Title: Audience Strategy Manager
Location: Bolingbrook, IL (Remote candidates will be considered, however preference is given to local candidates)
Duration: 5 Months with possible conversion to Full Time
Only W2 candidates are eligible for this position. Third-party or C2C candidates will not be considered.
Description:
Position Summary:
Client Media is seeking a strategic and operational leader to own the strategy, execution, and continuous evolution of our audience capabilities. The Manager, Audience Strategy & Operations will serve as the subject matter expert for audience targeting and activation, translating advertiser objectives into actionable audience strategies while ensuring those strategies can be executed effectively across client Media's activation ecosystem.
This role will own the end-to-end audience operating model, including audience planning, agency workflows, distribution, activation readiness, platform management, and operational governance. The Manager will partner closely with Sales, Account Management, Audience Product, Data, Reporting & Measurement, Marketing Technology, external agencies, and publisher partners to ensure client Media audiences are strategically relevant, operationally scalable, and delivered accurately and on time.
The role will also evaluate audience performance, identify best practices and opportunities for improvement, and help shape the evolution of client Media's audience product and capabilities. Success in this role requires equal comfort operating at the strategic level and getting into the operational details necessary to solve complex problems and improve the client experience.
You'll Accomplish All Of This By:
Audience Strategy & Client Advisory
- Serve as the subject matter expert for client Media audience strategy and targeting.
- Translate advertiser objectives, campaign goals, and business requirements into strategic audience recommendations across client Media channels.
- Partner with Sales and Account Management to develop audience targeting recommendations for client opportunities, campaign planning, and strategic conversations.
- Advise internal stakeholders and clients on audience capabilities, limitations, requirements, and activation considerations, ensuring expectations are aligned with what can be operationally delivered.
- Develop and maintain audience targeting best practices by campaign objective, category, audience type, and activation channel.
- Identify opportunities to improve audience relevance, precision, scale, and usability while balancing advertiser needs with available first-party data and activation capabilities.
Audience Operations & Activation
- Own the end-to-end audience operating model from audience request through development, distribution, activation, maintenance, and deprecation.
- Manage day-to-day audience operations with external agency and technology partners, establishing clear workflows, ownership, timelines, and escalation paths.
- Identify recurring operational challenges, root causes, and points of friction within the audience workflow and lead solutions to improve efficiency, quality, and speed to activation.
- Establish and maintain operational standards and governance to ensure audiences are appropriately named, documented, distributed, maintained, and retired.
- Oversee audience distribution and activation readiness across publisher platforms, proactively identifying issues that may impact campaign launch timing or audience availability.
- Manage audience platform hygiene and cleanup, including identification and retirement of outdated, duplicative, or no longer needed audiences.
- Monitor audience readiness and distribution timelines across publishers and partners and proactively communicate potential risks to campaign stakeholders.
- Serve as the escalation point for complex audience activation issues and coordinate resolution across agency, publisher, technology, and internal teams.
Audience Product & Capability Development
- Evaluate the current client Media audience offering to identify gaps, inefficiencies, and opportunities for new or enhanced audience capabilities.
- Partner with Audience Product, Data, Marketing Technology, and external partners to define, prioritize, and implement enhancements to audience products and activation capabilities.
- Translate business and client needs into audience capability requirements and operational improvements.
- Evaluate emerging audience technologies, data sources, activation capabilities, and industry practices to identify opportunities for client Media.
- Develop recommendations for audience taxonomy, segmentation, distribution, and activation approaches that improve scalability and consistency across the RMN.
- Help establish a clear roadmap for the evolution of client Media's audience capabilities.
Audience Performance & Insights
- Evaluate audience-level performance across campaigns to identify trends, opportunities, and potential areas of audience fatigue or inefficiency.
- Partner with Reporting & Measurement to connect audience strategy to campaign outcomes and identify actionable insights.
- Document audience-level best practices, observed outcomes, and learnings to inform future campaign strategy.
- Develop repeatable frameworks for evaluating audience effectiveness and translating performance observations into future targeting recommendations.
- Incorporate testing, analytics, consumer insights, and industry trends to continuously improve audience strategy and effectiveness.
- Share audience insights and recommendations with internal stakeholders and, when appropriate, contribute to client-facing presentations and business reviews.
Cross-Functional Leadership & Partnership
- Build strong partnerships across Sales, Account Management, Product, Reporting & Measurement, Media, and Activation teams.
- Serve as the connective point between strategic audience needs and operational execution.
- Manage relationships with external agency, technology, and publisher partners supporting audience creation and activation.
- Lead cross-functional workstreams related to audience operations, capability enhancements, and process improvements.
- Create clarity in complex or ambiguous situations and drive issues to resolution.
Industry & Innovation
- Stay current on retail media, identity, first-party data, audience activation, privacy, and ad technology trends.
- Benchmark client Media audience capabilities and practices against evolving retail media industry standards.
- Identify emerging opportunities to strengthen client Media's competitive audience offering.
- Recommend and prioritize tests, pilots, and new capabilities that have the potential to improve advertiser outcomes, operational efficiency, or the client experience.
The Essentials For Success:
- Bachelor's degree in a related discipline preferred.
- 5+ years of experience in retail media, digital advertising, audience strategy, media activation, ad technology, data strategy, or a related field.
- Demonstrated experience developing and executing audience strategies using first-party data.
- Strong understanding of audience segmentation, identity, activation, syndication, and digital media ecosystems.
- Experience working with audience management platforms, identity providers, or related AdTech/MarTech solutions.
- Experience managing agency, technology, publisher, or other external partners.
- Demonstrated ability to translate complex business objectives into actionable audience strategies.
- Strong analytical skills with the ability to evaluate audience performance and translate findings into actionable recommendations.
- Strong project and operational management skills, with the ability to manage multiple priorities and drive work to completion.
- Excellent written, verbal, and presentation skills, including the ability to simplify complex technical or data concepts for non-technical audiences.
- Strong problem-solving skills and demonstrated ability to identify root causes, develop solutions, and drive cross-functional implementation.
- Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, evolving environment with ambiguity and competing priorities.
- Strong proficiency in Excel and PowerPoint.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience working within a retail media network, retailer, media agency, publisher, or AdTech organization.
- Experience with LiveRamp, Adobe, SAS, CDPs, clean rooms, audience marketplaces, or other audience activation technologies.
- Experience developing audience taxonomies, segmentation frameworks, or audience products.
- Experience supporting omnichannel or cross-channel audience activation.
- Experience with measurement, attribution, incrementality, or closed-loop retail media analytics.
- Experience leading cross-functional initiatives or operational transformation.
- Experience developing client-facing audience recommendations and presentations.
- Experience managing or mentoring team members and/or leading agency partners.
REPORTS TO: Senior Manager, Reporting & Measurement, Client Media
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