Executive Vice President, Account Director
Publicis Groupe · New York City, Chicago
Company descriptionAt Saatchi & Saatchi Health, we believe in making the impossible possible in health. We partner with our clients to turn complexity into clarity, ideas into impact, and ambition into real-world outcomes.
By combining creativity, data, and technology, we create work that doesn’t just reach people--it moves them, connects with them, and makes a difference in their lives. Because when our people bring curiosity and courage to the work, we unlock new possibilities for our clients, and better outcomes for the patients they serve. We’re here to push what health can be. And to make it matter.
Overview
The EVP, Business Lead is accountable for the overall health, growth, and performance of a significant portfolio of client businesses, typically comprising two or more client relationships and approximately $30M in revenue. The role serves as the senior business leader across the portfolio, ensuring strong client engagement and satisfaction, sustainable organic growth, financial performance, integrated delivery, and healthy, high-performing teams. The EVP anticipates business risks and opportunities, aligns senior agency and capability leaders around client priorities, and makes the portfolio-level decisions and trade-offs required to deliver long-term value for clients, talent, and the agency. Specific responsibilities and portfolio composition may vary based on client complexity, lifecycle stage, integrated scope, financial profile, and organizational needs.
Responsibilities
Know Your Business
Maintain a comprehensive understanding of each client’s business, strategic priorities, market dynamics, organizational environment, financial outlook, and evolving needs.
Develop an integrated view of the portfolio, identifying patterns, dependencies, risks, and opportunities across client businesses.
Anticipate market, client, and organizational changes that may affect relationship health, growth, talent requirements, or financial performance.
Ensure individual business strategies and account plans reflect both immediate client priorities and longer-term partnership opportunities.
Use client, financial, operational, and talent indicators to assess portfolio health and determine where leadership attention or intervention is required.
Drive Growth
Own the organic growth agenda across the portfolio, ensuring each client business has a clear, actionable growth plan.
Identify and prioritize opportunities based on client need, strategic fit, relationship strength, agency capability, financial value, and delivery feasibility.
Serve as executive sponsor for the portfolio’s most significant organic growth opportunities, ensuring the right proposition, leadership, capabilities, investment, and governance are in place to convert them.
Expand relationships across senior client stakeholders and identify opportunities to increase the breadth, depth, and strategic value of each client partnership.
Connect client needs to differentiated Publicis Health and Groupe capabilities, working with relevant capability and business leaders to develop integrated solutions.
Maintain visibility into the portfolio growth pipeline and hold business leaders accountable for advancing qualified opportunities from identification through approved scope and revenue realization.
Own the Value
Own the total financial performance of the portfolio, including revenue, organic growth, profitability, forecasting, staffing, investment, and financial risk.
Establish clear financial and commercial expectations for each client business and hold business leaders accountable for delivering against them.
Maintain an integrated view of the financial landscape across the portfolio, including current performance, forward-looking forecast, scope stability, resource requirements, margin pressure, and growth potential.
Make or recommend portfolio-level trade-offs across staffing, investment, scope, timing, quality, profitability, and growth based on client and agency priorities.
Partner with Finance, Project Management, Business Management and business leaders to ensure forecasts are credible, risks are surfaced early, and corrective actions are taken when performance is off track.
Ensure commercial agreements and delivery models support strong client outcomes, sustainable team performance, and appropriate agency value.
Escalate significant client, commercial, financial, delivery, regulatory, or reputational risks with a clear assessment and recommended action.
Shape how emerging technology, data, and AI are applied across the portfolio to improve client value, team effectiveness, financial performance, and growth.
Champion responsible adoption and build the case for investments, tools, and capabilities that strengthen portfolio performance.
Translate emerging capabilities into differentiated client solutions, more effective operating models, and new sources of competitive advantage.
Activate the Network
Align senior Account, Project Management, Strategy, Creative, Medical, Media, Data, Technology, and other capability leaders around the needs of each client business.
Convene the right Publicis Health and Groupe leaders and capabilities to solve significant client challenges and advance portfolio growth opportunities.
Ensure integrated leadership teams have clear roles, decision rights, governance, and shared accountability for client and business outcomes.
Resolve cross-functional or cross-agency barriers that could compromise client confidence, delivery quality, financial performance, or talent health.
Identify capabilities, expertise, or operating-model changes needed to strengthen current client businesses or create new value.
Promote effective sharing of talent, learning, solutions, and proven practices across the portfolio when doing so improves client or agency outcomes.
Build Trust and Influence
Serve as the senior executive relationship leader across the portfolio and maintain direct engagement with the most senior and strategically important client stakeholders.
Monitor client health across each business, including relationship strength, satisfaction, confidence, unresolved issues, competitive threats, and future opportunity.
Establish appropriate executive governance for each client relationship, ensuring transparent communication, clear accountability, and timely resolution of issues.
Lead the most consequential client conversations, including relationship challenges, strategic inflection points, commercial negotiations, significant delivery concerns, and growth opportunities.
Build trust through candor, business judgment, responsiveness, and a consistent focus on creating value for both the client and agency.
Ensure client feedback is translated into concrete action and that agency leaders remain aligned on relationship priorities and commitments.
Represent the agency as a senior business partner while ensuring specialist and discipline leaders have the space and authority to contribute their expertise.
Invest in People
Own the overall talent health of the portfolio, ensuring each client business has the leadership, capabilities, capacity, and continuity required to deliver and grow.
Maintain an integrated view of talent risks across the portfolio, including leadership gaps, workload sustainability, capability needs, performance concerns, retention risks, and succession requirements.
Hold business leaders accountable for performance management, talent development, team culture, and succession within their respective businesses.
Partner with Managing Directors, discipline leaders, Talent, and agency leadership on senior staffing, succession, performance, promotion, retention, and recruitment decisions.
Deploy and rebalance leadership and talent across the portfolio based on client need, business opportunity, financial health, and employee development.
Create mobility, stretch assignments, and development opportunities that strengthen the portfolio while building future business leaders.
Foster an environment of accountability, inclusion, collaboration, constructive challenge, continuous learning, and sustainable high performance.
Intervene when client demands, operating practices, leadership behaviors, or staffing models place team health or delivery sustainability at risk.
Qualifications
Typically 18+ years of progressive leadership experience across complex client businesses, portfolios, and integrated organizations, with demonstrated scope and capability taking precedence over tenure alone.
Significant experience leading multiple client relationships or a substantial portfolio with enterprise-level financial, commercial, talent, and growth accountability.
Deep understanding of healthcare marketing and the medical, legal, regulatory, privacy, and reputational considerations associated with complex healthcare client businesses.
Demonstrated success strengthening senior client relationships, improving account health, growing existing business, and navigating complex client organizations.
Deep financial and commercial acumen, including experience overseeing revenue, profitability, forecasting, scope, staffing, investment, and business risk across multiple client businesses.
Proven ability to evaluate and convert organic growth opportunities while balancing client value, agency capability, profitability, and delivery feasibility.
Experience leading senior, integrated teams and partnering effectively with Project Management, Strategy, Creative, Medical, Media, Data, Technology, Finance, Talent, and other specialist leaders.
Demonstrated ability to identify talent and organizational risks, develop senior leaders, guide succession, and sustain healthy teams across complex businesses.
Executive presence, sound business judgment, candor, resilience, and the ability to create alignment and make difficult trade-offs in ambiguous or high-stakes situations.
Experience using data, emerging technology, and AI-enabled solutions to improve business insight, client value, operational effectiveness, and growth.
Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience.
Additional information
Our Publicis Groupe motto “Viva La Différence” means we’re better together, and we believe that our differences make us stronger. It means we honor and celebrate all identities, across all facets of intersectionality, and it underpins all that we do as an organization. We are focused on fostering belonging and creating equitable & inclusive experiences for all talent.
Publicis Groupe provides robust and inclusive benefit programs and policies to support the evolving and diverse needs of our talent and enable every person to grow and thrive. Our benefits package includes medical coverage, dental, vision, disability, 401K, as well as parental and family care leave, family forming assistance, tuition reimbursement, and flexible time off.
If you require accommodation or assistance with the application or onboarding process specifically, please contact USMTTACompliance@publicis.com.
All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.
#LI-LD3
Compensation Range: USD $0.00 - USD $0.00/Annually. This is the pay range the Company believes it will pay for this position at the time of this posting. This role may also be eligible for bonus or incentive compensation. Consistent with applicable law, compensation will be determined based on the skills, qualifications, and experience of the applicant along with the requirements of the position, and the Company reserves the right to modify this pay range at any time. Temporary roles may be eligible to participate in our freelancer/temporary employee medical plan through a third-party benefits administration system once certain criteria have been met. For regular roles, the Company will offer medical coverage, dental, vision, disability, 401k, and paid time off. The Company anticipates the application deadline for this job posting will be 11/2/2026.
Know Your Business
Maintain a comprehensive understanding of each client’s business, strategic priorities, market dynamics, organizational environment, financial outlook, and evolving needs.
Develop an integrated view of the portfolio, identifying patterns, dependencies, risks, and opportunities across client businesses.
Anticipate market, client, and organizational changes that may affect relationship health, growth, talent requirements, or financial performance.
Ensure individual business strategies and account plans reflect both immediate client priorities and longer-term partnership opportunities.
Use client, financial, operational, and talent indicators to assess portfolio health and determine where leadership attention or intervention is required.
Drive Growth
Own the organic growth agenda across the portfolio, ensuring each client business has a clear, actionable growth plan.
Identify and prioritize opportunities based on client need, strategic fit, relationship strength, agency capability, financial value, and delivery feasibility.
Serve as executive sponsor for the portfolio’s most significant organic growth opportunities, ensuring the right proposition, leadership, capabilities, investment, and governance are in place to convert them.
Expand relationships across senior client stakeholders and identify opportunities to increase the breadth, depth, and strategic value of each client partnership.
Connect client needs to differentiated Publicis Health and Groupe capabilities, working with relevant capability and business leaders to develop integrated solutions.
Maintain visibility into the portfolio growth pipeline and hold business leaders accountable for advancing qualified opportunities from identification through approved scope and revenue realization.
Own the Value
Own the total financial performance of the portfolio, including revenue, organic growth, profitability, forecasting, staffing, investment, and financial risk.
Establish clear financial and commercial expectations for each client business and hold business leaders accountable for delivering against them.
Maintain an integrated view of the financial landscape across the portfolio, including current performance, forward-looking forecast, scope stability, resource requirements, margin pressure, and growth potential.
Make or recommend portfolio-level trade-offs across staffing, investment, scope, timing, quality, profitability, and growth based on client and agency priorities.
Partner with Finance, Project Management, Business Management and business leaders to ensure forecasts are credible, risks are surfaced early, and corrective actions are taken when performance is off track.
Ensure commercial agreements and delivery models support strong client outcomes, sustainable team performance, and appropriate agency value.
Escalate significant client, commercial, financial, delivery, regulatory, or reputational risks with a clear assessment and recommended action.
Shape how emerging technology, data, and AI are applied across the portfolio to improve client value, team effectiveness, financial performance, and growth.
Champion responsible adoption and build the case for investments, tools, and capabilities that strengthen portfolio performance.
Translate emerging capabilities into differentiated client solutions, more effective operating models, and new sources of competitive advantage.
Activate the Network
Align senior Account, Project Management, Strategy, Creative, Medical, Media, Data, Technology, and other capability leaders around the needs of each client business.
Convene the right Publicis Health and Groupe leaders and capabilities to solve significant client challenges and advance portfolio growth opportunities.
Ensure integrated leadership teams have clear roles, decision rights, governance, and shared accountability for client and business outcomes.
Resolve cross-functional or cross-agency barriers that could compromise client confidence, delivery quality, financial performance, or talent health.
Identify capabilities, expertise, or operating-model changes needed to strengthen current client businesses or create new value.
Promote effective sharing of talent, learning, solutions, and proven practices across the portfolio when doing so improves client or agency outcomes.
Build Trust and Influence
Serve as the senior executive relationship leader across the portfolio and maintain direct engagement with the most senior and strategically important client stakeholders.
Monitor client health across each business, including relationship strength, satisfaction, confidence, unresolved issues, competitive threats, and future opportunity.
Establish appropriate executive governance for each client relationship, ensuring transparent communication, clear accountability, and timely resolution of issues.
Lead the most consequential client conversations, including relationship challenges, strategic inflection points, commercial negotiations, significant delivery concerns, and growth opportunities.
Build trust through candor, business judgment, responsiveness, and a consistent focus on creating value for both the client and agency.
Ensure client feedback is translated into concrete action and that agency leaders remain aligned on relationship priorities and commitments.
Represent the agency as a senior business partner while ensuring specialist and discipline leaders have the space and authority to contribute their expertise.
Invest in People
Own the overall talent health of the portfolio, ensuring each client business has the leadership, capabilities, capacity, and continuity required to deliver and grow.
Maintain an integrated view of talent risks across the portfolio, including leadership gaps, workload sustainability, capability needs, performance concerns, retention risks, and succession requirements.
Hold business leaders accountable for performance management, talent development, team culture, and succession within their respective businesses.
Partner with Managing Directors, discipline leaders, Talent, and agency leadership on senior staffing, succession, performance, promotion, retention, and recruitment decisions.
Deploy and rebalance leadership and talent across the portfolio based on client need, business opportunity, financial health, and employee development.
Create mobility, stretch assignments, and development opportunities that strengthen the portfolio while building future business leaders.
Foster an environment of accountability, inclusion, collaboration, constructive challenge, continuous learning, and sustainable high performance.
Intervene when client demands, operating practices, leadership behaviors, or staffing models place team health or delivery sustainability at risk.
Typically 18+ years of progressive leadership experience across complex client businesses, portfolios, and integrated organizations, with demonstrated scope and capability taking precedence over tenure alone.
Significant experience leading multiple client relationships or a substantial portfolio with enterprise-level financial, commercial, talent, and growth accountability.
Deep understanding of healthcare marketing and the medical, legal, regulatory, privacy, and reputational considerations associated with complex healthcare client businesses.
Demonstrated success strengthening senior client relationships, improving account health, growing existing business, and navigating complex client organizations.
Deep financial and commercial acumen, including experience overseeing revenue, profitability, forecasting, scope, staffing, investment, and business risk across multiple client businesses.
Proven ability to evaluate and convert organic growth opportunities while balancing client value, agency capability, profitability, and delivery feasibility.
Experience leading senior, integrated teams and partnering effectively with Project Management, Strategy, Creative, Medical, Media, Data, Technology, Finance, Talent, and other specialist leaders.
Demonstrated ability to identify talent and organizational risks, develop senior leaders, guide succession, and sustain healthy teams across complex businesses.
Executive presence, sound business judgment, candor, resilience, and the ability to create alignment and make difficult trade-offs in ambiguous or high-stakes situations.
Experience using data, emerging technology, and AI-enabled solutions to improve business insight, client value, operational effectiveness, and growth.
Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience.