Creative Strategy & Account Lead

Collier Simon•Los Angeles, CA

2d•$145,000 - $165,000

About The Position

Collier.Simon is hiring a Creative Strategy & Account Lead to serve as a senior agency leader within an inter-agency team supporting a major automotive dealership group. This person will report directly to agency leadership and partner closely with the Account Director, Creative Director, and field teams to drive creative strategy, strengthen client relationships, and ensure creative work performs at the highest level across markets. This role requires someone with a strong creative strategy backbone—not a copywriter, but someone with a sharp point of view who can build a brief, shape the narrative, give meaningful creative feedback, and drive a project from strategy through presentation. They need to understand what the client needs, ensure the work delivers on those needs, and tell the right story when it’s time to sell the work in. They also need to be a relationship builder. A significant part of this role is earning trust with dealership marketing directors and general managers, not just servicing them, but becoming the kind of partner they actively seek out. That takes business acumen, creative credibility, and the confidence to lead conversations that go beyond asset requests. This is not a single-lane role. The right person moves fluidly between strategic planning, creative oversight, field support, and client management and knows which mode the moment demands.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in an advertising or marketing agency environment, with a strong track record in creative strategy, account leadership, or integrated campaign management
Proven ability to build creative briefs, provide strategic creative feedback, and drive projects from concept through client-ready presentation
Experience managing complex, concurrent projects with the operational discipline to keep multiple workstreams on track
Exceptional presentation skills. Comfortable building and delivering strategic narratives to senior client stakeholders
Strong relationship-building instincts with a track record of earning trust with clients who are operationally focused, not just marketing-minded
The ability to read and respond to media performance data, partnering with media teams to improve creative effectiveness
Confidence to lead conversations, influence decision-making, and sell in creative direction without relying on formal authority

Nice To Haves

Tier 3 automotive experience is a plus
Understanding of distributed businesses: franchise, multi-location, or regionally activated brands where corporate goals and local market needs don’t always perfectly align
Comfortable managing multiple stakeholders, building consensus, and turning many voices into one clear path forward
Experience working within inter-agency or holding company team structures
Background in cluster or multi-location retail marketing

Responsibilities

Lead creative strategy across brand, campaign, and production initiatives, owning the strategic direction from project brief through final delivery
Translate project briefs into strong creative briefs, grounding the work in client objectives, audience insight, and a clear strategic narrative
Provide substantive creative feedback that sharpens the work, in close partnership with Creative Director and creative team leadership
Ensure every project has a clear story when it’s time to present, connecting creative rationale to performance data, cultural insights, and business context
Drive projects like brand strategy, campaign concepting, and production from initiation to completion, not by writing the work, but by ensuring it’s strategically sound and client-ready
Proactively search for insights (category, cultural, etc) to make work better
Build and refine client-facing presentations that frame creative recommendations within a narrative of insight, strategy, and measurable impact
Ensure media and creative are working in concert to maximize the efficacy of every campaign, consistently pushing for stronger performance, not just delivery
Oversee and inform creative briefs to ensure they are built on strong, actionable insights that elevate the creative output.
Read and interpret media performance reports, partnering with media teams to identify performance challenges and solve them through creative strategy adjustments
Champion a culture of continuous improvement where creative is measured, iterated, and optimized, not just launched and forgotten
Build strong working relationships with our account leads in the field, becoming a trusted creative resource they can rely on
Understand the challenges and opportunities across the dealership network and help field reps articulate the value of creative initiatives to general managers
Arm field teams with the narratives, playbooks, and talking points they need to win buy-in at the store level
Be available and responsive: jumping on calls, building quick-turn materials, and providing the creative air cover field teams need to do their jobs well
Earn trust by showing up with insight, preparation, and creative solutions. not just status updates
Work to create client evangelists: marketing directors and GMs who actively advocate for the agency’s work because they’ve experienced its value firsthand
Ensure the agency has the right level of relationship depth at the right levels of the client organization
Co-manage key projects across the portfolio with a counterpart, dividing and managing a broad portfolio of concurrent projects, including: partner sponsorships, annual conferences, grand openings, cluster campaigns, and key corporate initiatives
Own assigned projects end-to-end: scoping, cross-functional alignment, timeline management, creative feedback, client presentations, and delivery
Maintain operational clarity across workstreams so nothing falls through the cracks, even when volume is high
Bring the same strategic rigor to project management that you bring to creative—every workstream should have a clear objective, a plan, and a defined measure of success