About the Role

As a VP, Group Account Director at Monks, you’ll serve as a senior leader of the agency relationship for a Portland-based global sports wear company. This is a new engagement, so you will be accountable for the setup, health, growth, and success of the business, providing strategic counsel to senior client stakeholders while leading an integrated agency team to deliver ambitious, high-quality work against the client’s business, brand, and marketing objectives.

We are looking for a collaborative and commercially minded client leader who builds trusted relationships, sees the bigger picture, and knows how to turn complex business challenges into opportunities for great work. You’ll bring strategic thinking, strong judgment, curiosity, and a passion for building high-performing teams and partnerships. You’re comfortable navigating a fast-moving global organization and can connect the dots across business, brand, sport, culture, product, digital, and consumer experience.

Responsibilities:

• Play an instrumental role in the wider global business of this dedicated account, through collaboration and craft.
• Lead senior client relationships, serving as a trusted strategic partner and primary escalation point for key stakeholders.
• Collaborate with team members across the globe to ensure consistent client experience and knowledge sharing
• Set the vision and direction for the client partnership, aligning agency priorities, capabilities, and deliverables to broader business, brand, and marketing objectives.
• Develop a deep understanding of the client’s business, consumers, category, competitive landscape, and organizational priorities to proactively identify challenges and opportunities.
• Provide strategic counsel to senior client stakeholders, helping translate business needs into meaningful marketing, creative, and consumer opportunities.
• Lead multiple integrated programs and workstreams, ensuring consistency, connectivity, and quality.
• Partner with senior client stakeholders and agency teams to translate business and marketing objectives into clear, inspiring strategic and creative briefs.
• Champion the strategic and creative product, creating the conditions for teams to produce ambitious, culturally relevant work grounded in client objectives.
• Lead, mentor, and develop the account management team, establishing clear expectations, ways of working, and opportunities for professional growth.
• Partner across strategy, creative, production, operations, and other disciplines to build integrated teams around client needs.
• Maintain executive-level visibility across major initiatives, proactively identifying risks, dependencies, resourcing needs, and opportunities while empowering teams to lead day-to-day delivery.
• Own the commercial health of the business within your scope, partnering with agency leadership on scopes of work, staffing, budgets, forecasting, and resource planning.
• Identify and cultivate organic growth opportunities by anticipating evolving client needs and connecting them to capabilities across the agency.
• Establish strong account governance and ways of working that enable effective communication, decision-making, escalation, and collaboration across complex stakeholder groups.
• Represent the client’s business internally, ensuring agency leadership and cross-functional teams understand key priorities, challenges, opportunities, and organizational dynamics.

About You

The essentials:

• 12+ years of progressive experience in advertising, marketing, integrated communications, or a related client-services environment, with significant experience leading complex, high-profile client relationships.
• Experience working with sports, apparel, footwear, lifestyle, retail, or other culturally relevant consumer brands.
• Experience operating at a Group Account Director, VP, Business Lead, or comparable senior client leadership level.
• Proven ability to build trusted relationships with senior and executive-level client stakeholders and provide credible strategic counsel.
• Strong understanding of integrated marketing and the ability to connect individual programs and channels to broader brand, marketing, and business objectives.
• Demonstrated success leading large-scale, complex programs across multiple disciplines, workstreams, stakeholders, and agency partners.
• Strong commercial acumen, including experience managing scopes of work, staffing models, budgets, forecasting, resource planning, and account growth.
• Proven ability to identify and develop organic growth opportunities within existing client relationships.
• Experience building, leading, mentoring, and developing high-performing account teams.
• Ability to evaluate and strengthen strategic and creative briefs and provide clear, actionable direction to strategy, creative, and cross-functional teams.
• Excellent executive communication, presentation, negotiation, and relationship-building skills.
• Strong judgment and the ability to navigate ambiguity, competing priorities, organizational complexity, and sensitive client situations.
• A collaborative leadership style with the ability to influence stakeholders across disciplines, organizations, and levels of seniority.
• Ability to balance the immediate needs of the business with a longer-term view of the client relationship, team, and growth opportunity.

Not a must, but a plus:

• Experience supporting large-scale global consumer brands with complex organizational structures and multiple internal and external agency partners.
• Familiarity with product launches, seasonal marketing calendars, integrated campaigns, and high-volume consumer marketing ecosystems.
• A strong understanding of consumer culture and an interest in the intersection of sport, style, entertainment, technology, and culture.
• Experience working within an integrated agency model or coordinating across multiple specialist agencies and capabilities.

#LI-hybrid #LI-MJ1 GH12921

At Monks, we believe in fostering an environment where a diversity of perspectives can thrive. We proactively work to design hiring processes that promote equity and inclusion while mitigating bias. We celebrate diversity and are committed to building a team that reflects the communities we serve. We welcome and encourage qualified applicants, from all backgrounds, who are excited to contribute to our mission.  

This role is subject to our Return to Office (RTO) policy. If you reside within a commutable distance of one of our office locations, you will be expected to work from the office a set number of days per week. The specific details, including the number of required office days, will be in accordance with the company’s then-current RTO policy, which is subject to change from time to time.