Business Unit Director

**Our international client, operating in the global PR & Communications space,** is looking to employ an experienced Business Unit Director (Africa) to their Sandton based team.**

**This is a senior management role with a salary package commensurate with the role.**

**An awesome career opportunity awaits.**

**Responsibilities**:

- Provide direct input and management on paid media initiatives across diverse set of clients and industry verticals.
- Establish strategic relationships with the most influential media partners (Facebook, Google, Twitter, NYTimes, NBC, etc).
- Evangelize the role and impact of Paid Media on successful content marketing strategies, evolving the traditional PR model.
- Manage multiple facets of client programs including strategy development, campaign execution, and analytics and reporting.
- Lead proposals and oversee budgets and timelines for client projects.
- Oversee media research and POV development.
- Work with industry partners to gain insights and understanding into top trends and opportunities in the media space.
- Understand online research techniques and methodologies and use them to support development/execution of client campaigns.
- Aid in developing partnerships, including buying platforms, financial systems, and outside buying firms.
- Serves as a positive role model; supports and respects colleagues, clients and partners; focuses on self-improvement and ensures work is based on strategic insights.
- Effectively and consistently manages strengths and weaknesses of self and others; enables self and others to bring the best of their skills and talents to work; is consistently ambitious in setting and achieving goals.
- Always takes all feedback as a constructive learning opportunity and acts upon it; enables others to thrive as part of agency life and adapts to others’ styles to do so; ensures excellence is repeated by rigorously identifying and socializing key learnings for all colleagues.
- Delivers substantial change for clients and the communities in which we operate; ensures new insights from self and others fuel innovation in agency approach and client work; uses diversity of perspective to elevate client counsel, the agency and own career.
- Ensures work and relationships are founded on open and honest communications; listens and asks the right questions during day-to-day work; upholds creative, ethical, and legal standards.
- Ensures that client counsel and agency action is always purposeful and challenging; prioritizes the interests of the wider agency; holds subordinates, peers, and superiors accountable for demonstrating integrity and ethical behaviour.
- Demonstrates a strategic and thoughtful approach in challenging others to ask the right questions; prioritizes the interests of client service excellence ahead of individual advancement.

**Requirements**:

- Minimum 10 years of experience.
- Proven track record managing and developing Paid Media specialists at a regional level.
- Experience evaluating, negotiating, planning, and purchasing of traditional and online media, especially social, mobile and search media within an agency environment.
- Passion for growing a media strategy practice that focuses on content strategy, emerging distribution technology and audience insights.
- Experience managing large-scale media programs on behalf of consumer and B2B.
- Strong understanding of social media platforms, trends, and measurement approaches.
- Ability to manage the budgets and interdisciplinary account teams on sizable pieces of business.
- Experience managing account profitability, new business solicitation, and quality of account service and employee development within an agency setting.
- Superior communication skills and ability to counsel clients’ top executive management on online marketing issues.
- Interactive development experience is a plus.
- Understands role that PR and social media play in the overall communications marketing mix.

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