Starnes Media is a Birmingham-based media company serving hyperlocal communities with award-winning journalism and innovative marketing solutions. Our company thrives by proactive planning, serving our communities, and setting the bar high for quality and achievement.

Are you the person who makes sure every client feels like someone is paying attention to their business, and can build the system that guarantees it?

We’re looking for a Client Success and Creative Coordinator to own client experience, creative health, and retention across active advertiser accounts. This is a client success role that uses design as one of its delivery tools. You won’t be waiting for assignments. You’ll be driving the relationship with every active client, making sure no one is being ignored, every advertiser’s creative is working as hard as it can, and every client feels like they’re getting more value than they’re paying for.

Your primary measure of success is client retention. Are clients staying? Are they renewing? Are they engaged? You’re the operational point person for our client value system, from the onboarding call when a new client signs, to quarterly creative refreshes, to proactive outreach that keeps clients connected and growing. You’re the human face of the client experience between sales touches.

You’ll also need to be a master of the fundamentals of what makes advertising actually work. A great headline. A compelling offer. The right image. Simplicity. A clear call to action. Ease of response. These aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re the foundation of every ad you produce and every conversation you have with a client about their marketing. You’re not just making ads look good. You’re making ads that perform.

We’re moving to AI-assisted and agentic creative production: templated designs, AI-generated concepts, and automated creative workflows. Design and client communications will be drastically improved through systems and technology. Your role isn’t to be replaced by AI. It’s to manage the AI output, ensure brand quality, and focus your human skills on the things only a human can do: client relationships, creative strategy, and the judgment calls that make an ad work.

This role has real ownership. If you want to run something, not just make things when asked, this is your opportunity.

You Have

• Strong graphic design skills and experience producing ad creative for print and digital
• A solid understanding of advertising fundamentals: headlines, offers, imagery, simplicity, calls to action, and what makes an ad actually generate response
• The ability to work fast with templates, swapping logos, photos, offers, and copy to produce client-ready ads efficiently
• A proactive mindset. You reach out to clients with ideas, not just wait for requests.
• Comfort with, or strong willingness to learn, AI design tools and templated production systems
• Strong interpersonal skills and the confidence to communicate directly with business owners about their marketing
• An understanding that ad creative is a retention tool, not just a production task
• The ability to build and maintain a tracking system for client creative health
• Pride in producing high-volume, high-quality work consistently

We Offer

• Ownership of client experience, creative health, and the retention system across all active accounts
• The opportunity to build AI-assisted ad design workflows from the ground up
• A role that’s central to client retention. Your work directly impacts whether clients stay and grow.
• Paid time off, Blue Cross Blue Shield Medical/Dental/Vision, Life/Disability insurance, and 401(k)
• A company that’s investing heavily in design tools and systems to multiply your output

What You’ll Do

Client Success & Retention (Primary)

• Track, report on, and directly impact client retention metrics. Clients retained, clients at risk, creative engagement trends, and the correlation between proactive creative service and renewal rates. Client retention is your benchmark, and your actions drive the outcome.
• Be the operational point person for client value delivery. You own the client-facing systems that make every advertiser feel taken care of: onboarding, creative health, proactive outreach, recognition touchpoints, and quarterly engagement. You’re the reason clients stay.
• Own the client creative health dashboard. Every active client rated green (fresh creative in last 90 days), yellow (90 to 180 days, same ad), or red (180+ days or running camera-ready with no Starnes design touch). You know the status of every account at all times.
• Proactively contact every client in yellow or red status to seek solutions to turn the client health to green.
• Lead the new client onboarding call. Within 48 hours of every new client signing, you run a 30-minute call to collect brand assets, discuss first ad direction, explain the quarterly creative cycle, and make the client feel like they made the right decision.
• Own client recognition and engagement touchpoints: milestone celebrations, system-triggered moments that make clients feel like part of the family.
• Design quarterly ad campaigns for clients proactively. Plan the next quarter’s creative in advance so campaigns compound rather than repeat.

Ad Creative Production

• Produce all ad creative: new designs, refreshes, and production-ready files for every publication.
• Apply advertising fundamentals to every ad. Every piece of creative should reflect strong headline writing, a clear and compelling offer, effective imagery, simplicity, and an easy path to response. You’re the internal standard-bearer for what makes advertising work.
• Build and maintain a library of ad templates by category (home services, healthcare, real estate, restaurants, senior services) in Canva or equivalent. Templates that allow rapid production of client-ready ads.
• Produce spec ads for prospect meetings. When a sales rep needs a sample ad for a presentation, you produce it from a template same day.
• Support the transition to agentic ad design, working with our technical team to build AI-assisted creative production workflows, with you as the quality and brand consistency layer.

Reporting

• Report weekly: clients contacted (proactive outreach), client creative health dashboard status and trends, onboarding calls completed, ads produced segmented by category (new, refresh, pickup), and clients at retention risk.

Key Traits for Success

• Client-relationship oriented. You see yourself as serving clients, not just filling ad slots.
• Proactive. You reach out. You don’t wait.
• Comfortable talking directly with business owners about their marketing and what makes their advertising work
• Strong grasp of advertising fundamentals. You can explain why a headline, offer, or image choice matters.
• Organized enough to track all active client accounts and know which ones need attention
• Willing to embrace AI tools and templated production methods
• Results-oriented. You measure success by clients retained and MRR, not ads produced.
• Fast, efficient designer who thrives on volume when production is needed

Compensation & Growth Path

• Competitive salary based on experience
• Clear path to expanded responsibility as client volume grows with new market expansion
• Opportunity to lead the client success and creative function as the company scales
• Top performers shape the systems that become the company standard