Job Description

You lead a pod: a client portfolio and the people who deliver it. You own the growth marketing strategy for those accounts, the relationship with the people who pay for them, and the coordination that makes the work actually ship.

This is not an account management role in the servicing sense. You are not a message relay between the client and the media buyers. You are the person who decides what the account should do next, argues the case to the client, and drives the internal machine to execute it.

Three things define the job:

You own the growth thesis, not just the account. For every client in your pod you should be able to answer: where is this business now, what is the actual constraint, what is the next unlock, and what does the next two quarters look like. You bring that to the client rather than waiting for a brief.

You interrogate before you agree. When a client asks for something, your first move is understanding why. Most requests are a symptom of an underlying concern, and the concern is usually not what was said. Someone who executes the literal request without diagnosing the intent creates unnecessary work, wrong deliverables, and scope that nobody is paying for.

You are the first line of detection. Performance issues, creative gaps, tracking breakage, a winner that got paused: you catch these, not your leadership. If someone senior is consistently finding problems in your accounts before you do, the role is not being done.

What You Own

Client strategy and growth

• Set and defend the growth strategy for every account in your pod
• Diagnose what is actually constraining the business: creative, offer, funnel, positioning, budget, or market
• Translate performance data into a recommendation. "Sales are up" is not an insight. What happened, why it happened, and what we do next, is.
• Work on positioning and messaging with clients, not just execute what they hand you
• Identify growth and expansion opportunities and bring them forward with a case

Client relationship and expectation management

• Own senior relationships and be the person clients call when something matters
• Set expectations early and explicitly on timelines, deliverables, and what performance is realistically achievable
• Push back when a request is unreasonable, out of scope, or not in the client's own interest. Do it in a way that strengthens the relationship rather than straining it.
• Handle the hard conversations: performance recovery, missed targets, scope resets, budget discussions
• Protect the commercial terms of the engagement. Unpaid scope is a leadership problem, not a favour.

Pod leadership

• Lead a small pod of performance marketers and coordinate with AdOps, creative, and analytics
• Review work before it reaches the client. You are the quality gate.
• Coach your pod on client communication, strategic thinking, and diagnosis rather than execution alone
• Run the pod's operating rhythm: account reviews, creative reviews, prioritisation, escalations

Project management, internal and external

• Own delivery end to end: creative pipelines, launch sequencing, reporting deadlines, campaign timelines
• Chase what you need from the client, including creative assets, data, approvals, and decisions. Politely and persistently.
• Keep internal teams unblocked and sequenced so work does not arrive in unmanageable batches
• Build the SOP, template, or tracker when the process does not exist yet

AI-native operating

• Use Claude or ChatGPT as a daily working environment, not an occasional lookup
• Build AI-assisted workflows for reporting, insight extraction, deck production, and campaign QA
• Write structured prompts and context documents that your team can reuse
• Progress toward agentic tooling: connected data sources, MCP workflows, Claude Code. Not required day one, but you must be someone who gets there.
• Apply judgement over AI output. Anything that reaches a client carries your name.

Job Requirements

We are looking for high agency. Concretely:

• You ask why before you say yes. A client request gets diagnosed, not just actioned.
• You spot the problem before it is escalated to you, and you arrive with a recommendation, not just a flag.
• You are comfortable telling a client no, or not yet, or not that way.
• You do not use internal capacity as a client-facing excuse. If timelines are tight, you reset expectations in advance.
• You build the process that does not exist rather than waiting for someone to define it.
• You chase things down. Missing assets, unanswered questions, and stalled approvals do not sit.

If you need to be told what to do next, this role will not work for you.

Requirements

Must have

• 4 to 6 years in agency account management, client strategy, or performance marketing, with real client ownership
• Fluent Mandarin and English, both spoken and written. You will present in Mandarin, review Mandarin ad copy and creative, and work directly with Mandarin-speaking client stakeholders. This is operational, not decorative.
• Strong commercial understanding of paid media. You do not need to be the hands in the account, but you must be able to read performance, challenge a recommendation, and explain it credibly to a client.
• Demonstrated experience managing difficult client conversations, including performance recovery and scope discussions
• Project management capability across multiple accounts and internal teams simultaneously
• Daily AI tool use in your current work, with examples you can walk us through
• Bahasa Malaysia is a strong plus

Strong advantage

• Experience across multiple client models: large-brand lead gen, B2B, SMB, e-commerce
• Multi-stakeholder or multi-entity client structures
• Meta Ads, Google Ads, GA4, Looker Studio, Shopify, Motion or similar creative analytics
• Built internal systems, SOPs, or documentation that others adopted
• Direct response copywriting or creative briefing capability

Skills