Group Account Director: Activations & Partnerships

About UsThrive is proudly independent and values-driven, with a trans-Tasman footprint across Australia and New Zealand. We exist to help brands grow through relevance, reputation and relationships, creating work that earns attention and builds long-term cultural and commercial value.
Role Overview The Group Account Director (GAD): Activations & Partnerships is a senior strategic and creative leader who lives and breathes all things Culture, Experiences and Brand Partnerships. This position is responsible for driving earned-first creative excellence, production, operational execution and commercial success across key client brand activations. The role is also responsible for devising, negotiating and delivering strategic partnerships for our global portfolio of brands.
As GAD: Activations & Partnerships you’ll lead this function while staying hands-on with a mix of client work that lives in the world of creative production, earned-led storytelling and cultural relevance. As the agency for global brands including Diageo (luxury brands including Johnnie Walker & Don Julio), BYD and LEGO, this is a brilliant opportunity to lead a team with impact, manage and nurture relationships with the best suppliers in the country, drive agency and client growth and plug directly into the beating heart of culture, talent, and owned and sponsored events.
What you’ll do : Activations: Strategic Leadership & Delivery

• Earned Attention: Conceptualise, design, and pitch brave brand activations that live intrinsically in the context of capturing organic, earned media attention. Shift campaign metrics from surface-level exposure into national and global talkability.
• Strategic Engineering: Define and own the overarching strategic blueprint for all physical, digital, and hybrid brand experiences. Challenge traditional experiential norms by building culturally impactful territories.
• Execution Oversight: Lead and rigorously oversee the full delivery, logistics, and onsite execution of high-profile activations, ensuring campaigns land safely, on brief, and beyond standard client benchmarks - think F1 Grand Prix, Australian Open tennis and more.
• Quality Control: Establish clear operational technical checkpoints across the live activation lifecycle to protect agency and client reputation.

Partnerships: Identification, Evaluation & Resourcing

• Strategic Identification: Lead the market landscape analysis to discover, evaluate, and negotiate commercially viable commercial, content, entertainment, and lifestyle partnerships aligned with client corporate objectives.
• Team Management: Structure and lead a nimble, specialised internal account team dedicated to client partnership delivery. Manage end-to-end project management ensuring workflow efficiencies with teams and fully leveraging partnership deals to maximise returns to clients.
• Stakeholder Alignment & ROI: Govern complex external relationships across global corporations, legals, rights holders, and talent agencies to construct tight multi-channel partnership agreements. Demonstrate ROI to clients through best practice reporting and measurement benchmarks.

Clients & Strategy

• Serve as the premier, trusted senior advisor to C-suite and Marketing Director level clients, offering high-level strategic counsel on activations, cultural relevance, and issue triaging.
• Collaborate dynamically with cross-divisional leads (Creative, Studio, Media Relations) to embed social, influencer, and PR amplifications directly into the activation blueprints from inception.
• Sign off on all experiential campaign documentation, tactical schedules, Scope of Works, and measurable client KPIs.

Business Development & Growth

• Proactively identify, pitch, and capture organic growth and cross-sell expansion opportunities across current agency retainers.
• Lead high-impact new business proposals, responses to briefs, credentials building, and live pitches, acting as a visible market authority for brand activations.
• Maintain a strong pipeline via agency tracking systems, identifying next steps and opportunity stages during weekly reviews.

Commercial, Operations & Finance

• Maintain full financial accountability for the client profitability, tracking resource margins, fee structures, and campaign investment health.
• Manage week-to-week capacity utilizing Thrive’s forecasting platform. Audit client time allocation, proactively managing overservicing and managing scope variations.
• Oversee team members managing supplier quotes, Purchase Orders, agency margins, and credit control. Validate monthly client invoicing and expense reconciliations for line-manager sign-off.

People & Culture

• Manage, develop, and play an instrumental role in retaining reporting team members by providing consistent performance evaluations, active mentoring, and professional roadmap mapping.
• Guide team members skillfully through internal capability tracking and career planning metrics in our Thrive Professional Development Framework.
• Model time management, operational discipline, and a resilient, positive mindset under high-pressure live campaign schedules.

Thrive Values & Behaviours

• The Courage to Always Be Accountable: Actively owning programmatic successes and operational hurdles alike; managing business expectations Transparently and delivering consistently without over-promising.
• The Desire to Be Insatiably Curious: Fostering a relentless, inquisitive mindset to challenge traditional communication formats and pull fresh cultural movements into core ideas.
• The Feeling of Being Passionate About What You Do: Infusing everyday operations with positive energy, high momentum, and a proactive attitude toward challenging execution sprints.
• The Commitment to Being Collaborative: Operating with a true "we, not me" mentality that uplifts peers, seamlessly integrates internal specialist divisions, and nurtures long-term stakeholder partnerships with empathy.
• Acting with Integrity by Staying True to Our Values: Exhibiting unwavering honesty, professional transparency, deep mutual respect, and standard-setting work ethics across all internal and market interactions.

What You’ll Bring

• 10–15+ years’ experience in agency or in-house communications, spanning consumer, corporate, and technology-driven brand environments.
• Proven leadership at Senior Account Director, Group Account Director or equivalent level.
• Strong track record of advising senior clients on partnerships, events, thought leadership, media strategy and brand positioning.
• Deep understanding of earned media, sponsorships and activations.
• A natural ability to blend corporate credibility with cultural relevance and creative, earned-first thinking.
• Established media, industry and stakeholder relationships across business, tech, trade and mainstream outlets.
• Commercial confidence — comfortable owning revenue targets, forecasting and account growth.
• Strong presentation and storytelling skills, with the ability to sell ideas internally and externally.

Why Thrive?

• You’ll get to shape a growing offer, work with iconic clients, and collaborate with a supportive leadership team who genuinely prioritise our people. Benefits include:
• Culture Connections : Weekly drinks and nibbles at "Thrive O’Clocks" including weekly reflections and a regular speaker line-up, quarterly agency-funded social events a year and other client and Thrive social events
• Flexibility & Travel: Hybrid weeks (3 In-Office Collaboration Days per week with WFH on Mondays and Fridays) plus up to 4 weeks of approved "Work From Anywhere" to work in any of our 4 trans-tasman offices
• Extra Time Off: An annual "Thriving Birthday ‘Me’ Day" and early 4:00 PM finishes on Summer Fridays (Dec–Feb).
• Supercharged Parental Support: An additional 8 weeks of paid parental leave (+ superannuation) on top of the government scheme, plus a dedicated return-to-work transition schedule.
• Growth & Learning: Opportunity to join our AI Digital Council, an individual external L&D budget for your choice of memberships/seminars alongside our internal training programs (including monthly ‘Thrive Bites’, Lunch ‘n Learns with inhouse lunch on Thrive and Thrive Academies).
• Visa support : support for visa holders including 2-year+ option - long standing team member considerations including pathway to company sponsored Permanent Residency