Director, Performance Media

Responsibilities

• P&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.

Requirements

• 6+ years in performance media, including direct response and lead generation, with experience leading a team.
• 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.

Preferred

• 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.
• Managing managers is preferred, managing analysts at minimum.