MARS GLOBAL – PLANNING MANAGER (Pet Nutrition & Food Segments)

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About MARS:

Mars is a multinational company with 3 major business segments: Mars Wrigley Confectionery, Petcare (split Pet Nutrition and Royal Canin), and Food. Mars Wrigley is the world’s leading manufacturer of chocolate (including Snickers, Galaxy, and M&Ms) chewing gum (Extra), mints, and fruity confections (Skittles), whilst Mars Pet Nutrition boasts some of the world’s best-known & loved Pet food brands – including Pedigree, Whiskas, Sheba, Cesar, and Dreamies. Well-known brands on the Food segment include Ben’s Originals and Dolmio. EssenceMediacom has worked with Mars for many years in many key markets and we have a very strong relationship with them. One of Mars’ key pillars is ‘Mutuality’ which is reflected in the way they work with EssenceMediacom as the agency partner. We are very proud of the work we have done with Mars in driving growth for their brands and this has been recognized with a host of awards - including Media Week, Campaign, and Cannes. We believe these awards are a testament to how closely we work with Mars and our integrated approach, both within EssenceMediacom and working in partnership with other agencies.

Aside from being a high-profile, award-winning, dynamic, and progressive account, Mars is undergoing an enterprise level transformation of their communications approach. Moving away from their legacy model of mass-reach, broadcast-led marketing. Future growth will be driven through a sophisticated understanding of audiences, their growth potential, and the ability of content and communications to target audiences at different stages of their consumer journey with relevant messaging in service of driving outcomes. All supported by data and technology infrastructure.

About your role as MARS Global Planning Manager

This role is to support both the global Pet Nutrition & Food segment teams, with equal weighting.

As the Planning Manager, you will be responsible alongside the senior leadership for the ongoing implementation of the digital and data driven transformation programme. Therefore, we are looking for a strong digital focused candidate with experience across all aspects of the digital landscape. We also expect the candidate to have excellent planning experience and strategic thinking capability. The candidate should be motivated by creating smart and forward thinking connected digital communications plans to help solve problems.

This role offers significant opportunities:

• Critical team member of one of the largest FMCG accounts, pioneering a transformation in their consumer marketing approach & accelerate business performance.
• Collaborating with an extremely talented and diverse, international group of individuals both at EssenceMediacom and the client.
• Helping to drive a transformation agenda, influencing senior internal external stakeholder to drive change and make strategic choices that will drive the transformation & accelerate growth.

Key Accountabilities

Accountabilities & tasks are similar across both Pet Nutrition & Food:

• Supporting Strategy with the development of global campaigns, ensuring delivery of gold standard on brief communication solutions, with planning principles for our markets to adapt

• Ensuring any regional/local issues are identified and resolved in partnership with our Leadership team eg inefficient practices, capability gaps
• Consolidate key learnings from flagship campaigns across markets to share with global brand leadership at MARS

• Build strong relationship with key agency partners
• Recognise and evaluate good work from within and outside of EssenceMediacom (locally, regionally, globally), the client, the client category, and be confident in sharing and re-applying learnings from it.
• Be enthusiastic and have knowledge on new & emerging opportunities.  Provide critical & informed points of view on the application of these
• Remain up to date with market trends to advise customer of future strategy.
• Act with initiative, contribute to the definition of new processes and support the rollout and implementation of these

Your Skills, Behaviours and Experience:

The successful candidate will be creative and collaborative. They will want to embrace the culture at EssenceMediacom and likewise on MARS and strive to create exciting and business changing communications plans.

Summary of requirements;

• Relevant and significant experience in media (preferably an agency variety of roles)
• Experience in client management and servicing skills
• Experience in working as a member of a cross-agency team
• Strong understanding of the digital landscape and can harness the opportunities for brand growth (essential)
• Effective communications planning skills and knowledge across all media touchpoints
• Excellent presentation skills (writing and delivery)
• The ability to challenge clients in a structured and well thought through way
• Experience managing global media partners (eg Google, Meta)
• Previous experience in a global role is nice to have but not critical

Personal Attributes

• Effective working within teams, showing initiative and pro-activity
• Positive and passionate approach that motivates the team & champions team successes
• Strives to exceed expectations
• Tries new things, brings new ideas and solutions
• Works effectively with other agency partners
• Calm and collected under pressure
• Ability to respect deadlines and project manage team, inter-agency partners and clients against a clear plan
• Numerate, analytical, and administratively competent with strong attention to detail
• Possess the skills to solve problems and raises issues with line manager/team lead in a timely and effective way
• Comfortable with using data to provide strategic recommendations via a range of data sources
• Focussed on creating solutions rather than getting stuck on problems

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