WPP Media - (MFG) Senior Vice President - Client Partner, Japan

About the role

We are seeking a highly experienced, strategic, and operationally excellent Client Partner to lead our relationship with Google in Japan, a top-tier client across WPP Media. WPP Media manages the digital mandate for Google in Japan. This role sits at the intersection of senior client partnership, planning craft, execution excellence, and operational leadership. You will lead a cross-functional team and be accountable for flawless delivery, clear governance, strong strategic POVs, and executive-level influence-ensuring Google and MFG stakeholders have full visibility, confidence, and industry-leading work.

Responsibilities

• Trusted Strategic Advisor (Senior Stakeholders)
• Build and maintain trusted relationships with senior Google stakeholders (CMMs / PA Leads and their -1s), providing insights and recommendations that directly map to Google's business priorities.
• Translate business goals and market realities into media priorities, opportunities, and clear actions.
• Challenge the status quo constructively: improve briefs, strategy, plans, and operations with better, actionable alternatives.
• Strategic Planning & Industry-Leading Thinking
• Lead strategic planning across initiatives, ensuring every campaign solves a defined business problem and is designed with measurable outcomes.
• Deliver "outside-in" POVs: bring best practices, competitive intelligence, and emerging platform/consumer trends into actionable recommendations and next steps.
• Drive test-and-learn frameworks and ensure learnings are documented and scaled.
• Incorporate AI and automation to elevate output quality, speed, and decision-making where appropriate.
• Operational Excellence: "Run the House Like a Machine"
• Own day-to-day operational leadership with a no-surprises standard: smooth operations, disciplined execution, and proactive issue management.
• Establish and maintain governance mechanisms (e.g., operating cadence, RACI, QA gates, escalation paths, decision logs) to ensure clarity and accountability.
• Maintain full visibility across all initiatives (what's working, what's at risk, what's next), surfacing risks early with mitigation options and decision asks.
• Prioritize and triage workload to ensure focus on the highest-impact work and avoid wasted effort, rework, and last-minute fire drills.
• Execution Quality & QA (Zero Dropped Balls)
• Ensure flawless execution through rigorous QA processes, clear ownership, and adherence to Google's quality standards.
• Drive continuous process improvement without being asked-simplify complexity, increase consistency, and improve speed and precision.
• Financial, Scope, and Resource Management
• Manage client budgets effectively while ensuring profitability, ROI, and strong stewardship.
• Lead quarterly resourcing discussions with MFG Regional, feeding into fee/FTE allocations and ensuring the right talent is deployed to the right priorities.
• Own scope control and change management: align deliverables to priorities, secure decisions early, and reduce rework through strong briefing and QA.
• Connector Across Google, MFG, and WPP
• Navigate seamlessly across Google local, regional, and global stakeholders, and across the wider WPP network.
• Bring the best of regional/global practices into Japan at consistent quality; export Japan successes as repeatable playbooks where applicable.
• Activate the full WPP ecosystem (not just media) when needed to solve broader business challenges (e.g., data/measurement, creative technology, commerce, analytics).
• Executive Influence & Stakeholder Leadership
• Lead Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) and executive readouts with clear narratives: performance, implications, trade-offs, decisions re

Additional Information

WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world's leading brands. We unite cutting-edge media intelligence and data solutions, world-class creativity, next-generation production, transformative enterprise solutions and expert strategic counsel in a single company - powered by exceptional talent and our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open, to help our clients navigate change, capture opportunity and deliver transformational growth. We have been building the world's most valuable brands for 50 years and have global reach across 100+ markets, with deep local expertise. Our people are the key to our success. We're committed to fostering a culture of creativity, belonging and continuous learning, attracting and developing the brightest talent, and providing exciting career opportunities that help our people grow. For more information, visit WPP.com. Role Title: VP/ SVP - Client Partner Team: Marketing & Business Development Location: Tokyo, Japan About WPP Media WPP Media, part of WPP, is a leading media agency driven by performance, data, analytics, and creative technology. We excel in multichannel audience planning and strategic media expertise. Our clients include Google, Dell, Uber, Airbnb, Mazda and Hitachi. Our mission: to make advertising more valuable.

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