Senior Special Projects Manager

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We have a an excellent opportunity for a well-rounded Marketing Project Manager reporting to the Marketing Services Director supporting all divisions. This highly flexible person will have a broad background in banking, management, communications and/or project management. This person will be responsible for interfacing with all members of the team throughout the marketing group as they implement strategic programs throughout the regions. Projects assigned to the position will offer high impact programs to the region or franchise and have significant impact on the bottom line.

Key skills:
? Strategic Planning: Responsible for tracking the volume, spread and market share objectives related to each project and developing the combination of media, direct response, sales support and offer tactics required to achieve the project goals. In doing so, the project manager must be a persuasive advocate for his/her projects in the competitive process of allocating limited corporate marketing resources. Using verbal and written communication, will work to gain and maintain buy-in for their strategic approach. The PM must master the use of data and written and verbal persuasion to build support for their strategic view with peers and superiors in the business line, support functions, retail management and senior management.
? Marketing Planning: Responsible for helping to coordinate the annual strategic marketing plan process for the group working in conjunction with marketing team and agencies. This individual will help manage the schedules, keeping the team to tight deadlines and synthesizing the output into an executive summary that is highly integrated to the business line.
? Competitive Intelligence Management: The Project Manager must maintain constant, detailed familiarity with changes in the competitive environment related to specific projects. They should understand strengths and weaknesses of every aspect of every major in-market competitor's products relative to our client's products, programs or services and keep management proactively informed of any significant changes and recommended responses. Using marketing research resources such as the Council on Financial Competition, Red Books and trade publications the PM must also monitor out-of-market developments in their product as a basis for understanding long term product health and product development opportunities.
? Campaign Development: The project manager is responsible for delivering a campaign on time with sufficient weight to achieve strategic objectives related to specific projects. The PM is responsible for developing campaign strategy and a key message that ad support groups will craft into creative. The PM is responsible for seeing that the resulting creative delivers on strategy, using persuasive advocacy to ensure satisfactory results. The PM must sell the resulting creative to the client. The PM has final responsibility for approval of media schedules and direct response quantities and lists developed by ad services. The PM must fully realize the campaign by integrating Retail Management objectives, branch training and sales support, branch incentive programs (Excel) and campaign tracking. The PM is responsible for developing campaign results against clear benchmarks on a weekly, periodic and back-end basis and implementing mid-campaign changes as appropriate.
? Product Development: The PM must maintain the health of the product by regularly updating existing product design to reflect the latest in competitive developments and internal innovation attained through pilot programs and by eliminating features that are no longer competitive. The PM is also responsible for launching entirely new products where profit opportunity exists. To achieve this the PM must use research, data and consensus building skills to obtain peer and superior buy-in with clients and senior management.
? Client Services: The PM is the lead representative for corporate marketing for matters related to product. They must represent marketing in regular business line meetings using skills of persuasion and analysis to advance marketing's perspective while building consensus. They must also maintain a regular presence with state retail management and branch management in order to gain buy-in for programs, gain market intelligence and to ensure that campaigns are being effectively implemented through the appropriate sales channels.
? Budget Management: The project manager is responsible for managing the marketing budget assigned to his or her project. This may be done with the assistance of central budget resources. The project manger must approve any changes to the budgets subject to senior management override. In the event of management requests for reallocation, the PM must evaluate any changes for impact on strategic product objectives and, if necessary, advocate on behalf of the given product. Specific dimensions include delivering units at projected cost per acquisition as defined in the approved marketing plan while achieving spread targets established by the original project analysis or forecast and corporate finance.
? Reporting: The PM is responsible for both campaign reporting and periodic "health of the product or project" reports to senior management. Campaign reporting must be concise and readable with eye-appeal and should report against clearly understood benchmarks for financial success. Above all, reporting should be consistent. Health of the product/project reporting should take place quarterly or in response to requests and should focus on broader product issues such as competitive product structure, innovations in the market, market share changes and opportunities to change pricing in order to increase share or widen spread.
? Compliance: The PM should be the most knowledgeable person in the firm regarding issues of compliance as it relates to their products. Based on continuing dialogue with legal and compliance specialists, the PM should maintain a series of standard disclosure language and positions available on short notice for use in campaigns.
? Other: Manage marketing of special projects as needed especially as it relates to cross-functional programs that require a broad view of the department. Serve as a department resource for presentations and meeting preparations.

Requirements:
? Education: Bachelor's Degree.
? Experience: 5 to 8 years of project management experience.
? Organizational: Excellent interpersonal, communication and presentation skills.
? Technical/Computer Skills: Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Office (Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word).

A leading financial institution looking to expand its business offerings and brand recognition in the New England market.

About Aquent

For 20 years Aquent has led the way in transforming how companies find and utilize marketing and creative talent to execute their brand strategies. Aquent?s pioneering approach to staffing and services has helped thousands of companies ? including two-thirds of the Fortune 500 and 90 of the Fortune 100 ? build their internal marketing and communications capabilities. Today Aquent has 70 offices across 17 countries, with 11,000 talent working at more than 3,000 companies. Aquent, www.aquent.com, is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.