Director, Performance Media
Apply NowTitle - Director, Performance Media
Reports to - SVP, Performance
Direct reports - 2 Managers, Performance Media; Senior Analysts and Analysts
Accountable for - P&L of the Performance Media group including revenue, media margin, and gross profit
Partners with - Creative, Media, Ad Operations, Broadcast, Business Development, Finance
Location - Shelton CT or New York NY / hybrid
Key ResponsibilitiesP&L and Margin Ownership
- Own the Performance Media P&L: revenue, media cost, margin, and gross profit by client and by channel.
- Manage budgets and the associated risk of buying media where the payment return is a call payout or performance guarantee.
- Oversee and manage cash buy opportunities within the Performance Media group evaluating, pricing, and approving buys against margin thresholds.
- Forecast spend and response with high accuracy, including cost per unique call, and manage pacing to protect both volume commitments and profit targets.
- Design bidding and rate strategies that flex with seasonal trends and marketplace conditions while holding minimum volume thresholds and margin floors simultaneously.
- Escalate risk early. Identify buys, clients, or channels where the economics have turned, and act before the quarter absorbs it.
Campaign Strategy and Performance Delivery
- Lead and manage pay-per-performance media campaigns across traditional channels, and across digital lead generation channels, to drive profitable growth.
- Predict response and call volume accurately, and know how to dial volume up or down at critical moments.
- Optimize for quality as well as cost and track call conversion quality, not only cost per lead, and evolve tactics toward scalable results.
- Work in tandem with the call routing team to manage joint concurrent call volume capacity limits.
- Partner with Creative, Media, and Ad Operations to maximize campaign performance; brief the in-house development team on lead generation assets and landing environments.
- Ensure all customer lead generation environments are 100% compliant with applicable regulatory requirements.
- Stay current on channel, marketplace, and regulatory developments, and bring new approaches and technology into how the group buys.
Team Leadership and Capacity
- Oversee the Performance Media team including two Managers and 3-5 Senior Analysts/Analysts ensuring strong execution and strategic alignment.
- Manage resource allocation and capacity planning to support current accounts and anticipated growth.
- Recruit, build, and train the team required to deploy these strategies at scale.
- Develop the two Managers into leaders who can run their books independently, and build a bench beneath them.
- Set the operating cadence: pacing reviews, margin reviews, and performance check-ins that catch problems inside the week rather than at month end.
Growth and Cross-Sell
- Identify and activate cross-sell opportunities within existing Performance Media clients and across the broader organization.
- Partner with Business Development to identify and pursue opportunities that align with Performance Media objectives and decline the ones that do not.
- Bring a commercial point of view to pricing and deal structure on new performance business, including which risk the agency should and should not take.
- Build the case for channel or capability expansion where the economics support it.
Bundle Activation and Executive Reporting
- Lead the New Bundle Activation Project, ensuring successful launch and scaling of new performance media bundles including pricing, delivery model, margin structure, and go-to-market readiness.
- Own performance reporting for the group, delivering weekly insight on key metrics and financial outcomes to executive leadership.
- Make the reporting diagnostic rather than descriptive: what changed, why, what is being done about it, and what the financial consequence is.
- Support the SVP, Performance with the analysis and recommendations required for investment and resourcing decisions.
- 6+ years in performance media , including direct response and lead generation, with experience leading a team. Managing managers is preferred, managing analysts at minimum.
- Margin or P&L accountability. Has carried a gross profit or margin number, not only a media budget, and can speak to how they protected it in a bad quarter.
- Experience buying media at risk via per-inquiry, cost-per-call, or performance-guarantee structures where the agency's own capital is exposed.
- Insurance vertical expertise strongly preferred . Insurance or comparable regulated categories with working knowledge of regulatory compliance in lead generation environments. Home services also a strong plus.
- Forecasting rigor. Can predict response and call volume accurately, understands rate and pricing variability, and builds bidding or rate strategies that hold up through seasonal and marketplace swings.
- Cross-channel fluency across traditional response channels and digital lead generation, with enough depth to challenge the team's assumptions rather than accept their reporting.
- Strong analytical skills and the ability to extrapolate data trends into decisions, with fluency in the financial consequence of each one.
- Executive communication. Presents cleanly to senior leadership and states the problem before being asked.