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)

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.

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.

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.

Partnership Craft: Demonstrable experience originating and delivering non-standard media opportunities (e.g., AFP, branded content, co-productions, sponsor ships, 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.

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?