Responsibilities

• Own Spring Education Group’s enterprise paid media strategy and accountability for media investment and performance. Translate enrollment priorities, school capacity, market demand, lead quality, conversion performance, lifetime value, seasonality, competitive dynamics, and brand priorities into differentiated strategies by brand, campus, market, audience, channel, and funnel stage rather than applying a single enterprise approach.
• Oversee a multi-million-dollar media portfolio and identify opportunities to responsibly scale investment where incremental spend can generate attractive returns, while building clear recommendations on where to increase, maintain, test, or reduce investment. Partner with Finance, Analytics, Enrollment, Regional Directors, and marketing leadership to strengthen forecasting and set clear expectations for enrollment and financial outcomes.
• Evaluate performance across the full enrollment funnel, from demand and inquiry through tours, applications, enrollment, retention signals, and lifetime value, rather than optimizing primarily to platform metrics or cost per inquiry. Rapidly diagnose whether underperformance stems from media, market demand, creative, website experience, lead quality, admissions conversion, capacity, competition, or another factor, and identify responsible opportunities to scale when additional spend can generate attractive returns.
• Serve as the primary liaison with Spring’s paid media agency, setting strategic direction, business objectives, performance expectations, testing priorities, investment guardrails, operating standards, service levels, governance, quality assurance, reporting expectations, and escalation protocols.
• Hold the agency accountable for execution, optimization, innovation, reporting, quality, responsiveness, and results.
• Challenge and validate agency recommendations, communicate with clarity and directness, give and receive direction, push back when warranted, and recognize when performance or learning curves have plateaued.
• Maintain sufficient technical and platform fluency to recognize issues, test assumptions, and decide quickly whether recommendations should be accepted, modified, or rejected; recommend changes to agency scope, staffing, technology, or partner structure when needed.
• Provide strategic leadership to internal paid media resources, establishing clear roles, ownership, expectations, and performance standards. Partner with the VP of Marketing to ensure effective coordination across internal paid media resources, agency partners, technology, automation, and platform resources as business needs evolve; create transparent, efficient workflows across paid media, brand, web, creative, analytics, CRM, enrollment, and finance; and foster curiosity, urgency, accountability, collaboration, experimentation, and continuous improvement.
• Stay ahead of changes across Google, Meta, other major advertising platforms, and the broader digital ecosystem, with particular emphasis on AI-driven advertising, automation, audience development, measurement, privacy, emerging channels, and the implications of AI search behavior for paid media strategy.
• Proactively recommend testing, adoption, scaling, or rejection based on business value and expected enrollment impact.

Requirements

• 10+ years of progressive experience in paid media, performance marketing, growth marketing, digital acquisition, or a related discipline, including Director-level leadership
• Significant experience developing strategy for and overseeing multi-million-dollar media investments across multiple brands, locations, markets, or business units
• Deep expertise in paid search and paid social, particularly Google and Meta, plus video, display and programmatic media, retargeting, local acquisition, and emerging performance channels
• Strong knowledge of AI-driven advertising, automation, bidding, audience development, attribution, privacy, platform evolution, and the implications of AI search visibility for paid media and demand strategy is essential
• Proven ability to connect marketing spend to enrollment, acquisition cost, lifetime value, revenue, profitability, and ROI; diagnose complex performance issues; and build sophisticated testing and optimization programs across media, audiences, creative, conversion, and landing experiences
• Requires full-funnel measurement and analytics fluency, including CRM data, lead management, conversion tracking, GA4, reporting platforms, and dashboards; experience with HubSpot, Salesforce, NetSuite, DOMO, or comparable CRM and analytics technologies is beneficial
• Demonstrated success managing and challenging paid media agencies, vendors, publishers, and platform partners; leading and developing teams; and building effective operating structures
• Must be a clear, direct, high-signal communicator who can translate complex performance information into concise, actionable recommendations and collaborate effectively with brand, analytics, creative, content, SEO, CRM and lifecycle, web, enrollment or sales, finance, Regional Directors, and executive leadership
• Strategic, commercially minded, and ecosystem-oriented: Connects investment decisions to enrollment, business economics, brand priorities, and market opportunity while understanding that paid media is one component of a broader marketing and enrollment system
• Proactive, forward-looking, analytically curious, decisive, and agile: Identifies opportunities and problems before being asked; stays ahead of AI, automation, platform evolution, privacy, consumer behavior, and emerging media opportunities; investigates why results occurred; moves quickly from insight to action; and changes course when data and business conditions support it

Preferred

• Meaningful agency-side experience is strongly preferred, along with demonstrated success managing and challenging external media agencies; experience managing diverse client portfolios across multiple industries is also preferred.
• Experience in education, healthcare, multi-location services, hospitality, franchising, or another locally driven, multi-market business model is also strongly preferred.

Benefits

• Full medical, dental, and vision insurance
• FSA/HSA options
• 401(k) with company match
• Student tuition remission
• Continued education savings through our university partners
• Paid holidays and sick days