Partnerships & Investment Senior Partner

Location: Manchester & Hybrid / Remote First (with in-office collaborative days and travel as needed)

Type: Full-Time (5 days per week)

The Opportunity

Are you a master of full-landscape media investment who knows how to bridge the gap between big-picture strategy and real-world results?

Open Partners is looking for a Partnerships & Investment Senior Partner to widen what "the answer" can look like for our clients. Working hand-in-hand with our Media, Creative, Strategy, and Data teams, you will build integrated, outcome-led investment plans that drive real commercial growth. In this role, you’ll bring the judgement to know when a conventional channel plan is the right route and when a bespoke media partnership will unlock growth that ad space alone can't deliver.

Your Role & Responsibilities

You will balance commercial rigor with creative partnership origination to deliver work that competitors structurally cannot offer:

Investment Judgement: Own the "which route" decision, building structured investment plans across the full media landscape and articulating with authority when a partnership beats a conventional buy (and when it doesn't).

Partnership Origination: Identify, shape, and negotiate bespoke opportunities with broadcasters, publishers, platforms, rights holders, and production partners - turning client challenges into co-created propositions.

Creative Collaboration: Partner closely with Creative from the earliest stage so partnership ideas are shaped by creative thinking rather than retrofitted, combining media reality with big creative ideas.

Reach Extension: Build integrated plans that extend partnership value across other channels - covering content licensing, versioning, paid amplification, owned distribution, and PR to ensure a single investment works several times over.

Strategic Translation: Turn complex strategic thinking into clear, structured, and compelling investment narratives that stakeholders - from marketing teams to C-Suite and private equity - can get behind.

Commercial Growth & Excellence: Drive new business wins and organic growth through measurement-informed plans, while establishing the templates, commercial guardrails, and frameworks to raise the bar agency-wide.

What Success Looks Like in 6 Months

Trusted Partner: You have built deep, collaborative relationships across Media, Creative, Strategy, and Data, establishing yourself as a key creative collaborator and the go-to partner for turning strategy into action.

Live Partner Network: You have mapped and activated a working network of senior media owner, platform, and production contacts.

Ideas in Market: At least three bespoke partnerships are sold in, live, or in production - each with a robust measurement framework and reach extension plan attached from day one.

Co-Intelligent Output: You are working co-intelligently with our HI / AI workforce, leveraging agency tools like Media Optimiser and RISE to sharpen audience strategy and channel prioritisation.

What You’ll Bring

Partnership Craft: Demonstrable experience originating and delivering non-standard media opportunities (e.g., AFP, branded content, co-productions, sponsorships, experiential, format integrations, or creator partnerships).

Media Owner Fluency & Negotiation: A strong, current network across broadcast, publishing, audio, OOH, streaming, and retail media, along with proven skill in structuring bespoke commercial agreements, value exchanges, and payment terms.

Rights & Licensing Awareness: Practical understanding of content rights, usage, talent, and exclusivity, and how those terms dictate how assets can be repurposed or extended.

Influential Communication: The confidence to simplify the complex and sell an ambitious idea to both a client and a media owner in the same week.

Outcome Obsession: Comfort working with budgets, ROI dynamics, and effectiveness evidence over award-bait for its own sake.

Our Values & Mindset

At Open Partners, we hire mindset first. It is the biggest factor of success in our business. If you do not have direct industry experience but possess a fierce growth mindset and transferable skills, we want to hear from you. We hold ourselves to three standards:

Smarter: Aim high, train hard, embrace next.

Faster: Learn fast, adapt fast, act fast.

Better: Think, say, and do what is best.

Ready to elevate your career and shape the future of media investment?

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