Full-Time

Group Director

Client Partnership, Media + Growth

DEPT

DEPT

1,001-5,000 employees

Global digital agency delivering customer experiences

Compensation Overview

$150k - $195k/yr

No H1B Sponsorship

San Diego, CA, USA

Remote

Category
Growth & Marketing (1)
Required Skills
Forecasting

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Requirements
  • The candidate must have 10+ years of relevant agency, consultancy, startup, or client-side experience.
  • The candidate must have significant experience leading large or strategically important client relationships.
  • The candidate must have demonstrated success growing early-stage or rapidly scaling businesses through media and marketing.
  • The candidate must have a strong understanding of performance marketing, measurement, experimentation, and full-funnel growth.
  • The candidate must have experience working across meaningful media budgets and scaling investment based on demonstrated signal.
  • The candidate must have proven commercial ownership including scoping, negotiation, forecasting, and account growth.
  • The candidate must have exceptional communication, presentation, and executive storytelling skills.
  • The candidate must have a track record of building trust quickly in complex, high-pressure environments.
  • The candidate must have meaningful contribution to organic growth and/or new business.
  • The candidate must be able to understand specialist disciplines deeply enough to ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, and connect them around a business problem.
  • The candidate must participate in E-Verify and be authorized to work in the United States.
Responsibilities
  • Own senior client relationships and overall commercial success across a portfolio of high-growth accounts.
  • Serve as a strategic business partner, helping clients decide where and how to invest rather than simply managing an agreed scope.
  • Lead clients from early testing and market learning through scaled acquisition and full-funnel growth.
  • Partner with media, creative, strategy, data, and technology leaders to build integrated growth systems.
  • Ensure measurement and learning agendas are built into the work from the beginning.
  • Connect media performance to broader business outcomes, including customer acquisition, retention, revenue, and lifetime value.
  • Identify and shape organic growth opportunities before they become formal briefs.
  • Lead commercial planning including scopes, staffing models, forecasting, profitability, and account investment decisions.
  • Create clarity across fast-moving multidisciplinary teams and ensure DEPT feels like one integrated partner to the client.
  • Contribute actively to new business, especially opportunities involving growth, emerging technology, and consumer transformation.
  • Mentor Client Partners and Directors across the organization and help evolve DEPT’s standard for modern client leadership.
Desired Qualifications
  • Proven leadership experience in startup, scale-up, or high-growth consumer businesses, particularly in technology, artificial intelligence, hardware, marketplaces, direct-to-consumer, or adjacent categories.
  • Deep fluency in modern growth media across paid social, search, programmatic/video, creators, and emerging channels.
  • Experience building a growth engine from the ground up, including measurement, audiences, experimentation, creative learning, acquisition, and scale.
  • Understanding of customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, conversion, attribution, incrementality, and how media connects to enterprise value.
  • Ability to discuss brand building and performance and help clients understand how the two reinforce one another.
  • Experience operating effectively with founders, chief marketing officers, growth leaders, and senior investors or stakeholders.
  • Curiosity about technology and consumer behavior, including the impact of artificial intelligence on discovery, media, and marketing.
  • Ability to move quickly with incomplete information without becoming reckless or superficial.
  • Collaborative leadership and judgment about when to lead, challenge, or bring specialist expertise into the room.
  • Experience with performance marketing, measurement, experimentation, and full-funnel growth.
  • Experience with media budgets and scaling investment based on demonstrated signal.
  • Meaningful contribution to organic growth and/or new business.

Dept is a global digital agency that helps brands grow online by blending creativity, technology, and data across customer experience, technology engineering, performance marketing, and brand campaigns. It builds and optimizes digital touchpoints, from responsive websites to immersive experiences such as a 3D Eurovision village and AR apparel drops. It differentiates itself by delivering tailored solutions for both global brands and startups, pursuing international expansion and acquisitions to broaden its reach and combining design, tech, and data in each project. Its goal is to drive client growth with customized digital solutions while aiming to lead the digital agency space and maintain a focus on sustainability.

Company Size

1,001-5,000

Company Stage

Acquired

Total Funding

N/A

Headquarters

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Founded

2008

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Signs won 2026 Webbys, proving DEPT converts AI experimentation into award-winning products.
  • Uber Eats' 2026 Super Bowl work shows access to premium, high-spend brand budgets.
  • DEPT’s AI practice targeted 10% revenue by 2025, expanding services across more engagements.

What critics are saying

  • AI commoditizes production work by 2025, pressuring DEPT’s margins and bill rates.
  • Webby wins mask client concentration risk; losing Adidas, Google, or Uber Eats hurts quickly.
  • Global agency integration remains fragile; one major delivery failure damages referrals across markets.

What makes DEPT unique

  • DEPT won 2026 Webby Agency and Network of the Year, validating creative depth.
  • Its NVIDIA Signs partnership shows credible AI accessibility productization, not just campaign work.
  • Dylan Williams joined June 2026 to strengthen EMEA strategy, reinforcing global client coverage.

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Benefits

Health Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

401(k) Retirement Plan

401(k) Company Match

Paid Vacation

Parental Leave

Hybrid Work Options

Flexible Work Hours

Mental Health Support

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

13%

1 year growth

13%

2 year growth

13%
Dept
Jun 30th, 2026
Expand online has become dept - DEPT®

We said goodbye to Expand Online and hello to DEPT®. Since May 2016, we have merged together with other international leading digital agencies to form DEPT®.

Digiday
Jun 24th, 2026
Agencies look to AI agents for edge, but must fend off brands looking to in-house with the same tech.

Agencies look to AI agents for edge, but must fend off brands looking to in-house with the same tech. With half the industry's dealmakers and powerbrokers gathered in the south of France this week, agencies have been falling over themselves to boast AI agent-related tests, case studies and partnerships. They're not just competing with each other, but rather against the chance clients will use the same technology to bring more of their marketing operations in-house - and off the market. WPP revealed it was testing a media buying and planning agent for premium video inventory just last week. Meanwhile Dentsu has struck a partnership with AI agent development company Newton Research, bolstering the AI analytics and media planning capabilities it offers through Dentsu.connect. The partnership includes the testing of media-buying agents in the U.S., according to Caitlin Gelles, evp of data technology and measurement at Dentsu, as well as solutions to provide faster media analytics and campaign set-up. "We're working on a couple of early-stage pilots [with clients] who want to use Newton for transactional buying," she told Digiday. Gelles said the primary goal of the partnership was to use agents to save time. "It takes hours to set up campaigns across systems... when you can store those nuances in a RAG database, or take how clients like to buy, and let AI find those efficiencies, that's where the value comes in," she said. Related Insights The agentic focus is just as sharp among indies. Butler/Till, which was among the first agencies to begin using AI agents to execute media buys earlier this year, has been working with DoubleVerify to develop Claude agents designed to analyze media inventory quality, and to make automatic adjustments to campaigns to steer them away from poor quality ad space. It's not limited to media planning or buying applications, either. Dept, for example, launched a consultancy service dubbed Agent Studio, which allows clients to effectively rent the engineering workflows and architecture, as well as the underlying tech, that Dept uses to build its own AI agents across a range of applications. "It's about consistency at scale," said Jonathan Whiteside, evp of technology at Dept. At the same time as agencies rush to boast about each new development, clients are also turning to agentic systems. Hyundai, for example, has been working with AI firm Chalice and its in-house media agency Canvas (which also works with other brands, including Zillow) to develop custom AI models and bidding agents using a "containerized" AI solution, OpenXBuild. When used to find inventory on OpenX's SSP, the system led to a 67% reduction in online video CPM rates. Tylynn Pettrey, svp of analytics and AI at Chalice, said the CPM reduction was due to the agent finding inventory that would have otherwise been overlooked. The cost per "high value action," defined by Hyundai as a dealership visit or similar interaction, fell 20% during a pilot scheme. "We eliminated some not-great inventory that we might have purchased; we're focusing our investment on where it matters the most, and scaling it quicker," said Sean Gilpin, North America CMO of Hyundai. He said the company reinvested the savings back into its media budget. The initial tests of the bidding agents ran on campaigns intended to encourage car buyers researching their next vehicle closer to purchasing a Hyundai; Gilpin said future uses of the solution could be tweaked for different objectives. "We want this practice to be deployed on as much of the inventory that we're evaluating. To have this agent on my behalf, doing evaluation of every impression... that becomes a competitive advantage," he said. Although more advertisers are investing in their own programmatic media planning and buying chops, few can boast the depth of Hyundai's internal marketing capabilities. AI investments could be one way of closing the gap, though. According to the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), 71% of in-house teams are implementing AI in their marketing operations while 93% expect to invest further in AI tech over the next 12-24 months. Related Insights Dept's productized approach to agent implementation may provide one way forward for agencies. It's designed to provide a speed and rigor to bespoke AI builds that an internal team might struggle to match. Dept's team implemented an e-commerce platform redesign using AI agents built with Google's Gemini and Antigravity suites for Blackroll, a Swiss fitness equipment brand. Whiteside said the redesign was completed 3.8 times quicker than Dept estimated would have been possible without AI agents. Scott Zalaznik, CEO at Blackroll, said the company was now using AI agents for the majority of its e-commerce feature testing and development. The Dutch agency group's strategy extends to developing an AI assistant designed to finesse project management and digital workflows. Taken together with Agent Studio, the focus on efficiency and orchestration forms part of the company's response to clients potentially taking their business in-house. As AI lowers the barriers to running a media planning and buying team, or to clients managing their own digital transformation projects, agencies need to show that their partnerships, their tech and their working models can get more out of those same tools than clients can without their assistance.

Dept
Jun 2nd, 2026
Dylan Williams joins DEPT(R) as EMEA chief strategy officer.

Dylan Williams joins DEPT(R) as EMEA chief strategy officer. Inês Saraiva Global Communications & PR Director Date June 2, 2026 DEPT(R), the Growth Invention company, today announced the appointment of Dylan Williams as SVP Strategy EMEA. I don't see how in 2026 one can credibly talk about marketing technology without truly understanding brands, nor talk about brands without truly understanding the role of technology. When I looked across the industry, DEPT(R) not only stood out as the place that best does both, but that does so with a laser focus on achieving growth for its clients. Spending time with Joanna Trippett confirmed for me that I wanted to be part of her team. This team feels like it has the potential to be the seminal agency of the Twenties and I want to be part of that. Dylan Williams, SVP Strategy EMEA Dylan is one of those rare people who has shaped the industry rather than just worked in it. He is going to be my right-hand partner as Michelle Lowery build out what DEPT(R) can do for its global and local clients across EMEA, and I've long admired his ability to connect brand strategy to business outcomes in a way that very few people can credibly claim. The team and I are thrilled to have him on board. Joanna Trippett, EMEA CEO

Adobo Magazine
Feb 25th, 2025
Hello Monday/DEPT launch Signs platform for ASL learning with NVIDIA

NEW YORK, USA - Creative agency Hello Monday/DEPT announced a collaboration with NVIDIA and the American Society for Deaf Children to launch Signs, an AI-powered web tool designed to bridge communication gaps between Deaf and hearing communities.

The Drum
May 10th, 2024
The most innovative Mother's Day campaigns from Dove, MoneyGram, DoorDash & more

To mend the bittersweet feeling of being away from your mom on Mother's Day, DoorDash teamed up with Dept, a digital marketing agency that is helping facilitate the remote delivery of both flowers and loved ones to doorsteps.