Associate Director, Data Strategy

About the role

We're looking for a sharp, curious, and strategically minded Associate Director, Data Strategy to join the Data Strategy team in the US. This role will support one of the world's most iconic beauty brands — Estée Lauder. This is a pivotal, client-facing role at the intersection of audience strategy, data activation, and media technology.

Responsibilities

• Data & Audience Strategy:
  • Define audience frameworks across foundational, enrichment, and activation layers; identify the right signals and data sources to answer real business questions
  • Develop audience strategies and insights, overseeing the translation of audience logic into activation in partnership with planning, activation, and analytics teams
  • Audit client data maturity, identify gaps, and surface enrichment opportunities to improve addressability, measurement, and outcomes
  • Avoid privacy-safe data collaboration and clean room strategies (e.g., InfoSum), translating client business questions into compliant use cases for audience insights and activation
  • Stay ahead of industry trends and provide thought leadership that positions WPP Media as a leading voice in data strategy
• Audience Development, Governance & Enablement:
  • Build, taxonomize, and syndicate audiences across relevant platforms — ensuring audience definitions, dependencies, and usage guidance are clear and repeatable
  • Analyze and present audience-level reporting (e.g., overlaps, correlations, affinity/indexing) within DMP/CDP platforms to inform planning and optimization
  • Proactively monitor audience onboarding and syndication health (e.g., match rates), communicating risks and remediation paths to reduce data loss
  • Own audience integration documentation and operational guidance to enable consistent cross-functional execution
• WPP Open Platform & Technology Adoption:
  • Become a deep product expert on WPP Open and our broader suite of data tools and platforms
  • Support the growth of the WPP Open platform by driving adoption of our data assets and capabilities with clients and internal teams
  • Clearly communicate technical capabilities to both internal stakeholders and external audiences
• Collaboration & Stakeholder Management:
  • Build strong, trusted relationships across media, analytics, technology, and commercial teams in a matrixed environment
  • Manage a high volume of tasks and priorities with confidence and clarity
  • Develop and maintain strong partnerships with external data vendors and technology partners

Requirements

• Significant experience in data strategy, audience strategy, martech/adtech, or a closely related field — ideally within a media agency, consultancy, or platform environment
• Demonstrated ability to develop audience-first strategies using 1P/2P/3P data and translate strategy into activation-ready audience logic
• Experience creating audience insights and reporting within audience management platforms (e.g., DMP/CDP)
• Familiarity with identity, data onboarding/syndication concepts, and operational metrics like match rates
• Familiarity with the adtech/martech ecosystem and how platforms support data strategy execution
• Familiarity with audience modeling approaches including lookalikes, propensity models, value-based segmentation, and suppression
• Strong client-facing communication skills — able to make complex concepts clear for both technical and non-technical audiences
• A genuine curiosity and commitment to continuous learning in a fast-moving industry

Preferred Experience

• Driving platform adoption in a SaaS/PaaS environment and supporting enablement programs
• Experience designing data strategies for large, complex, multi-brand, or multinational advertisers (CPG a plus)
• Familiarity with the GroupM/WPP ecosystem, data platforms, and ways of working

What You'll Bring

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