Overview
Senior Account Director – Digital Jobs in Shanghai, China at IMG
Title: Senior Account Director – Digital
Company: IMG
Location: Shanghai, China
The Role and What You'll Do:
The Senior Account Director leads a business unit end-to-end: strategy, client relationships, team performance, and financial outcomes. This is one of the most senior roles in the company. You set the direction for your accounts, own the P&L, and are responsible for building and retaining a high-performing team.
The team is strong. They have been in delivery mode since day 1 of the project, and what they need is someone who can read the China market with confidence, bring proactive ideas that push the work into new spaces, and guide a high-performing group toward decisions that hold up under client scrutiny.
You report to the General Manager and sit on the leadership team, contributing to company-wide decisions beyond your own unit. Your brief is simple: make the work better than it would be without you.
Key Responsibilities:
Strategy & Business Planning
- Define and execute the mid- to long-term strategy for each client in your portfolio.
- Develop annual business and marketing plans aligned to client objectives and China-market realities.
- Identify new revenue opportunities within existing accounts and through your own business network.
- Stay ahead of trends in the Chinese sports industry, digital media landscape, and consumer behaviour, and translate insight into action for clients.
- Drive synergy across workstreams, including campaign, social, fan engagement platform – WeChat Mini Program, and digital partnership
Client Management & Business Development
- Serve as the senior point of contact for key clients; build trusted, durable relationships at the executive level.
- Lead presentations, workshops, and bi-monthly reviews with clear, persuasive reasoning – orally and on the page.
- Translate market signals into recommendations the client can act on. Share marketing updates and insights with recommendations / solutions.
- Ensure every deliverable – strategy deck, campaign report, quarterly review – meets the standard expected at this level.
Team Leadership & People Management
- Oversee day-to-day operations with 'can-do' spirit, willing to roll up your sleeves.
- Own service quality and delivery, acting as the gatekeeper to ensure outputs meet client expectations, contractual scope, and commercial targets.
- Set clear performance expectations, conduct regular reviews, and manage underperformance directly.
- Build a pipeline of future leaders through coaching, stretch assignments, and honest career conversations.
- Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, and professional discipline.
- Guide the team and grow the people in it. You will actively mentor mid-level and senior team members, create opportunities for them to step up, and build the next layer of strategic leadership on the account.
Financial & Operational Oversight
- Own the unit P&L: revenue targets, margin, resource allocation, and cost control.
- Ensure accuracy and attention to detail across all client-facing documents, including commercial documents like quotations and proposals.
- Forecast accurately and report financial and operational performance to the leadership team monthly.
- Manage resource planning across projects to balance workload, billability, and team health.
Marketing & Campaign Execution
- Oversee the full lifecycle of integrated campaigns: insight, planning, content development, distribution, and measurement.
- Ensure campaigns leverage the right mix of Chinese digital and social platforms (WeChat, Weibo, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and emerging channels).
- Sign off on all major client-facing deliverables, including reports and presentations delivered in English.
Qualifications & Experience:
- 10-12+ years in strategy, account leadership, or brand planning, with at least 5 years in a multinational or global environment. Please demonstrate your track record of success throughout your career.
- 5+ years of people management experience, managing minimum 8 people teams and owning strategic output for a major client or portfolio of clients.
- Deep understanding of the Chinese digital ecosystem.
- Evidence of bringing proactive ideas to clients that turned into revenue or new scope – not just responding to briefs.
- Experience in working with complex organisation and projects across various workstreams (Marketing, Social, Paid, Data Management and commercial partnership management) requiring consultative guidance in fast-paced environment. Agile and adaptable as needed.
- Exceptional attention to detail, alongside organisational, time and project management skills.
- Native Chinese speaker with excellent English reading, writing, and presentation skills.
- Passion for sports is non-negotiable – you follow the industry closely.
Key Competencies:
- Fluent in Mandarin and English – strategic conversation, not just transactional.
- Proven ability to lead senior client presentations, workshops, and high-stakes meetings where the room includes C-suite or VP-level stakeholders.
- Strong written communication: decks, briefs, and strategic narratives that are clear, persuasive, and built to be acted on.
- Comfortable working on projects that start without structure and bringing clarity to assignment objectives, tasks, and deliverables.
- A working curiosity about how culture, consumer behaviour, and technology are reshaping the China market.
- The discipline to treat your own thinking as a draft – you update your position when the evidence shifts.
- Enough confidence to hold the room and enough humility to learn from it.
- Willingness to adapt working hours to effectively support a client based in the CET time zone.
