high bar for detail, quality and execution.

Experience planning and/or buying press is useful, but isn't essential for this particular role.

We're open to people from both independent and network agency backgrounds. You also don't necessarily need to be an Account Director already – a strong Senior Account Manager who is already operating at this level and ready to take broader ownership could be equally 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 creative freedom of 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.