Senior Consultant — Marketing Operating Model
Diagnose & DesignOfficeLondon
CoverageUK and Northern Europe
EngagementProject-based
ModeHybrid
Many companies have a marketing model written in a presentation and an entirely different way of working in practice. The gap between the two goes unmeasured, and inside it time, money and quality are lost. This role measures that gap and closes it.
What you do
- Establish how the client's marketing actually runs: who decides, who executes, who pays, where it stalls.
- Design the target operating model — roles, delegated authority, approval thresholds, the boundary between centre and local markets.
- Define the governance: the rules that hold the model together once we have gone.
- Benchmark the client's maturity against its sector and derive the gap to be closed.
- Build the transformation roadmap: what happens in the first 90 days, what happens over the year.
- Run the workshops with marketing leadership and come away with a decision, not a debate.
What you bring
- 12+ years across client side, agency or consultancy, with at least two marketing operating models designed or lived from the inside.
- The standing to sit with a CMO and say what is not working without losing their confidence.
- Experience of multi-country organisations, where headquarters and local markets want different things.
- Clear writing: our documents are read by boards.
- Business-level English. A second European language is an advantage.
Consultant — Spend Mapping & Benchmarking
Diagnose & DesignOfficeSingapore
CoverageAsia-Pacific
EngagementProject-based
ModeHybrid
Before telling a client where to save, you have to know what they spend and on what. Almost no one knows precisely: the data sits in separate systems, under names that do not match, and does not add up. This role makes it comparable. Everything else rests on it.
What you do
- Reconstruct marketing spend by category, market, vendor and project, from sources that do not speak to each other.
- Normalise cost lines that every vendor writes its own way, until they can be compared.
- Build the baseline: the figure against which every subsequent result is measured.
- Benchmark the client's costs against the market and identify where it overpays.
- Classify estimates and actuals inside the platform, feeding the data on which the benchmarks rest.
- Prepare the tables that go in front of the CFO: few lines, no ambiguity.
What you bring
- 7–10 years in financial control, marketing procurement, auditing or consultancy.
- Genuine command of the spreadsheet — not basic formulas: pivot tables, dirty data cleaned, thousands of rows that reconcile.
- The ability to read an agency estimate and understand what sits inside a line.
- Stubbornness about detail. One misclassification here propagates through the whole project.
- English; Mandarin is an advantage.
Senior Consultant — Pitch & Tender Management
Ecosystem & RemunerationOfficeParis
CoverageFrance, Benelux, Switzerland
EngagementProject-based
ModeHybrid
A badly run agency pitch costs the client months and every participant a fortune, and it often selects the best presentation rather than the right partner. VA runs them so they end well for both sides: the client finds the right partner, and the agencies know from the outset which criteria decide it.
What you do
- Establish why the client genuinely wants to change agency — through AURA/PRP (Pitch Readiness Pulse), which frequently surfaces a different problem from the stated one.
- Define the partner archetype required, through AURA/Strategic Mapping Expectation.
- Build the longlist from the database of 5,000+ classified vendors.
- Work alongside the client as they draft the brief, the RFI and the RFP, and review the text before it goes out. An ambiguous document produces answers that cannot be compared.
- Set the evaluation model through AURA/Scoring Model and hold it as the through-line from first meeting to final decision.
- Run chemistry meetings and presentations, and protect equal treatment across the field.
- Take the client through to handover with the chosen agency: from there the work belongs to someone else.
What you bring
- 12+ years across client side, agency or consultancy, with pitches run from both sides of the table.
- Genuine neutrality. Anyone with a favourite agency cannot do this work.
- The firmness to manage senior people who want different things.
- Absolute discretion: during a pitch, every participant's fees and strategy pass through your hands.
- French and English.
Consultant — Remuneration & Contracting
Ecosystem & RemunerationOfficeParis
CoverageFrance, Benelux and continental Europe
EngagementProject-based
ModeHybrid
Two agencies quoting the same figure can be offering very different quantities of work. Until fees share one unit of measure, no comparison exists and the negotiation is a trial of strength. This role makes them comparable, then writes them into a contract that holds.
What you do
- Normalise offers on an FTE basis through AURA/FRC (Fulltime Ratecard Calculator): same roles, same days, same rate card.
- Benchmark fees against the market by role, seniority and country.
- Build the remuneration model — retainer, project, performance-based or blended — and test it against the client's real volumes.
- Define the indicators the variable element hangs on, and write them so they can actually be measured.
- Run contracting and onboarding through to signature and operational start.
What you bring
- 7–10 years in agency remuneration, marketing procurement or the finance side of one.
- An understanding of how an agency P&L is built: without it, you negotiate blind.
- Method in negotiation: you reach the number by construction, not by insistence.
- Fluency with service contracts and with the legal reviewers who mark them up.
- French and English; German is an advantage.
Senior Advisor — Production Oversight
Execution Oversight · ProductionOfficeNew York
CoverageNorth America
EngagementProject-based
ModeHybrid
VA started from this craft in 1994, and it remains the core of the work. A production estimate is a document few people can genuinely read: inside it sit days, crew grades, usage rights and margins that are rarely explicit. This role makes them visible before the client signs.
What you do
- Govern the selection of production vendors: how many are needed, which ones, against which brief.
- Examine estimates line by line and separate what the work requires from what has been added.
- Validate costs against the market and against the client's own history.
- Oversee delivery: when something changes mid-flight, the cost is known immediately.
- Verify usage rights and licensing — the line that produces surprise invoices two years later.
- Close the final reconciliation: estimated against actual, line by line.
- Always separate saving from cost avoidance: they are different things and are never added together.
What you bring
- 15+ years in the craft — production company, agency department, or cost consultancy.
- Concrete knowledge of what a shoot day, a crew and a post-production schedule cost.
- Courteous firmness: you tell a vendor their estimate is high and keep working with them the following month.
- A network in the North American production market.
- English to native standard.
Senior Advisor — Media Oversight
Execution Oversight · MediaOfficeLondon
CoverageUK and international markets
EngagementProject-based
ModeHybrid
Media is the largest line in marketing spend and the least transparent. Between what the client approves and what the market genuinely buys sit intermediaries, trading terms and financial returns that almost no one verifies. This role verifies them.
What you do
- Compare the approved plan against the delivered plan, market by market.
- Verify trading conditions and the financial returns the contract provides for.
- Follow the digital buying chain far enough to establish how much of the money invested reaches an actual person.
- Build the media investment intelligence view, making markets that use different metrics comparable.
- Prepare the material the client takes into negotiation with its media agency.
- Hold the relationship while holding VA's position: independent, with no revenue from media owners.
What you bring
- 15+ years across media agency, advertising investment auditing or client-side leadership.
- The ability to explain a digital supply chain to someone who does not know it, without simplifying it dishonestly.
- Independence from agencies and media owners, in form and in substance.
- Fluency with spend data and with verification tooling.
- English to native standard.
Advisor — Event & Experience Oversight
Execution Oversight · Event & experienceOfficeDubai
CoverageMiddle East and Africa
EngagementProject-based
ModeHybrid
An event has a date that does not move. That changes everything: every decision taken late costs more, and haste is the leading cause of overspend. This role brings decisions forward and is on site when it counts.
What you do
- Select build, technical, logistics and hospitality vendors, and put them in competition against one comparable specification.
- Validate estimates, separating what quality costs from what haste adds.
- Follow production through to build, and oversee the event on site.
- Govern last-minute variations: every change is quantified and approved before it is executed.
- Close the reconciliation after the event, when everyone else has already moved on.
What you bring
- 10+ years in events, build or live production.
- The ability to read a build estimate and recognise what has been inflated.
- Composure: on event day something always goes wrong.
- Knowledge of the vendor base and of materials import rules across the Gulf.
- English; Arabic is a real advantage.
Advisor — Digital & Platform Delivery Oversight
Execution Oversight · Digital & platform deliveryOfficeSingapore
CoverageAsia-Pacific
EngagementProject-based
ModeHybrid
Sites, applications and platforms are paid for in development days, and almost no client can say whether the number quoted is the right one. This role can, and checks that every release matches the agreed scope.
What you do
- Examine development estimates: how many days, which grades, what risk margin.
- Compare offers from vendors describing the same work in incompatible ways.
- Verify that every release matches the scope agreed for it.
- Quantify the impact of additional requests before they enter the work.
- Control recurring costs — licences, infrastructure, maintenance — which outweigh initial development.
- Close the reconciliation between estimated and spent.
What you bring
- 10+ years across digital agency, systems integrator or client-side technical leadership.
- Technical competence sufficient to challenge an estimate with the person who wrote it.
- Experience of multi-country projects across Asia-Pacific, where development costs vary widely from one country to the next.
- Clarity in explaining technical choices to a marketing audience.
- English; an Asian language is an advantage.
Consultant — Performance Measurement & Reporting
Performance MeasurementOfficeNew York
CoverageNorth America and international markets
EngagementProject-based
ModeHybrid
A result nobody can demonstrate does not exist. This role turns the work of the other three clusters into figures that hold in front of a finance director. Including the uncomfortable part: separating what the client saved from what they never spent.
What you do
- Define indicators and scorecards with the client, before the project starts.
- Measure saving — spending less than the available budget — and cost avoidance — a cost removed altogether. You keep them on two separate lines, always: adding them inflates the result and makes it indefensible.
- Calculate the return on the investment in VA and show how it is built.
- Assess the performance of the client's partners against criteria agreed in advance.
- Build the executive dashboards the client uses without us.
- Write the closing report: what happened, what it produced, what happens next.
What you bring
- 8–12 years in marketing performance analysis, financial control or consultancy.
- Honesty with numbers. The temptation to make a result work is daily here, and giving in to it destroys everyone's work.
- The ability to build a dashboard a person understands in thirty seconds.
- English; a second language is an advantage.
Associate — Data & Cost Analysis
Across all four clustersOfficeBuenos Aires
CoverageLatin America
EngagementProject-based
ModeHybrid
VA's benchmarks are worth exactly what the data feeding them is worth. We classify every estimate and every actual passing through our projects, line by line: it is patient work, and the people who do it learn the craft from the foundations.
What you do
- Classify estimates and actuals in the platform, line by line, against the VA taxonomy.
- Prepare the cost comparisons senior consultants take to the client.
- Control data quality: flag anomalies rather than smoothing them over.
- Support colleagues across Latin American markets on data collection and document formatting.
- Learn the craft alongside people who have practised it for twenty years.
What you bring
- 4–6 years in data analysis, cost control or agency finance.
- Command of the spreadsheet and an appetite for learning proprietary tools.
- Precision. One misclassified figure contaminates a benchmark for years.
- Spanish and English; Portuguese is an advantage.
