Senior Account Manager

Role: Senior Account Manager

Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States

About the role: 

 

The Senior Account Manager is the bridge between Client's marketing teams and the studio — the client's voice inside the building, and the studio's voice to the client. Reporting to the Creative Director and the Global Account Director, you'll work alongside client and creative teams alike to build the processes, relationships, and workflows that allow the full studio capability to operate at maximum efficiency.

This is a newly created role with real influence and real accountability. You'll define what excellent client service looks like on this account, own the brief pipeline from intake to allocation, and partner with the Project Manager to keep work flowing seamlessly across teams. This is initially an individual contributor role, with the expectation of growing a client services team as the studio scales.

What you will be doing: 

 

• 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.

• Bring a clear understanding of brand insights and strategy to the studio’s briefs and triage sessions by aligning with the internal insights team.

• Proactively identify and pursue opportunities for our clients, spotting unmet needs or emerging use cases.

• 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

• Drive knowledge sharing and collaboration across teams, maximizing the full studio's capabilities and ensuring seamless handoffs when work moves between teams.
• 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 the brands's marketing teams and studio leadership clear visibility of progress, performance, and priorities.
  
  
• Champion 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.

 

What you need to be great in this role: 

 

Expertise and Capabilities

• Strong track record in account management within a creative agency or in-house creative studio and proven desire to do great creative work that leads to more.
  
  
• Experience in competitive environment and proven ability in spotting and converting growth opportunities for the team / agency.
  
  
• 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, is able to hold the big picture and the detail simultaneously, and to partner effectively with a dedicated Project Manager.
  
  
• Confident, clear communicator who can influence stakeholders at all levels, manage expectations with honesty, and represent the studio with credibility and calm.
  
  
• Experience in an FMCG, beverage, or consumer brand environment is a strong advantage.

Tools and Platforms

• Proficiency with project management and workflow platforms such as Monday.com, Smartsheet, Asana, or similar.

• Familiarity with creative production workflows and in-house studio operations.

• Skilled at building polished, client-ready presentations (PowerPoint or equivalent), translating complex information into clear, compelling visual narratives.

• Proficiency with Gen AI tools relevant to account management and client services, using these to improve briefing quality, reporting efficiency, and workflow clarity.

• Agentic approach to problem-solving: able to break complex account challenges into manageable components, identify the best path forward, and execute with confidence.

• Ability to critically evaluate AI outputs and apply sound human judgement before acting on them.

Client Partnership

• Proven ability to build strong, trusted relationships across Client's marketing function, understanding their business priorities and translating these into clear studio direction.

• Experienced in managing escalations — handling sensitive conversations with professionalism and care.

• Skilled at representing the studio's capabilities, capacity, and ways of working to client stakeholders at all levels.

 

Req ID: 18742

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