Growth Director

About Us

IPG Mediabrands is the media and marketing solutions division of Interpublic Group (NYSE: IPG). Mediabrands manages approximately $40 billion in marketing investment globally on behalf of its clients and provides strategic services and solutions across its award-winning, full-service agency networks UM and Initiative and through its innovative marketing specialist companies Kinesso, Magna, Orion, Rapport, Healix, Mediabrands Content Studio and the IPG Media Lab. Mediabrands clients include many of the world’s most recognizable and iconic brands from a broad portfolio of industry sectors. The company employs more than 13,000 marketing experts in more than 130 countries representing the full diversity of humanity. For more information, please visit our website: www.ipgmediabrands.com.

Role Description

Reporting into the Head of Growth, The Growth Director role is mid-senior level that sits at the heart of the EMEA Growth Team. 

This Director role has a dual aspect - across pitching and growth operations;

It firstly includes leading small to medium size pitches in the region across and supporting in larger-scale pitch management led by the Heads of. This includes multi-market and single market pitches where the latter are transformational local opportunities across Mediabrands, UM, Initiative or integrated IPG pitches. This involves supporting the new business pitch process and the team to deliver all key elements of a pitch, including best-in-class RFIs (Requests for Information) and RFPs (Requests for Proposal) outputs. The candidate will be responsible for assisting the teams, delivering meetings, pitch project plans, managing pitch budgets and ensuring deadlines are met. 

The candidate will also be expected to connect with the global, specialist or local teams to guarantee the excellence of responses, as well as delivering of pitch collateral and theatre. Some flexibility is required in your working hours (related to deadlines and times zones) and you’ll have the opportunity to travel, spending time on ground in market during key pitch periods. 

In addition, this specific role will include responsibilities related to ensuring smooth growth team operations that better support pitch teams in EMEA and the UK – prospecting opportunity vetting, RFI knowledge banking, project management standardisation and reporting (Salesforce). 

This role is a unique opportunity for an ambitious candidate to work at holding company level, with fantastic exposure to senior HoCo leadership, global craft functions, media agency culture, teams and propositions and local market colleagues.

Key Responsibilities

Pitch Management:

• Receive brief/initiate process/liaise with client/consultant.
• Set timelines and assign key tasks/deliverables.
• Lead RFI + RFP responses for small to medium sized regional opportunities.
• Ensure high level output and specialist service collaboration across all pitch stages as relevant.
• Interrogate the brief and organise the team to deliver excellent results, on time and with passion.
• Work closely with senior management and the Head of Growth to compile the ‘strategy to win’, build a pitch plan and efficiently execute the pitch end-to-end.
• Help all teams involved to tell their story clearly, and effectively through mentoring and coaching.
• Take ultimate responsibility for ensuring deadlines are met and quality of output is maintained to an exceptional standard.
• Work closely with junior growth team and creative partners to develop and create pitch marketing collateral as required across all pitch stages .
• Work closely with our commercial and legal teams to deliver smooth delivery of remuneration models, MSA’s and SLA’s retrospectively.

Growth Operations:

Opportunity Vetting and Capture: 

• Traffic all regional pitch invitations, performing due diligence checks to provide ‘pitch or no pitch’ evaluation for senior Growth and Leadership functions to decide on.
• Regularly connect with Top 10 markets to discuss and capture incoming local opportunities and ensure they are correctly inputted into reporting tool, status sheet and/or escalated to Head of Growth to ensure resource allocation.

Knowledge Banking: 

• Work with global to systematise our knowledge bank (RFI library) and ensure regular cadence of content upload to relevant systems.
• Be a point of contact for EMEA market queries and regularly update information repositories (Branch/SharePoint)

Project Management: 

• Work alongside global to implement and roll-out standard project management ways of working and technology and ensure adoption within the EMEA growth, UK Growth and local market growth teams. 

Reporting: 

• Actively support the Salesforce reporting roll out, working with Salesforce to ensure platform adequacy, markets to ensure input accuracy and stakeholders to understand data analysis needs.
• Work with RECMA and Comvergence and ensure accurate 3rd party reporting.

Desired Skills & Experience

• Whilst new business experience in a media agency is desirable, you are first and foremost driven, highly organised and appreciate the need for clear and standardised operational structures to deliver high-quality work. You thrive in a fast-paced environment, under pressure and deliver to tight deadlines, but appreciate down-time to regroup and reboot.
• You build and maintain strong relationships quickly, are positive, and enjoy working with diverse teams. You are a team player and are always ready to muck in and help – even when it’s not necessarily convenient for you!
• Multi-market management or engagement in your current or a previous role is advantageous.

• You are great at storytelling and have a good eye for design… and are confident to share an opinion on how we improve the quality of both. 

• You are a brilliant communicator with the ability to adapt tone of voice and style to multiple stakeholders.