Senior Account Manager

About the role:

The Senior Account Manager is a critical member of the team, involved with and overseeing all their clients’ campaigns and projects. This role brings the full suite of Bicycle’s services together to drive business growth for advertisers. You’ll work on approximately accounts across different categories, likely food, charity and fintech.

This role reports into a Business Director, who in turn reports directly to the CEO. For the right person, this is therefore an exciting opportunity for gaining high level exposure to client and agency management. We would craft a clear progression plan, and there would be straightforward Account Director headroom for a high achieving, successful candidate.

The Senior Account Manager would line manage an Account Executive.


The successful candidate will:
- Act like an extension of your clients’ marketing team. Project manage accounts, be seen as a safe pair of hands as well as a source of great media ideas. Develop detailed, close understandings of clients’ businesses; keep partners and internal teams abreast of news.
- Oversee the use a variety of research tools to identify and profile target audiences, and evaluate your clients’ position and opportunity within their respective categories. Understand how to effectively combine both claimed and observed, qual and quant data, and clearly brief Executives to conduct valuable, actionable research.
- Help translate strategic platforms into implementational briefs for activation teams and media owners. Appraise responses to brief, identifying any discrepancies or inaccuracies, and oversee Executives translating to clear, concise client-facing documentation.
- Know clients’ media plans like the back of your hand. You understand how our campaigns relate to clients’ strategic goals, and can fluently describe media ideas, formats and targeting in detail, across all offline and online paid channels.
- You know exactly what needs to happen for campaigns to go live on time and according to plan, and ensure junior team members know all the aspects of campaign management. Maintain visibility of copy delivery, trafficking sheets, tracking & tagging.
- Build relationships with key media owners, data providers and other partners, e.g. creative agencies. Be an ambassador for Bicycle with these external parties, ensuring we’re perceived as a reliable, helpful partner they always enjoy working with.
- Supervise timely, accurate client billing by Executives. Oversee completion of billing trackers, understand account cash flows and differing commercial models across clients, and flag potential issues with the BD and Finance team.
- Implement and oversee campaign reporting, whether dashboard or spreadsheet-based. Maintain visibility of all performance vs targets. - Proactively manage problems or opportunities with channel specialists and external vendors. Lead the creation of rich, visually appealing, actionable PCAs, and ensure learnings are implemented in subsequent projects.
- Line-manage an Account Executive. Own their personal development plan, coach and guide them in their training, and be responsible for regular, constructive 121s. You can also contribute to the development of Execs in the Activation team, and improve the knowledge of junior client individuals.
- Support and present in pitches. Oversee new client onboarding. Help investigate new business opportunities. You love that winning feeling, and your radar is always on!
- Proactively contribute to agency development projects, for example marketing, thought leadership, DE&I, sustainability. You’re ambitious about Bicycle growing into a bigger, better agency, beyond “just” activating media campaigns.
- Live Bicycle’s values (Balance, Freedom, Momentum) and encourage them in others; always move forwards with our strategic objectives in mind.


Essential skills & experience:
- 5+ years’ marketing/advertising experience. Including at least 3 full years in a full service (offline & online) UK-focused media agency
- Some experience of working on performance-based business
- Confident building and maintaining positive, constructive relationships with client individuals. Can get to know clients as people, able to ‘read the room’, identify potential challenges and opportunities, and when to escalate these to Business Director
- Able to independently run important client meetings. Capable of project managing all account workflows, ensuring all projects stay on brief, on deadline, and on budget
- Experience of training and coaching junior team members, and line management
- Able to complete relevant, accurate, insightful audience and competitive research. Comprehensive working knowledge of Ad Intel, TGI, Touchpoints, MediaPlanner
- Extremely competent in briefing and collaborating with internal specialist teams (including more senior colleagues), collating and refining media schematics
- Thorough knowledge of media channels’ metrics, relationships with brand and business objectives. Good grasp of channels’ roles, limitations, common vendors and formats
- Well-versed in collating and evaluating campaign reporting data, and articulating media performance clearly and constructively to clients
- Analytical, numerate and commercially-minded
- An excellent multi-tasker, exceptionally well-organised, outstanding attention to detail
- A fast-thinking problem-solver, undeterred by unexpected change
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills
- Always diplomatic, proactive, inquisitive and positive
- A passion for media, communications and creativity


Additional preferred experience:
- Working knowledge of Mediaocean’s MX and Buyer Workflow/Prisma, Google Analytics, TV attribution tools, YouGov, DEN, Techedge
- Media buying experience in OOH, press, digital
- Familiarity with Campaign Manager, social business managers, Double Verify
- Experience working on pitches and/or onboarding new clients
- Experience working on a charity client
- Knowledge of media landscape in other European markets, e.g. Ireland, Germany, France
- Experience presenting to senior clients (CMO, Marketing Director)

Salary £45k

Flexible, extensive benefits post probation. These include:
- The obligatory beer/soft drink fridge, fruit and snacks. But more importantly…
- Cycle to work scheme (of course)
- In-office Brompton bikes available for employee use
- Two additional days of holiday per year for volunteering/charity work
- Additional holiday for every full year as an employee
- Pet-friendly office
- Annual away day & monthly socials (not just the pub)
- Free Audible membership
- Private healthcare, death in service, pension
- Personal development fund to explore your passions and hobbies
- Well funded training & development programme
- Annual performance-based bonus scheme of up to 8.3% of salary

Founded in June 2021 by people who believed that a better type of media agency wasn’t just possible, but needed, from a standing start we are now 25 strong and one of the world’s fastest growing media agencies. We already count Kroo, Carwow, Livescore, Virgin Bet, Belvoir Farm, La Vie, Duolingo, Branston Pickle, Sarson’s Vinegar, Moju, Swyft Home, Virtua, Movember, ANNA Money and Estrid amongst our clients. We won The Drum Global Startup of the Year Award in 2022.

We are the Media Experience (MX) agency. We believe that experience is the most important factor to lean into when considering communication for clients, and our unique 3X approach brings together MX, CX and UX to powerful effect in a way that other agencies simply aren’t able to deliver. We're built on the power of 'and': brand and performance, art and science, data and creativity, man and machine.

Our headquarters are in Clerkenwell, London and we have fully global capabilities in-house. We’re home to intelligent people who want to create incredible work on interesting brands. We are 100% independent, with no external investment whatsoever. And we're going to change what you thought it was possible for a media agency to be.