Planning Director

Havas Media; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work up to 4 weeks per year

Hybrid working model – min 3 days in‑f

Generous holiday allocation

Wellbeing days, one day per quarter

Parental Life at Havas policy

Rental deposit loan

Season ticket loan

Mortgage advice

Subsidised gym membership

Social club

Early Friday finishes

Weekly bar nights

Job summary

Havas Media Network in London seeks a Planning Director to lead high‑level planning for key clients, including Emirates and University of Law. You will guide cross‑functional teams, focus on audience insight, and ensure integrated media solutions with commercial impact.

You will mentor talent within the team, drive growth opportunities, and partner with senior clients to deliver exceptional, measurable outcomes. This is a hybrid role with in‑office and remote work options.

Qualifications

• Experience leading integrated media planning with data-driven approaches.
• Ability to translate audience insight into actionable media strategies.
• Proven track record of guiding senior client relationships and teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead best-in-class media planning across Emirates and University of Law accounts.
• Drive planning excellence rooted in audience understanding and commercial acumen.
• Develop and mentor talent within the team and foster cross-functional collaboration.
• Present clear proposals and maintain strong client leadership and trust.

Skills

Planning

Strategic thinking

Client leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

Agency : Havas Media Group Job Description : Planning Director Job Description About Havas Media Network Havas Media Network (HMN) employees over 950 people in the UK & Ireland. We are passionate about helping our clients create more Meaningful Brands through the creation and delivery of more valuable experiences. Our Havas mission: To make a meaningful difference to the brands, the businesses and the lives of the people we work with, and our core proposition is more human and delivering lasting impact. HMN UK spans London, Leeds, Manchester & Edinburgh, servicing our clients brilliantly through our agencies including Ledger Bennett, Havas Market, Havas Media, Arena Media, Forward Media, DMPG and Havas Play Network. Our Ambition At Havas Media Network we create Meaningful Media that drives growth for the world’s most ambitious brands. Guided by our values—Human at Heart, Head for Rigour, and Mind for Flair—we embed genuine human insight, data-driven discipline and creative daring into everything we do. This role sits at the heart of that promise—bridging day-to-day planning with specialist capabilities to ensure data-driven thinking enhances every stage of media delivery.

The Role

The Role Planning Director: Focussing on client problems and uncovering the appropriate media solutions and strategies. As a Planning Director, you are the guardians of our work, and responsible for leading best-in-class planning, fuelled by our Mx Planning System and its subsequent delivery to clients. This role is to work across Emirates and University of Law (ULAW) Emirates is one of our most recent global wins in 2026, with the UK market being one of the largest and important. As Planning Director on the account, you will be responsible for driving planning excellence across the account, ensuring every recommendation is rooted in deep audience understanding, commercial acumen and integrated thinking across their different types of campaigns. University of Law (ULAW) is UK's oldest and largest specialist provider of legal education, offering career-focused degrees across law, business, criminology, psychology, and computer science. You will be responsible for continuing our work in supporting YoY application growth, partnership management and client leadership. As the client's trusted partner within Havas, you will lead with curiosity and bring together the best of the agency to deliver exceptional work for the client. Alongside this, you will play a key role in developing talent within the team, fostering collaboration and identifying opportunities to drive growth across the partnership.

What behaviours we need from you:

As the Planning Director, you are the heartbeat of the agency, your team and often your client’s gateway to the Havas. You will be a positive, motivated individual with an attitude and mindset to convey real care, craft, and creativity. For your team, you will be a leading figure, and someone that will play a pivotal role in motivating those around you, bridging the requirements of both the client and wider agency. For your clients, you are representing the best of Havas. The face of our offering and someone that can build brilliant, trusted relationships based on exceptional work and genuine interest in their business.

• Effectively manages upwards; builds positive cross functional relationships, provides solutions when escalating issues, anticipates the needs of the wider team
• Proactively develops more junior members of the team and drafts clear objectives, including ownership of appropriate appraisals. Gets the most out of your team, delegates authority to match their teams job level and holds them accountable
• Works with specialist team leads to manage hours dedicated to the account to ensure profitability
• Effectively communicates upwards account challenges and suggests structural changes to retainer/contract

• You will be someone who: Works with a partner to identify growth opportunities on the account, proactively pursuing these opportunities and making them a reality Suggests well thought through, reasoned alternatives to identify better commercial opportunities Present to senior client stakeholders, clear and well thought out proposals and recommendations Actively seeks out the opinions from others in the village to aid decision making Independently engages in tasks which require a high degree of interpretation of complex information Is a curious mind, takes a proactive approaching to managing risk

Role Competencies:

• Uses experience and industry knowledge to identify planning, strategic and where appropriate, commercials improvements to client and Havas Group
• Is able to employ best practice methodology from inside and outside the business
• Identifies gaps in information and looks to close them, but is also able to make assumptions in order to act
• Has a clear understanding of products and services within Havas and how they can help clients to meet their short- and long-term business objectives
• Is able to develop project plans and justify their decision-making process based on established principles
• Able to evaluate responses and proposals brought forth by more junior members and apply a more advanced lens based on knowledge of client’s business (sales, targets, broader business goals)
• Is able to use and demonstrate the use of tools in appropriate circumstances. Can direct team in appropriate sources of information to test hypotheses or find information.
• Can create clear measurement frameworks and set out guidance for appropriate KPIs to assess the viability of plans

What’s on offer from Havas:

We want you to do the best work of your career. To support you in managing your career, as well as your commitments and priorities in your life. We have created a modern, market leading approach to personal benefits, wellbeing, and care: We have shown at Havas, that we can all work productively in a new Hybrid manner To give you even more flexibility, and support a better balance between work and life, Havas employees are given the opportunity to work remotely from anywhere in the world for up to 4 weeks per calendar year. Alongside a generous holiday allocation and birthday off, we are all allocated one day per quarter as wellbeing days. These are simply days you can take off, guilt free and without eating into your holiday allowance. We have modernised and introduced a market leading parental package for our employees. The Parental Life at Havas policy enhances, broadens, and encourages the uptake of parental leave for all parents, regardless of gender, type of relationship, type of parentship or any other potentially defining characteristic. We also haven’t forgotten about those benefits that make a meaningful difference to you personally, from a Rental Deposit Loan (so you can secure your new place), season ticket loan to ease travel and free mortgage advice for the getting on the property ladder we have you covered and much more! We haven’t lost the fun stuff either, subsidised gym membership, social club, early Friday finishes and weekly bar nights We work in a hybrid working model – in office and remotely Current policy is for minimum 3 days in office. Office Location: London – Havas Media office #LI-NK1 Contract Type : Permanent

Here at Havas across the group we pride ourselves on being committed to offering equal opportunities to all potential employees and have zero tolerance for discrimination. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome applicants irrespective of age, sex, race, ethnicity, disability and other factors that have no bearing on an individual’s ability to perform their job.

About Us

Founded in 1835 by Charles-Louis Havas, Havas is one of the world’s largest global communications groups, with more than 23,000 people in over 100 countries sharing one single mission: to make a meaningful difference to brands, businesses, and people. Havas has developed a fully integrated model covering all communications activities. The teams of the three business units, Creative, Media and Health & You, work together with agility and in perfect synergy to offer clients tailor-made, meaningful, innovative and entertainment-oriented solutions that support them in their positive transformation.

Life at Havas

We take great pride in our Havas family. They bring many unique personalities, perspectives, and passions to their work. Collaboration is at the core of how we operate, and Havas Villages are the homes we work in. We encourage our people to take advantage of our many opportunities to learn and grow. Through local agency training sessions, our unique global and development programs, we offer our people endless opportunities to explore.

Havas Media Network

We create the best media experience, capitalizing on the most meaningful media to build more meaningful brands. We know how to connect a client with their target audience – in the context of where they are, through the content they pay attention to. We deliver this expertise through the Mx System, our global operating methodology and strategic planning process, that creates value for our clients by turning consumer intelligence into clear growth targets, aligning stakeholders and KPIs, and measuring the impact of media experiences.

Havas Creative Network

At Havas, we believe creativity isn’t just a description of our business, it is part of our agencies’ DNA. We bring together some of the industry’s most creative and accomplished agencies. By combining creative expertise with the strategic and innovative power of our Villages, we can build seamless teams around the individual needs of our clients.

Havas Health

Havas Health Driven by human purpose and focused on the betterment of humanity through health, Havas Health & You leverages a global collection of experts and individuals to help people everywhere live healthier lives. With a spirit rooted in innovation, creativity, and education, we are dedicated to delivering consistent excellence and groundbreaking work.