Media Planning Executive

About Essence

Essence, part of GroupM, is a global data and measurement-driven media agency whose mission is to make advertising more valuable to the world. Clients include Google, Flipkart, NBCUniversal, L'Oreal and the Financial Times. The agency is more than 1,800 people strong, manages $4B in annualized media spend and deploys campaigns in 106 markets via 20 offices in APAC, EMEA and North America.

Visit essenceglobal.com for more information and follow us on Twitter at @essenceglobal

About the team

Media Planning are experts on the paid media landscape and how consumers interact with it. We architect and steward holistic media plans throughout their lifecycle, owning the creation of overall plans, cross-channel budget allocation, in flight cross-channel optimisation & reporting and post-campaign analysis. We are our clients’ key contacts for a unified view across all aspects of their campaigns, narrating the story of the campaign from planning recommendation through to PCA.

About the role

Media Planning Executives on the L’Oréal account are primarily tasked with admin support for the team. Whilst the role offers a long-term career path in to a wider range of media planning responsibilities, candidates must be comfortable with this focus on admin support for the medium term. We are looking for a highly organised individual, someone who loves to “dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s”. A person who has superb attention to detail, enjoys working through tasks methodically and takes pride in keeping things up to date and shipshape.

The main function and responsibility of this role is to lead the day-to-day administration, finance process and billing of campaigns. The candidate must have superb numerical, operational and communication skills, remain calm under pressure and have strong decision-making skills, allowing them to prioritise work to meet deadlines, sometimes at short notice.

The role brings the opportunity to work closely across multiple categories within L’Oreal’s portfolio of brands, including L’Oréal Paris skincare and cosmetics, Men Expert, Elvive and Kérastase.

Some of the things we’d like you to do

• Owns L’Oréal’s visibility of media plans across all channels via their Contacts platform and Essence’s Olive platform, ensuring total accuracy
• Support the client billing process ensuring reconciliations are approved by internal teams and invoicing is complete within agreed internal timescales.
• Supports the end to end invoicing process including managing to budget, reconciliation and completion.
• Support the wider media planning team to ensure the smooth delivery of campaigns and their performance against agreed outcomes
• Create trafficking sheet templates and collaborate with Ad Operations through campaign launch
• Compile and validate creative specs. Collaborate with creative agency partners to ensure deadlines are met
• Conduct research and compile data to guide and support planning and optimisation recommendations
• Support team huddles and weekly client status meeting

A bit about yourself

• A passion for everything media and advertising, coupled with a continued desire to expand your knowledge
• An effective communicator, confident in speaking direct to clients and other team members, and able to clearly articulate thinking through written documents, emails and reports
• Advanced spreadsheet capability (VLOOKUP, Pivot Table) is a must
• Will have an eye for detail to meet the needs of an analytical, data driven client
• Strong organisational skills with a keen ability to prioritise, multi-task and process large volumes of information quickly
• Able to recognise when problems could develop and know when to escalate to managers
• Ability to adhere to deadlines while delivering a high-quality standard

What you can expect from Essence

Essence’s mission is to make advertising more valuable to the world. We do this by employing the world’s very best talent to solve some of the toughest challenges of today’s digital marketing landscape. It’s important that we hire people whose values reflect those of our own: genuine, results-focused, daring and insightful. As an Essence employee, we promise you a workplace that invests in your career, cares for you and is fun and engaging. We believe these factors create a workplace where you can be yourself and do amazing work.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, or marital status.