Paid Digital Media Manager

Overview

This is an exceptional opportunity to join a renowned media group that champions intellectually distinctive content and impactful journalism. As a pivotal member of their marketing team, you will directly influence audience growth, subscription success, and brand expansion for some of the most influential publications in the industry. Your strategic vision and hands-on execution will shape how new audiences discover and engage with high-quality, ideas-led content, making a tangible impact on the future of media.

About the Role:

We are seeking a commercially minded digital specialist to lead and scale paid audience growth across various platforms. This role is ideal for someone who can expertly balance subscription growth, top-of-funnel traffic generation, and brand engagement for premium media brands. You will be instrumental in developing and executing paid media strategies that drive subscriptions, promote events, and significantly expand the reach and influence of compelling journalism.

Working closely with editorial, marketing, data, and events teams, you will own the strategy and execution of campaigns, with the support of junior executives. This role offers the chance to shape the foundations of paid media across the group, influencing tooling, processes, and future team growth within a collaborative, ideas-driven culture that values autonomy and impact.

Key Responsibilities:

• Plan, execute, and optimize end-to-end paid digital media campaigns, covering audience strategy, budget allocation, creative testing, bidding, optimization, and post-campaign analysis across platforms such as Meta, Google, YouTube, X, and LinkedIn.
• Serve as a hands-on platform expert across major advertising platforms, demonstrating a deep understanding of campaign structures, bidding strategies, audience signals, creative formats, and attribution nuances.
• Drive subscription acquisition and retention initiatives, taking clear ownership of performance metrics such as CPA, ROI, and LTV.
• Develop top-of-funnel strategies to generate high-quality traffic and introduce new audiences to our publications.
• Support the promotion of live events, podcasts, newsletters, and special projects through targeted paid media efforts.
• Own and manage a structured experimentation roadmap, including creative testing frameworks, audience segmentation tests, funnel experiments, and landing page optimization, complete with clear hypotheses and documented learnings.
• Collaborate closely with editorial and design teams to ensure paid campaigns are on-brand, compelling, and intellectually distinctive.
• Partner with data and engineering teams to ensure robust tracking, attribution, and measurement across platforms, addressing pixel implementation, server-side tracking, and evolving privacy constraints.
• Manage substantial monthly paid media budgets, including forecasting, pacing, scenario planning, and dynamic reallocation of spend based on performance and business priorities.
• Stay at the forefront of platform changes, media trends, and best practices in subscription marketing to continuously innovate and improve campaign effectiveness.

Must-Have Qualifications:

• Proven experience in paid digital media, performance marketing, or growth marketing, with demonstrable ownership of strategy and execution.
• Experience gained either from an agency or a publishing, media, or subscription-led business is highly desirable.
• Comfortable operating as a senior individual contributor: self-directed, highly organized, and confident in taking full ownership of a critical growth channel.
• Proven track record of driving paid subscription growth at scale.
• Strong understanding of full-funnel marketing, from awareness to conversion.
• Highly analytical, comfortable working with data, dashboards, and experimentation. Confident in managing significant paid media budgets.
• Collaborative and editorially aware, with a genuine appreciation for quality journalism and ideas-led brands.
• Naturally outgoing, commercially astute, comfortable taking ownership, and adept at working across diverse teams.