Client Planning Director

the7stars; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private medical insurance

Gym membership

Life assurance

Cycle to work

Job summary

the7stars is seeking a senior operator to lead client relationships across healthcare and FMCG, delivering all-channel planning and strategic leadership from Covent Garden with a hybrid pattern.

You'll coach teams, navigate stakeholders, and drive innovation and measurement thinking to optimise media investment for major accounts.

This role offers the chance to shape how the agency's clients grow, with opportunities to mentor talent and contribute to new business pitches.

Job description

You will join one of our four client teams who, like the rest of the7stars, challenge themselves to deliver bespoke strategies for clients.

This role will sit across two major client relationships spanning healthcare and FMCG.

The healthcare business offers a complex, integrated planning challenge across multiple audiences, products and services, with a strong focus on bringing together brand and performance thinking. The FMCG account covers a portfolio of well-known consumer brands, with significant seasonal media investment.

We're looking for a senior operator who can provide confident client leadership, navigate complex stakeholder environments and lead sophisticated, all-channel planning. You'll take ownership of a major area of client business while coaching and developing the team around you.

About the Clients

The healthcare account spans a broad portfolio of consumer healthcare products and services.

A key challenge is bringing greater consistency to how the wider portfolio shows up in market, while recognising that individual areas have different audiences, competitive contexts and jobs to be done.

The account is genuinely full-funnel. Performance and customer acquisition are important, but a major focus is building demand and consideration further up the funnel, improving the effectiveness of performance investment.

This creates an integrated, all-channel planning environment spanning TV and AV, digital video, audio, podcasts, out-of-home and performance media.

Measurement and effectiveness are also important, with a focus on understanding how media contributes to broader business outcomes.

FMCG account

The FMCG account covers a portfolio of major consumer brands within the food and treats category.

Media investment is highly seasonal. Planning typically spans TV, BVOD, online video, social, outdoor and retail activation.

The account follows an annual brand-planning cycle, creating the opportunity to lead longer-term strategic thinking across distinct brands and audiences.

Responsibilities

• Provide senior client leadership across a portfolio of major accounts, building trusted relationships with senior stakeholders
• Lead a significant area of client business, taking responsibility for planning, account delivery and team output
• Lead integrated, all-channel planning across brand and performance activity
• Orchestrate the collective agency response, partnering with Strategy, Activation, Insights and specialist teams
• Navigate complex stakeholder environments and bring clarity and structure to businesses with multiple brands, audiences or areas of focus
• Ensure the highest quality of client plans, driving innovation, strategic direction and robust effectiveness frameworks
• Bring strong measurement thinking to client conversations, helping clients understand the broader impact of media investment
• Deliver proactive strategic thinking that goes beyond the brief and adds value to senior client relationships
• Lead, coach and develop team members
• Identify opportunities for commercial growth
• Champion new agency tools, technology and AI, ensuring they are effectively integrated into planning and client work
• Actively participate in agency new business pitches

Skills & Experience

We're looking for someone who:

• Has significant agency-side experience in media planning and senior client leadership
• Is a confident senior operator with the presence and credibility to lead complex client relationships
• Has strong stakeholder management skills and can navigate multiple senior stakeholders
• Has strong all-channel knowledge and is comfortable leading integrated planning across offline and digital media
• Brings strong performance experience and understands how brand and upper-funnel investment can drive customer acquisition and commercial outcomes
• Understands measurement and effectiveness and can use data to inform planning
• Can translate overarching strategy into clear planning direction for different brands, audiences and areas of a client's business
• Has excellent interpersonal, presentation and communication skills
• Has experience coaching and developing teams
• Has strong commercial acumen
• Is practical and hands-on
• Actively embraces AI and new tools to improve planning and productivity
• Experience working within regulated or complex consumer categories would be beneficial but is not essential
• Experience across FMCG or consumer brand planning would also be valuable

About You

We're looking for people who:

• Can move comfortably between strategic leadership and practical delivery
• Back their ideas with confidence, evidence and commercial understanding
• Enjoy coaching people and raising the standard of the team around them
• Are entrepreneurial at heart and motivated to do the best work of their career

Salary & Benefits

• Competitive salary dependent on experience and expected impact in role
• Uncounted holiday
• Discretionary summer profit share and Christmas bonus
• Free breakfast and company bar
• New business bonus eligible in your first year
• Private medical insurance
• Gym membership (choice of four local options)
• Personal finance advice
• Season ticket loan
• Cycle to work scheme
• Life assurance
• Critical illness cover
• Income protection
• Enhanced maternity, paternity, fostering and adoption leave, including phased return to work and enhanced pay
• Employee assistance programme and wellbeing support

About the7stars

the7stars launched in 2005 with a promise that we were going to do things differently.

Freedom guides how we work, how we think and how we treat one another.

Our Freedom philosophy lives across our entire business - from people, product and planning. It means we plan and buy media how we want, develop careers how we want, take holiday when we need it, invent tools when we need them, and give people a platform to speak up, question and express themselves freely.

We have a unique working environment and open structure which encourages personal development through client contact, teamwork, training and a "sky's the limit" approach to growth within the agency.

the7stars is 300 passionate media people focused on creating great work for our clients.

Working Pattern

Monday-Thursday in our Covent Garden office, with hybrid working on Fridays.

the7stars is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment where employees feel empowered to share different ideas, perspectives and experiences in a collaborative and creative workplace.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation.