Hybrid VP, Creative Agency Partnerships

at Synchrony

• Job title: VP, Creative Agency Partnerships
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Lead
• Salary: $110,000 - $185,000 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Location requirements: Hybrid, New York City, United States

About the role

• Creative Agency Partnerships leader responsible for managing vendor governance and financial decisions aligned with strategic objectives. Collaborating with internal teams to optimize creative sourcing practices.

Responsibilities

• Partners with business and marketing leaders early in campaign planning to influence creative sourcing decisions and advocate for in-house creative capabilities
• Establishes strong enterprise relationships to help shift behavior toward more effective and efficient use of internal creative resources
• Collaborates with business stakeholders to identify external creative vendor needs while maintaining alignment with enterprise Sourcing policies
• Leads the vendor evaluation process from a creative perspective, ensuring all external partners meet clear business objective needs, and quality and pricing standards
• Develops and maintains a preferred vendor list, ensuring that the roster remains optimized by capabilities and pricing, and does not expand without clear business justification
• Partners with Sourcing, Finance and functional teams to ensure external agencies are charging fair market value, providing accurate scopes, and justified in change orders
• Develops standardized agency scorecards to conduct regular quantitative performance measurements that include but are not limited to capabilities, price fairness, delivery quality, and overall value to the business
• Identifies, implements, and enforces process controls to match business function needs with the appropriate creative partners, and identify capabilities gaps across our creative ecosystem
• Captures patterns and insights from external agency engagements to inform creative leadership of emerging demand trends, perception gaps, and capability opportunities
• Provides actionable strategies from qualitative feedback on selection criteria of external agencies where our in-house agency may need additional positioning or enablement support
• Provides visibility into creative spend across external agencies and in-house contractors, strategizing opportunities for cost savings or consolidation
• Champions the value of vendor governance by engaging and influencing senior leaders
• Creates, tracks, and manages purchase orders for in-house contractors, and reviews and approves invoices to ensure accuracy and alignment with contract terms and work output
• Supports strategic decision-making by providing reporting and analysis on vendor utilization, engagement costs, and external agency services
• Champions process improvements across vendor evaluation and onboarding, agreement consistency, partnership accountability, scope review, and change order management
• Perform other duties and/or special projects as assigned.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Marketing, Finance, or related field.
• In lieu of degree, a high school diploma and 8+ years of work experience in business, agency process management, project management or business operations
• 5+ years of experience in vendor management, procurement, or creative operations (agency or in-house experience preferred)
• 3+ years of experience in change management to shape enterprise behavior or adoption
• Strong ability to navigate organizational hierarchy in a matrixed environment to influence cross-functional stakeholders
• Strong ability to communicate with senior leadership (SVP/VP) in a polished and diplomatic manner, ensuring alignment, trust, and increased utilization of Goldmind’s capabilities
• 4+ years of strong understanding of marketing and creative campaign lifecycles
• 5 + years of strong financial acumen with hands-on experience managing purchase orders, contracts, and invoice processes
• 4+ years of proven ability to lead vendor evaluations and enforce best practice standards
• Ability to assess creative partner capabilities and ensure alignment with creative standards
• Ability and flexibility to travel for business as required.

Benefits

• flexibility
• occasional commuting or travel for in person engagement activities such as business or team meetings, training and culture events