Sales and marketing recruitment inAgency & Media
Recruitment for commercial roles across advertising, creative, digital, performance, PR, communications, media, production and specialist marketing agencies.
Recent result
3-person shortlist. Successful hire remains in post today.
£24.3bn
UK advertising & marketing GVA, 2024
€1.146bn
Ireland digital advertising spend, 2025
In Agency & Media, winning the client is only half the commercial job.
The work still has to be scoped properly, delivered by the team the client thinks they are buying and priced well enough that the agency can keep doing good work without quietly absorbing more and more of it.
That changes how experienced new-business and client-services people look at an opportunity. A prestigious name, exciting brief or large fee can still become a poor account if the scope is loose, the decision-making is difficult or the client expects substantially more senior time than they have actually bought.
Marketing the agency has its own challenge. Prospective clients are often being asked to buy judgement before they can fully evaluate it. Strong agency marketing therefore makes the way the agency thinks visible, not just the work it has already produced.
What do employers look for in Agency & Media Sales & Marketing professionals?
The important variables are the proposition, pricing model, ownership of the client relationship, account profitability and how the work is actually delivered.
Consideration
Commercial Judgement
Strong professionals understand how retainers, projects, media commission, production fees and performance arrangements affect scope, pricing and margin. This helps them pursue and shape work that is commercially worthwhile.
Take these into your next interview. A free hiring checklist for Agency & Media.
Get the checklistRoles we recruit in Agency & Media
Sales
Sales that win deliverable, profitable work
New Business Director
Leads agency growth through prospecting, credentials, pitches and relationship development aligned with the agency’s actual capabilities.
Client Services Director
Leads major client relationships, account teams, commercial performance and delivery quality across a portfolio.
Business Development Manager
Builds qualified opportunities through targeted outreach, networks, partnerships and well-managed pitch processes.
Account Director
Owns senior client relationships, scopes work, coordinates delivery and identifies growth without encouraging unsustainable over-servicing.
Media Sales Director
Leads advertising, sponsorship, partnership or platform revenue across relevant audiences and inventory.
What employers look for in sales
Employers may be looking for someone who can:
• Qualify the opportunity before the pitch. Not every RFP represents a genuinely open decision, and senior creative, strategy and leadership time is expensive.
• Understand why the client is looking. A change of leadership, incumbent problem, capability gap or commercial pressure can tell you far more than the formal brief.
• Sell the actual agency. The team, thinking and level of senior involvement promised during the pitch need to exist after the win.
• Understand the pricing model. Retainer, project, media, performance and value-based arrangements create different risks and client expectations.
• Protect scope and margin. Growth is not useful if additional work, endless revisions or excessive senior involvement make the account uneconomic.
• Grow existing relationships intelligently. Account development is different from simply allowing more work to drift into the same fee.
The ability to say no is part of this too.
Experienced new-business people often become more selective about which pitches deserve the agency's time. They look at whether the opportunity is winnable, commercially sensible and aligned with what the agency is genuinely good at rather than treating every invitation as pipeline.
Marketing
Marketing that demonstrates distinctive value
Agency Marketing Director
Builds the agency’s positioning, reputation and demand through content, case studies, events, partnerships and communications.
Communications Director
Leads media relations, corporate narrative, reputation and executive or client communications.
Content Strategy Director
Defines content approaches that connect audience insight, brand objectives, channels and measurable commercial outcomes.
Social Media Director
Leads social strategy, creative standards, community and performance across clients, platforms or owned media brands.
Audience Development Manager
Uses data, content, partnerships and channel optimisation to grow, engage and monetise relevant audiences.
What employers look for in marketing
The stronger Agency & Media marketers tend to:
• Make the agency's thinking visible. Specific insight and a clear point of view usually say more than a stream of generic agency content.
• Use work as evidence, not decoration. Good case studies explain the original problem, the decisions made and what changed as a result.
• Build credibility before a brief exists. Reputation, referrals, useful content and visible expertise can influence who gets invited into the room.
• Understand the agency's actual proposition. A broad list of capabilities rarely creates the same confidence as a clear reason to involve that particular agency.
• Work closely with New Business and Client Services. Agency Marketing should support the kinds of clients and assignments the business actually wants.
• Compete internally for time. Billable client work naturally takes priority, so marketers need to extract knowledge from busy specialists without depending on endless internal availability.
Internal Marketing can easily be pushed behind paid client work, despite being responsible for building the agency's own reputation and future pipeline.
Same CV. Different Capability.
“Agency experience” can hide substantial differences in commercial capability.
Two New Business Directors may both show major pitch wins and well-known clients.
One may be strongest once an RFP or brief arrives, coordinating credentials, senior teams and the pitch process; another may build relationships long before the brief exists, shape how the agency is perceived and qualify opportunities for fit, margin and win probability.
The same new-business result can start at very different points in the buying journey.
Professional A
New Business Director
- Builds strong credentials and pitch processes
- Coordinates senior agency involvement
- Converts briefs once the opportunity is clearly defined
Professional B
New Business Director
- Builds senior relationships before formal briefs
- Creates preference while needs are still forming
- Qualifies carefully for fit, margin and win probability
- Helps shape the agency proposition around opportunity
We find out which one you need. Brief a role
Case study
40-person Belfast brand agency needed a Commercial Director during a major repositioning.
The brief required an unusual combination of strategic leadership, people management and new business ability. We mapped the relevant market thoroughly and narrowed a broad potential field to three professionals capable of operating across all three areas.
3-person shortlist. Successful hire remains in post today.
The Agency & Media Economy
+8%
Ireland digital advertising spend growth, 2025
THE UK PICTURE:
In the UK, creative and media agencies generated approximately £35.2 billion in GVA in 2024, with more than 23,000 registered agencies employing around 288,000 people. Total UK advertising investment then reached £46.7 billion in 2025 and is forecast to rise to approximately £50.5 billion in 2026. (Advertising Association)
THE IRISH PICTURE:
Ireland's wider advertising market reached approximately €1.7 billion in 2025. The 2025 IAPI Census also reported more than 3,000 people working across its member agencies, with retainers increasing to 36% of agency income and 21% of revenue coming from overseas clients. (Creative Communications Ireland) Those headline numbers sit across very different commercial models.
A performance agency, PR consultancy, creative studio and media agency may compete for similar client budgets while developing quite different Sales, Marketing and client-management experience.
Building your Sales & Marketing career in Agency & Media
Agency careers often give people unusually broad commercial exposure because they see inside multiple client businesses, markets and decision-making styles. The quality of that experience depends heavily on what responsibility sits underneath the title.
SALES, NEW BUSINESS & CLIENT GROWTH
Careers can begin in Business Development, account management, media sales or client services before progressing into New Business leadership, Client Services leadership, Commercial leadership or agency growth roles.
Progression is not simply about pitching bigger clients.
More experienced people tend to become better at judging which clients suit the agency, interpreting what sits behind an imperfect brief and protecting the relationship between client expectation, team capacity and commercial value.
Client Services can become particularly commercial at senior level.
The job may involve recognising scope creep early, having difficult conversations about fees, translating unclear feedback into useful decisions and helping clients explain the agency's value internally.
At senior level, Client Services & Account Leadership protects relationships and grows scope, while Commercial & Growth Leadership connects pricing, utilisation, client mix and retention.
MARKETING
Agency Marketing careers can begin across Content, PR, Events, Awards, Digital or Communications before broadening into proposition, reputation, thought leadership and new-business strategy.
The more senior role is rarely simply “market the agency harder”.
It involves understanding which work the agency wants more of, what differentiates it from competitors and which people or pieces of thinking are most likely to demonstrate that difference credibly.
Experience across agencies can also create strong cross-sector intelligence. People see how different organisations brief, approve, buy and measure Marketing, which can build valuable judgement much faster than a role exposed to one business alone.
At the same time, agency Marketing can be deceptively difficult. There may be no shortage of marketing opinions inside the business, while getting agreement on the agency's own positioning can be considerably harder than producing work for a client.
For employers
For employers, we look beyond the obvious agency name and job title and spend time understanding the proposition, clients, pricing model, account economics and real commercial ownership behind someone's experience.
Discuss a Sales or Marketing HireFor professionals
For professionals, we help make sense of the experience you have built, what you are genuinely good at and where that might take you next.
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