Account Director – Trailblaze

Description

About Trailblaze

Trailblaze is a modern communications agency built for brands that want to stand out. We specialize in creative marketing communications, earned media, and influencer campaigns that drive cultural relevance and real impact. Our clients partner with us because they’re done with predictable, “check-the-box” PR and want bold thinking, sharp strategy, and standout execution. We bring mainstream CPG rigor to the weirdest, fastest-moving, most regulated categories in marketing.

The Opportunity

We are not your typical PR agency. This is not your typical AD role.

1. Run accounts like a pro.

2. Generate ideas that actually get picked up, not just sent.

3. Read culture (and Gen Z) faster than the trend hits your FYP.

4. Know what’s legal to say about a THC gummy on Instagram.

This is a senior, client-facing role for a communications leader who thrives in categories other agencies find too complicated, too regulated, or too unconventional. If you know the difference between Delta-8 and Delta-9, understand why the World’s Largest Pot Brownie wasn’t a stunt but a stock-moving event, and have an opinion about where cannabis, wellness, and functional beverages go next — keep reading.

What You’ll Do

Lead the Work

• Own integrated communications strategy across earned media, influencer, creative, and executive visibility for a tight roster of cannabis, CBD, wellness, and adjacent regulated-category clients.
• Turn briefs into breakthrough ideas, the kind that get the AP to file, land on Colbert, and move stock prices.
• Build annual comms plans, editorial calendars, messaging platforms, and campaign frameworks with KPIs that actually tie to client business.
• Navigate platform restrictions, ad bans, state-by-state regulatory complexity, and category-specific legal guardrails with the confidence of someone who’s already been there.

Generate the ideas

• Invent the moments. Pickleball in Central Park, Danksgiving, Way to 420, the World’s Largest Pot Brownie; those weren’t briefed; they were conceived. You’ll be the engine that keeps that coming.
• Know what’s landing where from Forbes and Bloomberg to High Times, The Fresh Toast, and Rolling Stone and what will land where next.
• Read culture at velocity. Anticipate trend cycles, cultural tentpoles, and subculture shifts before they’re mainstream, and turn that instinct into pitch angles, PR stunts, and survey-led news hooks.
• Operate with Gen Z fluency you don’t just know the platforms (TikTok, Reels, Substack, Discord, even Reddit), you know the tone, pacing, and creator ecosystem well enough to pitch campaigns that resonate there natively.

Own the client relationship.

• Be the trusted advisor for CMOs, CEOs, and founders betting their business on how their brand shows up.
• Lead client meetings with the calm authority of someone who has an answer before the question lands.
• Provide proactive counsel on issues management, crisis, and high-stakes moments.
• Spot organic growth inside accounts and help shape new business pitches.

Drive breakthrough earned media.

• Oversee press materials, messaging, pitch angles, thought leadership, bylines, and story arcs that make reporters at top-tier outlets actually open the email.
• Leverage and actively expand relationships with media, cannabis and wellness influencers, and cultural tastemakers — from national news desks to niche trade publications.
• Partner with creator and influencer networks to extend earned work into social and community spaces.

Lead the team.

• Mentor publicists and account staff; review every deliverable with the same care you’d give your biggest pitch.
• Manage resources across a capped book of business. We curate our roster on purpose, and we expect the same focus from the people who run it.
• Foster a collaborative, high-performing, fully remote team environment across time zones.

Requirements

Who you are.

Our brand personality is BOLD, SOPHISTICATED, CLEVER, AUTHENTIC, and GO-GETTER. You are too, or this won’t be a fit.

• Experience: 9–12 years in PR, communications, or integrated marketing, with agency experience strongly preferred.
• Category fluency: You’ve worked on cannabis, CBD, psychedelics, health and wellness, functional beverage, beverage alcohol, or an equivalently regulated CPG category. You understand the marketing constraints and the cultural opportunities those constraints create.
• Cultural fluency: You are plugged in. You have a POV on what’s happening in music, fashion, food, internet culture, and Gen Z behavior, and you know how to turn that POV into a pitch angle a journalist can’t ignore.
• Creative brain: You generate ideas: stunts, data stories, partnerships, moments — not just press releases. You can see a launch brief and immediately spot the three ways it could go viral (and the one way it will).
• Trend-forward: You’re reading Business of Fashion, Garbage Day, The Cannigma, and MJBizDaily. You know which TikTok sound is about to cross over. You spot the cultural undercurrents other agencies won’t see for another six months.
• Media relationships: You’ve built them, not inherited them. Top-tier consumer, business, trade, and lifestyle.
• Sharp writing: Decks, messaging platforms, press releases, bylines, crisis statements, executive comms — all at a level that doesn’t need heavy editing.
• Presence: Present to a boardroom without breaking a sweat. Take feedback without breaking stride.
• Operating style: Entrepreneurial. Comfortable with ambiguity, fast decisions, and a roster that demands senior attention every day.
• Humor: Required. This industry takes itself seriously sometimes; we try not to.

Salary range: $85,000 - $100,000

Where an employee or prospective employee is paid within this range will depend on, among other factors, actual ranges for current/former employees in the subject position; market considerations; budgetary considerations; tenure and standing with the company (applicable to current employees); as well as the employee’s/applicant’s background, pertinent experience, and qualifications.

Acceleration Community of Companies ("ACC") provides equal employment opportunity for all applicants and employees and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, gender or sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding or related medical conditions), national origin, ancestry, age, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, family and medical care leave status, military or veteran status, marital status, family status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. ACC will also make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with known disabilities to perform their essential functions unless doing so would result in an undue hardship to the Company. Please inform ACC's Human Resources Department if you need assistance completing any forms or to otherwise participate in the application process. This policy governs all aspects of employment, including selection, job assignment, compensation, promotion, discipline, termination of employment, and access to benefits and training.