Associate Director of Media Investment – Paid Social

About This Role

If you're a self-starter with lots of enthusiasm for devising innovative and integrated media solutions, you get energized by the notion of critical thinking, conceptualizing, and brainstorming with others, you have an entrepreneurial spirit and want to be a part of an agency start-up that is experiencing accelerated growth… then you've come to the right place. Our Associate Directors of Media Investment are seasoned paid media leaders who oversee execution across all digital channels (search, social, programmatic, and emerging) for a portfolio of clients. For this role specifically, we're looking for a leader with deep paid search expertise. You live in the platform, lead complex search strategy from account architecture through bid management and creative testing, and you bring that same in-platform fluency to oversight of social and programmatic teams that report up to you. In addition, they work well with other parts of the media equation and are interested in providing strategic insight to help assist our Media Managers in the development of media plans that they'll, in turn, help execute.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage the implementation, execution, and optimization of digital advertising campaigns across multiple platforms.
• Lead paid social strategy and execution across Meta (Facebook & Instagram), TikTok, LinkedIn, and emerging social platforms (Reddit, Snapchat, X, etc.) for our largest accounts.
• Own social account architecture decisions: campaign consolidation and structure, Advantage+ and Smart+ adoption, audience signal strategy (broad targeting, custom audiences, lookalikes, and exclusions), and creative testing frameworks.
• Creative Strategy: Treat creative as the primary performance lever — partner with creative teams to brief, test, and scale a steady cadence of genuinely distinct concepts, and use performance data to diagnose fatigue and shape the next round of testing.
• Bid Strategy: Drive bid and budget strategy across the portfolio (lowest-cost / highest-volume, cost cap, bid cap, value/ROAS optimization, and campaign budget optimization) with strong intuition for when automated delivery works and when it doesn't.
• Measurement & Signal: Collaborate in the development of clean, server-side measurement (CAPI / Conversions API) and tagging frameworks, ensuring signal density and data quality are strong enough for the platforms' delivery systems to learn and optimize.
• Collaborate with agency and client teams to formulate and create strategic proposals that meet identified objectives.
• Sales Activity Support: Interact on a day-to-day basis with the agency's Media Investment team to ensure campaign optimization and success. Support agency teams during operational and business reviews and act as a critical team member for operational and technical discussions.
• Campaign Monitoring: Identifying and escalating potential technical issues, identifying and building specifications on potential market needs requiring technical developments.
• Manage a team of media investment associates, specialists, supervisors, and managers.
• Onboard new hires in agency and industry best practices.
• Ongoing strategic media recommendations.
• Comfortable leading client-facing calls and meetings.
• Host internal and external training.

Qualifications

• Must be located in DFW or willing to relocate.
• 5+ years of working experience in Paid Social.
• Expert-level proficiency in Google Ads (Search, PMax, Shopping, Demand Gen) and Microsoft Advertising. Familiarity with Apple Search Ads, Reddit Ads, or other emerging search surfaces is a plus.
• Active Google Ads certifications (Search and Measurement at minimum).
• Outstanding analytical and project management skills. Extreme attention to detail and the ability to handle several projects concurrently under deadline pressure is essential.
• Ability to work effectively with internal team members and external clients and other agency partners.
• Ability to create accurate projections based on data analysis.
• Ability to multitask and perform under pressure.
• Proactive initiative — A team player who is accountable for delivering accurate, timely, and insightful reports, recommendations, and POVs.
• Bachelor's degree. Master's degree is a plus.
• Supervisory experience.
• Experience running multi-million dollar media investments.

Position Status: Salaried Exempt