Group Comms Lead

Context

Minority owned by WPP and spanning five continents, the 1500-strong multi-disciplined agency group The&Partnership has seen multiple continuous years of record growth against a challenging industry backdrop.

It attributes this rapid expansion to the success of its ‘&Model’; multi-disciplined, dedicated teams working alongside clients’ marketing departments in new, nimble ways, to a single bottom line; delivering data-driven work to fit new marketing agendas. Designed to meet clients’ growing need for maximum speed, agility, cost-effectiveness and integration, these multi-disciplined ‘&Model’ agencies are driving impressive results for clients including News UK, Centrica, NatWest Group and TalkTalk in the UK, The Wall Street Journal in the US, TELUS and Toyota in Canada, as well as Toyota and Lexus across over 20 markets in Europe and Asia.

Overview of the role

A holistic comms role across T&P agency partners:

As we are bringing together our Growth offering across all areas of the business, to better align our strategic focusses – we are on the hunt for a motivated agitator that has a natural ability to deliver our central Group Comms vision and how that is activated for our creative, and media agency partners - T&P, mSix, additionally there will be the opportunity to work more closely with Halpern, our PR practice to ensure we are laddering our central strategy through all areas of the business.

Covering both external and internal comms:

Externally – we have a story, it is strong, compelling, and differentiating – we need a self-starter to help us ensure we are front of mind in delivering this story to the market, with total alignment to our wider growth objectives. Someone that will be able to identify the right places to be to maximise impact of this story and to connect with our external audiences in a way that converts to business impact across our paid, owned and earned channels. External comms is going to be crucial for us moving forwards as we are building our pipeline and ensuring we are driving the wider industry agenda with the ambition of T&P group becoming a top 10 agency player, in all markets, globally – across media and creative.

Internally – we need to deliver in alignment with our people team, to ensure our people stay connected, across the network and deliver against our employee, culture, vision, and core business values. Due to our rapid growth and multiple agencies, communications to our own people lacks the consistency that it requires. Our People team have done a lot of work, but an overarching programme is required to help better drive cultural consistency.

This role will also be focussed on delivering our core and central messages through our growing network and into our markets – with the primary goal of driving consideration from new prospects, raising our brand profile across targeted external with clients, journalists, consultants, wider partners, and talent through proactive brand building and leveraging and developing tactical thought leadership to be driving the conversation and agenda within our respective markets.

The role will be working into the Group Comms lead and working alongside the senior leadership and people teams, of each component part of the business.

What you'll need:

• We are bringing the business units that sit within T&P and mSix closer together, streamlining the Marketing and Communications functions by aligning the current structure into one group role, overseeing our strategic priorities centrally and across markets

• This role will report directly into the Group CMO, and work in alignment with the senior leadership teams from each of the areas of the business

• This is a full time role to work to deliver against the fast paced and ever evolving group needs

• Leadership skills, experience in running multidiscipline teams – within the wider growth environment

• The ability to develop strategic marketing plans, led centrally but covering all business units and supporting markets

• Supporting how we leverage our ‘Practices’ in their go to market strategies, with efforts balanced against our central needs
• You will enjoy the necessary networking that goes hand in hand with effective external communications and will bring your own network of contacts to add to ours.

• Skilled in working across multi-agency, senior management structures

• The ability to deliver clear stories and asks – externally and internally, where applicable

• Experience in delivering global and senior client level events

• Able to handle relationships with senior level stakeholders both internally and externally

• The ability to identify, mitigate and handle, conflict and crisis management, should the need arise
• A passion for connecting into the wider growth team and practice to maximise results

• The ability to work in a fast-paced and evolving organisation

• Connecting our marketing efforts directly to our growth ambitions from strategic thought leadership to supporting pitch efforts through the pitch lifecycle

• Journalistic / editorial levels of written and verbal skills

• Management of our relationships with journalists that are pertinent to our business growth strategy – from marketing trade to client trade, where applicable

• Experience in handling third party suppliers as part of the communications environment – building relationships that have maximum impact

• The ability to pull out and spot differentiating stories that leverage the business in a busy market

• The ability to inspire our local markets and deliver central assets in a concise and usable way

• An understanding that as we grow as an organisation there is a need for guardianship as well as guidance

• Working to deliver through our paid, owned and earned channels – whilst monitoring and checking outputs to extract maximum value, enabling us to ensure we have identified the right channels for business impact

• A proven track record in the above and examples of where these have been delivered

Who you are:

• A self-starting, driven thought leader | Innovator with a desire to bring people together. Innate ability to marshal people and create gravity around ideas.

• Open and collaborative | Our team is close-knit and supportive and we’re working to create a story, at speed – you must be a champion of team environments that are comfortable and encouraging, especially when working across disciplines.

• An experimenter | Embrace the unknown and ready to break process. You’ll be excited by opportunities to explore new ideas rather than rely on existing paradigms, and you view technology as a tool that can drive this creativity.

• A team player | We is always stronger than I, it’s a mentality that makes the team successful.

The&Partnership embraces and celebrates diversity, inclusivity, and equal opportunity. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We are a worldwide creative agency that represents global clients. The more inclusive we are, the more brilliant work we can create together.