Manager, Audience Strategy & Operations – UB Media
Location: Remote
Duration: 5 Months
Position Overview
We are seeking a Manager, Audience Strategy & Operations to lead audience strategy, targeting, activation, and operational execution.
This role will serve as a subject matter expert in audience targeting and activation, helping translate advertiser goals into effective audience strategies using first-party data and available activation capabilities.
The Manager will collaborate closely with Sales, Account Management, Audience Product, Data, Reporting & Measurement, Marketing Technology, external agencies, and publisher partners to ensure audiences are strategically relevant, operationally scalable, and activated accurately and on time.
Key Responsibilities
Audience Strategy & Client Advisory
- Develop audience targeting strategies based on advertiser objectives and campaign goals.
- Partner with Sales and Account Management teams on audience recommendations and campaign planning.
- Advise stakeholders on audience capabilities, requirements, limitations, and activation considerations.
- Develop audience targeting best practices across campaign objectives, audience types, categories, and channels.
- Identify opportunities to improve audience relevance, precision, scale, and usability.
Audience Operations & Activation
- Own the end-to-end audience workflow, from request through development, distribution, activation, maintenance, and retirement.
- Manage day-to-day audience operations with agencies and technology partners.
- Establish workflows, ownership, timelines, and escalation processes.
- Identify operational challenges and develop solutions to improve efficiency and speed to activation.
- Maintain audience naming conventions, documentation, governance, and operational standards.
- Monitor audience distribution and activation readiness across publisher platforms.
- Identify and retire outdated, duplicate, or unnecessary audiences.
- Serve as an escalation point for complex audience activation issues.
Audience Product & Capability Development
- Evaluate current audience capabilities and identify gaps and opportunities.
- Partner with Product, Data, and Marketing Technology teams to improve audience products and activation capabilities.
- Translate business and client needs into audience capability requirements.
- Evaluate emerging audience technologies, data sources, and activation solutions.
- Help develop audience taxonomy, segmentation, distribution, and activation strategies.
- Contribute to the roadmap for future audience capabilities.
Audience Performance & Insights
- Evaluate audience-level campaign performance and identify trends and opportunities.
- Partner with Reporting & Measurement teams to connect audience strategy with campaign results.
- Identify audience fatigue, inefficiencies, and optimization opportunities.
- Develop repeatable frameworks for evaluating audience effectiveness.
- Document audience best practices and campaign learnings.
- Provide audience insights to internal stakeholders and support client-facing presentations when appropriate.
Cross-Functional Leadership
- Partner with Sales, Account Management, Product, Reporting & Measurement, Media, and Activation teams.
- Coordinate with external agency, technology, and publisher partners.
- Lead cross-functional projects related to audience operations and process improvement.
- Help resolve complex operational and audience-related issues.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree preferred.
- 5+ years of experience in retail media, digital advertising, audience strategy, media activation, AdTech, data strategy, or a related field.
- Experience developing audience strategies using first-party data.
- Strong understanding of:
- Audience segmentation
- Audience targeting
- Identity
- Audience activation
- Audience syndication
- Digital media ecosystems
- Experience with audience management platforms, identity providers, or AdTech/MarTech solutions.
- Experience managing agency, technology, publisher, or other external partners.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
- Strong project and operational management skills.
- Excellent communication and presentation skills.
- Ability to explain technical or data concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
- Strong proficiency with Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint.