Senior Consultant, Paid Media (Cape Town)

Rival is looking for a Senior Consultant to join our consulting team.

As a Senior Consultant you will play an exciting part in developing and delivering business changing strategy & thinking for clients, as well as new business and new agency offerings. You will serve as the lead on consulting projects that range across growth and paid media, as well as go to market communications planning, data and marketing technology, and analytics. 

We are a distributed team with people currently based across the US, UK, and South Africa.

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Role

• You will join an existing team, reporting to the Managing Partner based in London, UK
• Our Senior Consultants are the day-to-day strategists and project leads
• You will spend most of your time creating, owning and delivering client strategy and leading paid media execution, and ultimately responsible for client performance goals 
• You will be the day-to-day project lead on one or multiple engagements, beginning with our anchor client in South Africa
• You will own and oversee the output from our team, the relationship with the client, and the commercial health of the account
• You will also support new business development and pitching 
• Over time you still start to manage a small team of Consultants and Associates
• Senior Consultants are expected to go beyond platform best practice or surface level insights, and understand the underlying principles that drive paid media success - and can be applied to multiple platforms
• Leading the execution of Rival’s  portfolio of client paid media spends across multiple channels, including biddable and programmatic platforms, to the highest standard of quality and performance
• Supporting the Principal and Partner on the process and standard practices for creation of reports, testing agendas, dashboards, and documentation for campaign launch process
• Supporting the Principal and Operations Director on account management, billing, invoicing and spend tracking for our and our client’s budgets 
• Collaborating with the Principal, Partner, and other Associates on client strategy by providing key insights on paid media results, including presenting to clients directly 
• Helping the Partner and Principal develop Rival’s differentiated and best-in-class paid media outlook and capabilities, including input into the development of our owned tech products and your local market knowledge of South Africa 
• Training and developing Associates and Consultants as the paid media team grows and ensuring their work is also to the highest standards and creating repeatable success for our talent development program

Opportunity

• You will be joining the Rival journey at an exciting time. While our paid media and go-to-market practice is still nascent, we’re selectively taking on small, carefully defined engagements with key clients, and our team in South Africa is working on one of the largest and most exciting new consumer brands in the country. 
• We have a global client portfolio - you’ll get a truly global perspective and be exposed to brands and projects in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia (and hopefully Latin America soon). 
• This role has buckets of opportunity for progression. Even if you have zero experience in marketing consulting, paid media, or analytics, we’ll give you the training, mentorship, and projects to grow into an expert over time. 
• This role also differs from traditional agency media buying roles: advancement as a Paid Media consultant with Rival will build not just your technical skills, but expose you to broader strategic principles. And unlike traditional consultancies, you’ll learn by doing and actually executing real campaigns. With us, you’re not pigeonholed into a single career track, but given foundational skills that can transfer to many different roles in marketing and media. 
• You’ll be exposed to thinking on brand strategy, product creation, capability development, and Rival’s other practice areas as part of our holistic client solutions. 
• We are a remote-first company with hybrid in-person working.. We want to give people the benefit and flexibility to work from home. However, the value and impact of spending time together in person is critical, especially at this early stage. Over our first two years we were fully remote, but in our effort to constantly learn, evolve, and grow, we’ve shifted to a remote-first, mostly-flexible model.

Requirements 

We'd like to hear from you if…

• We do not require a minimum years of experience, but you do need to have significant experience running paid media campaigns, including hands-on-keyboard execution and analysis - beyond basic platform certification
• Expertise in and a strong point of view on marketing strategy for brand, content, paid media, and/or analytics
• Strong organizational skills along with the demonstrated ability to work to a deadline
• A start up mentality and personality: you're mission driven and not afraid to get stuck in
• Willingness to travel for client engagements as needed and for company retreats once a year 
• No university degree required - we value your experience and skills

We would be particularly excited if... 

• You have experience in an early stage start-up

Compensation

• Our compensation philosophy is to “mid-market base, top-market upside”. We offer everyone the opportunity to share in the upside of what we’re building together. 
• There are three components to our compensation package 
  
  • Base Salary - market average for marketing consultancy/agency
  • Profit Share - eligibility for a profit share distribution twice a year (after one year of employment) based on company and individual performance
  • Employee Liquidity Plan -  eligibility for our “shadow stock” plan (after one year of employment)

Benefits‍

• 28-days vacation days for South African employees + public holidays
  
  • 21 discretionary vacation days
  • 7 company ‘recharge days’ during the year - these are mandatory days that everyone takes off to relax and focus on family, friends and ourselves.
• Profit Share and Rival Employee Liquidity Plan (ELP)
  
  • ELP aka “shadow stock” has all the financial benefits of options, but without the cost to exercise and tax implications
• Office-first but flexible working environment 
  
  • Our default policy is for everyone to be in the office two-three days per week (currently Tues/Wed/Thurs). We believe in and have seen the impact of in-person collaboration on our work, culture, and development. However, we hire grown ups and trust people to manage their time and schedule. We understand there will be exceptions to the default rule, as long as we’re all focused on what’s best for the team.
• Discovery Health Medical Aid contribution
• The equipment and technology you need to be successful, plus additional support if you need to enhance your work from home set-up
• Quarterly ‘Team Weeks’
  
  • One week a quarter we focus on planning, team building, and professional development. This can involve the opportunity to travel to other offices.  

• Various surprise and delights & Rival events throughout the year.

About Rival

Rival is a marketing consultancy for challengers. We believe incumbent best practices lead to average results. We use the playbook of challenger brands to deliver outsized impact for CMOs who need to do more with less.

Our Hiring Ethos

We want to build a home for the world’s best marketing talent while advancing diversity in our industry. Hiring is the most important thing we do at Rival. Finding and attracting the best talent in the industry is key to our long-term success and day-to-day happiness, but it’s also the most direct way we can have an impact on driving positive change in our industry and for our clients. 

Our goal is to deliver a best-in-class interview experience for candidates:

• Upfront alignment on what good looks like 
• We compensate candidates time for any interview that requires a task
• Timely, respectful communication 
• Opportunity for all candidates to provide feedback 
• All employees undergo unconscious bias training
• Global Equality Collective membership to upskill ourselves in all aspects of hiring

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

At Rival, we're invested in a thoughtful, long-term hiring approach that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion. We care about creating a global community with a combined mission, but not at the expense of losing individual identity, which is critical to our innovation. It’s essential that we bring our authentic self to work every day, no matter our age, ethnicity, religion, citizenship, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, neurodiversity, or otherwise.

We listen to our employees, take direction and are taking continual action to better ourselves in this mission. Inclusion isn't just an initiative at Rival. We strive to embed it into all aspects of our business model and how we operate.

B Corp

Rival is proud to have gained B Corp Certification in 2023, we joined a fleet of B Corp businesses around the world who all have the same goal, driving global social and environmental change. We aim to set a new standard for corporate social responsibility in our industry. We believe we have a responsibility to not just do well for ourselves and our clients, but do good for others and the world at large. We don’t believe we can change the world on our own. But we do believe we can make a meaningful difference in this industry and set a meaningful example for others to follow.

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