Strategic Client Services Lead – Creative Studio

OLIVER Agency - North America; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 98,000 - 109,000; Full time

Job summary

OLIVER Agency - North America is seeking a Senior Account Manager to bridge Client marketing teams and the in‑house studio. You’ll define excellent client service, manage briefs from intake to allocation, and partner with the Project Manager to ensure efficient, scalable workflows.

The role starts as an individual contributor with potential to grow a client services team as the studio scales, reporting to the Creative Director and Global Account Director.

Qualifications

• Strong track record in account management within a creative agency, in‑house studio, or content production environment.
• Proven ability to build and manage client relationships at a senior marketing level — commercially astute, proactive, and trusted.
• Experience establishing or significantly improving client services processes, from brief intake and triage through to workflow management and escalation frameworks.
• Skilled at working across multiple internal teams, translating client needs into clear, actionable briefs and ensuring the right capability is applied to every project.
• Strong project management sensibility — able to hold the big picture and the detail simultaneously, and to partner effectively with a dedicated Project Manager.
• Clear communicator who influences stakeholders at all levels, manages expectations with honesty, and represents the studio with credibility and calm.
• Experience tracking scope and managing the commercial implications of changes to briefs, timelines, or deliverables.
• A continuous improvement mindset — always looking for smarter ways to run an account, structure a brief, or improve how teams collaborate.
• Experience in an FMCG, beverage, or consumer brand environment is a strong advantage.

Responsibilities

• Establish and lead a new client services layer for the team, becoming the single point of escalation and insight for Client's marketing teams and the wider studio function.
• Act as the client's voice within the studio and the studio's voice to the client, building trusted, commercially grounded relationships with senior stakeholders on both sides.
• Serve as a strategic and commercial partner to the Creative Director, owning the client relationship infrastructure and enabling the Creative Director to focus fully on creative leadership.
• Proactively identify and pursue growth opportunities, spotting unmet needs or emerging use cases and translating them into expanded scope for the studio.
• Own the central triage of all incoming briefs, interrogating each brief, identifying gaps, sourcing additional information from marketing and briefing teams, and ensuring work is assigned to the right skillset.
• Work closely with the Project Manager to design, implement, and continuously improve processes that support brief flow, team utilisation, and on‑time delivery.
• Enable knowledge sharing and collaboration across teams, maximising the full studio's capabilities and ensuring seamless handoffs when work moves between specialisms.
• Build and maintain a clear picture of studio workload, capacity, and pipeline, surfacing risks proactively and escalating where needed to the Global Account Director.
• Establish regular reporting rhythms that give Client's marketing teams and studio leadership clear visibility of progress, performance, and priorities.
• Lead process excellence across the account, identifying inefficiencies, proposing practical solutions, and embedding ways of working that scale as the studio grows.
• Facilitate the seamless flow of work, ensuring maximum efficiency across the full team's capabilities and avoiding duplication or dropped handoffs.
• Track and report on scope, flagging changes that affect commercial agreements and working with the Global Account Director to manage scope conversations with the client.

Skills

Account management

Client relationships

Process improvement

Cross-functional collaboration

Project management

Communication

Scope management

AI awareness

Tools

Monday.com

Smartsheet

Asana

Gen AI tools

Job description

OLIVER Agency - North America is seeking a Senior Account Manager to bridge Client marketing teams and the in‑house studio. You’ll define excellent client service, manage briefs from intake to allocation, and partner with the Project Manager to ensure efficient, scalable workflows.

The role starts as an individual contributor with potential to grow a client services team as the studio scales, reporting to the Creative Director and Global Account Director.