Associate Director, Audience Strategy and Reach - Shanghai

Responsibilities

• Develops Audience Strategy; seeks out potential roles with the business for the group’s members to grow into, through both paid and non-paid media. Relates brands’ overall objectives to reachable audiences and explains audience focus to internal and external teams.
• Owns the DMP.  Responsible for its use & maintenance, plus stakeholders’ education on its capabilities.  Accountable for the data quality & quantity contained within the DMP.
• Owns the campaign calendar, by leading the Media & Campaign Ops team to ensure it is accurate and stakeholders are informed.  Is the primary decision maker for Campaign Categorization.
• Lead the campaign process on a day to day basis; free Head of Corporate Digital Marketing to take a more strategic role and act as an escalation point in the campaign process. Works with Digital UX and Effectiveness teams’ leadership to bring the 3As (Audience – Activation – Analytics) model into practice, examining campaigns within a customer strategy framework.
• Point of contact for the Media Agency’s Audience Strategy lead in writing the response to the media brief.  Available to discuss ideas & hypotheses.  Has a point of view on where the brand needs to evolve.  Brings a depth of understanding to accompany the media agency’s breadth of media industry experience.
• Leads the conversation with brands when amends are required to the campaign brief.  Willing to challenge non-audience-led thinking.  Champions customer centricity over historic precedent or trade marketing considerations.  Guides the brand to signing off the media brief, highlighting where media can (and cannot) help brands achieve objectives.
• Be a key link to the creative function, especially as media & creative are brought closer together.  Use audience as a ‘common currency’ to foster discussion between the disciplines
• Critically reviews tactical proposals, ensuring they fulfil the agreed audience strategy to drive timely brand sign off of executional plans.
• Actively participates in campaign performance analysis.  Use a strong analytical mindset to guide operational teams in how they frame the questions asked of the data, as well as the manner in which they are answered.
• Key contributor to the DM team’s approach to understanding Customer Decision Journeys.  Works with others in DM as well as Brands & DSI to better understand how customers interact with the group, and what drives customer lifetime value.
• Develops & coaches the Audience Insights team within DM; seeks out potential roles with the business for the group’s members to grow into.  Promotes our China’s use of 1st party data to shift the organization towards a customer-centric way of thinking.
• Develops & coaches Media & Campaign Ops team by helping them upskill and become an effective operational management team in the new audience-based experience designing and 3A model. 

Requirements

• Well-rounded intelligence to elaborate business growth opportunities with audience understanding and best-in class martech/adtech usage as enabler.
• Solid and proven ability in strategic thinking, results orientation, team leadership and change agility.
• Creativity and flexibility to develop bespoke solutions to define the audience, gain insights and effectively reach and connect.
• Experience in navigating relationships with different leadership layers; leading and influencing across diverse groups, communicating goals, strategy and plans.
• Patience and resilience to work with stakeholders with diverse background, expertise and thought process.

Qualification, Education, Experiences etc.

• Masters degree or post-bachelor program certificate in marketing, advertising, consumer behavior and related majors preferred.  
• 15+ year working experiences in the combination of media strategy, digital media, programmatic, martech/adtech (CDP/DMP/DSP), either in an agency working with multi-national FMCG client or in a corporate team of such companies.
• Additional experience in marketing strategy, integrated marketing communications and consumer science is a big plus. 
• Hands on experience being both strategic and executional lead.
• Proven track records of building and scaling new operational models, and leading initiatives with positive business returns.
• Understanding and good command for the key technologies and tools to run audience segmentation/clustering/profiling as well as targeting and user experience designing: CDP/DMP/DSP/LBS/DAM  
• Passion for all things audience reach and growth – paid, social, content, voice search, private traffic domain, so on. 
• Thrive on a mix of analytical and creative workstreams
• Strong commercial awareness with a market and competition outlook
• Ability to understand and work within the framework of the overall company strategy and relevant customer insights
• Analytical skills: ability to define problems, collect details data, analyses and interprets results and recommend changes and improvements, good commercial and operational sense.
• Goal Oriented: Ability to track record of delivery, sets clear priorities and meets deadlines
• Result oriented: entrepreneurial and self-motivating, good planning and organizational ability
• Thought leader:  passionate about leveraging digital technologies to capture new business opportunities through collaboration, co-creation and teamwork. 
• Natural leader: Positive, driven, has ability to influence, sets good examples, ambitious, determined and flexible
• Resilient, resourceful and able to perform under pressure
• Ability to handle ambiguity 
• Openness to diverse cultural environment
• Fluent in English, native in Chinese.  Excellent communication skills.