Senior Director, Industry Strategy (Advertising)

Application deadline: 27 August 2026. Department: Marketing. Location: United States (East coast).

About the role

Zappi is looking for a senior advertising effectiveness and creative development expert to help strengthen our authority, differentiation, and commercial success in the advertising research and creative effectiveness space. This person will serve as both:

• A trusted expert, educator, and industry advocate externally
• A strategic, cross-functional subject matter expert and connective layer internally

The role is designed for someone who has helped major brands understand how advertising works, diagnose creative opportunities, improve campaign performance, and translate consumer insight into stronger creative decisions. They should be credible with senior Insights, Marketing, Brand, Media, Creative, Commercial, and Strategy leaders, and able to connect methodological rigor with a modern, scalable approach to advertising research.

Responsibilities

• Serve as an industry expert
  • Bring deep expertise in advertising strategy, creative effectiveness, campaign development, ad testing, and consumer research methodologies.
  • Act as a senior subject matter expert on creative testing, campaign diagnostics, norms, benchmarks, competitive dynamics, and market trends.
  • Understand how large enterprise organizations operate, including process, politics, agency dynamics, decision-making, budget pressures, stakeholder complexity, and media and creative timelines.
  • Stay ahead of emerging trends in advertising effectiveness, AI-generated creative, synthetic respondents, creative volume, digital and social testing, predictive models, and connected learning systems.
• Function as a trusted internal advisor across the organization
• Help drive cross-functional GTM readiness
  • Work closely with Sales, Customer, Product, Product Marketing, Marketing, and Research Science teams on strategic narratives and customer engagements.
  • Help Product Marketing build messaging, frameworks, demos, POVs, enablement, competitive guidance, and customer-facing materials when expertise-level knowledge is needed.
  • Support enterprise opportunities as a strategic expert and advisor, speaking directly to customers and prospects when senior advertising expertise is needed.
  • Clarify where Zappi’s advertising solutions fit across the creative development lifecycle, from early creative exploration to validation, optimization, and connected learning.
  • Own the competitive intelligence program for advertising research and creative effectiveness, translating market, competitor, customer, and industry shifts into internal guidance and external-facing content.
• Build external credibility
  • Develop a visible external voice in the advertising effectiveness and creative development space.
  • Create thought leadership on the future of advertising research, better creative decision-making at scale, AI in creative development, synthetic methods in ad testing, and connected creative learning.
  • Speak at conferences, webinars, customer events, and industry forums.
  • Engage with analysts, strategic customers, and industry communities.
  • Co-create customer education materials and programs with Customer Marketing.
• Influence product and strategy
  • Translate customer realities, workflow needs, agency dynamics, and competitive gaps into actionable product and GTM recommendations.
  • Partner closely with Product, Research Science, and Commercialization teams.
  • Align with Product Marketing, Product, and Commercialization to pressure test emerging AI, synthetic, predictive, diagnostic, and connected-learning capabilities from both methodological and commercial perspectives.
  • Serve as a second voice outside of Product to help ensure product direction aligns with real-world customer workflows, buyer expectations, and unmet needs.

What success looks like

• Zappi has a stronger, clearer, and more differentiated point of view in advertising effectiveness, creative development, and modern creative decisioning.
• GTM teams are more confident and effective in advertising conversations, with stronger discovery, sharper positioning, and better objection handling.
• Zappi’s advertising offerings are easier for Sales and Account teams to position as a strategic growth opportunity, not simply a set of point solutions or individual ad tests.
• Enterprise buyers increasingly view Zappi as a strategic partner for advertising effectiveness, creative development, and connected campaign learning.
• Product and GTM strategy are more closely aligned to customer realities, creative development workflows, competitive dynamics, and emerging market needs.
• Zappi builds greater external authority through thought leadership, customer education, industry participation, and expert-led advertising narratives.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in creative development, ad testing, campaign strategy, consumer insights, advertising effectiveness, or market research.
• Deep expertise in advertising research methodologies, including pre-market ad testing, creative diagnostics, campaign learning, norms, benchmarking, and KPI interpretation.
• Experience working with enterprise brands and senior stakeholders across Insights, Marketing, Brand, Media, Creative, Commercial, or Strategy teams.
• Strong understanding of how enterprise teams make advertising decisions, manage creative risk, and connect consumer insight to campaign performance.
• Ability to translate complex advertising methodologies into clear commercial narratives, sales guidance, executive-level storytelling, and customer-facing POVs.
• Experience supporting strategic sales, enterprise customer conversations, thought leadership, or consultative growth motions.
• Exceptional communication, presentation, and storytelling skills, with comfort representing a company externally as a senior industry expert.

You may come from

• Consumer insights, brand, media, creative, or strategy teams
• Advertising research, market research, or creative effectiveness consulting
• Advertising effectiveness or creative development leadership
• Senior roles within research, insights, ad tech, creative analytics, or marketing technology providers

Pay

$190K - $200K base + $13K bonus.

Benefits

• Three company-paid mental health days of rest per year (pre-scheduled so the entire company can take the same days off regularly to reset).
• Generous PTO policy: minimum of 20 days of paid time off per year, plus national holidays. Leave over 30 days requires manager and People team approval.
• Private medical healthcare cover.
• Group risk, life & disability contributions.
• Flexible working arrangements, including remote (unless otherwise specified).
• Thoughtfully designed offices to support both individual work and collaboration without interrupting others.
• Wellbeing benefits such as free yoga and access to trained therapists/counsellors.
• Enhanced parental leave policies.
• Free lunch in the office Tuesday-Thursday.
• Tax-efficient pension contributions via salary sacrifice scheme.
• Salary sacrifice cycle-to-work scheme.
• Salary sacrifice nursery scheme.
• Tailored personal development through training allowances, coaching, mentorship, and career frameworks.

Zappi has been recognized as one of the hottest martech companies in 2022 by Business Insider and named Best Place to Work by Quirk’s Media for its engaging and inclusive workplace culture. The company is committed to both people and the planet, with a focus on inclusion and sustainability, including achieving Net Zero in 2021 and earning B Corp certification.

• Winner of Comparably's Awards for Best Company for Women, Work-Life Balance, Compensation, CEO for Women, Diversity, Company Culture, Happiness, Leadership Teams, CEOs for Diversity, Engineering Teams, and Company Outlook (2022-2023).
• Winner of Newsweek’s Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in the UK (2022 & 2023).
• Recognized by Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators (2023).
• Winner of Best Marketing Insights Platform in the MarTech Breakthrough Awards (2023 & 2024).