Associate Director, Media Planning

POSITION SUMMARY:

We're looking for an Associate Director, Planning to lead day-to-day planning across a set of complex client businesses - the kind where the growth targets are real, the pace is fast, the stakeholders are many, and the difference between a good plan and a great one shows up in the business results, week over week.

You'll sit where strategy becomes media, and where media becomes outcomes. You'll lead a team of ~1-2 planners, work day to day with strategy, analytics, and investment, and be the voice clients trust to explain why the plan looks the way it does, what's working, and what you're changing because of it.

This role reports into the Senior Director, Planning and is a senior seat on the planning team. You'll own the quality of the planning work on your accounts and help raise the standard for how planning gets done across the floor.

This is a key leadership role on the accounts that you will touch, connecting the disciplines across our evolving integrated model.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Help build what's next. We're shaping how we plan, what we plan with, and how planning, analytics, and tech connect. You won't be inheriting a finished playbook; you'll help write it, turning new approaches into the templates, checklists, and habits the team uses. For the right person, this is the most exciting part of the role: the chance to put your fingerprints on how the discipline works here.
• The planning product on your accounts. You'll own planning across your portfolio, translating client business goals into full-funnel media strategy, from broad-reach brand channels to performance and local media, and making sure each plan is built to deliver business outcomes (sales, leads, subscribers), not just media KPIs. Your own work meets the bar without needing to be caught, and you catch the team's work before it reaches a client.
• The team. You'll lead, develop, and grow a team of planners, coaching on fundamentals, reviewing their work, and building their skills. You give specific, actionable feedback, and people get better working for you.
• Day-to-day client leadership. You'll own relationships with your day-to-day client leads, typically Director and VP level. You're in front of the client regularly, presenting performance, answering the hard question in the moment, and turning a fast-moving ask into a clear recommendation. You're a credible, prepared voice in the room with their CMO when the moment calls for it.
• Brand and performance, in balance. You understand that mental availability and short-term sales work as a system. You can build plans that fund both, hold the long-term role of brand when the conversation drifts to last-click, and you're equally at home when the brief is a hard acquisition number and every dollar has to earn its place. You explain the trade-offs in language a marketer can act on.
• Pull-through and optimization with investment. You'll partner upstream with strategy, so the brief is sharp, and downstream with investment and channel teams so what gets bought reflects what was planned. Then you stay in the loop: reviewing performance with investment on a regular cadence, agreeing on what to shift, and making sure in-market optimizations ladder back to the business goal, not just the platform metric. You close the gaps where strategy usually gets lost in translation.
• The measurement frame. With analytics and strategy, you'll define the success metrics up front, the ones that connect media to client business outcomes. You bring the client's business context to the measurement conversation, you know the toolkit well enough to ask for the right thing (incrementality and geo testing, attribution, MMM, brand lift), and you act as the voice of the client. When the numbers come back, you and analytics turn them into a decision, not a readout.
• Insight to action. You'll work closely with analytics and data teams to surface what matters and translate it into planning choices i.e., channel mix, flighting, audience strategy, creative implications. You know the difference between data point and insight, and between an insight and a decision, and you get to the decision quickly.
• The full vehicle set. You operate fluently across every channel we plan, i.e., linear and streaming TV, audio, OOH, print, paid search, paid social, programmatic, and local and direct-response media, and across paid, earned, and owned. You know when paid is the answer, when it isn't, and how they reinforce each other.
• Speed with judgment. Performance businesses move weekly, not quarterly. You make sound calls quickly with imperfect information, know which decisions need a pause, and which need an answer today, and keep the client informed either way.
• AI in the day-to-day. You actively use AI tools, proprietary and otherwise, to accelerate planning work and sharpen thinking, and you know how to catch an output that sounds right but doesn't hold up. You help the team adopt what works.
• New business and growth. You contribute meaningfully to new business pitches, owning workstreams and bringing sharp planning thinking to both pitch work and the day-to-day.
• Cross-agency collaboration. You work confidently alongside agency partners we don't manage, i.e., creative, CRM, PR, local and regional shops, platform partners, and you keep the work moving when priorities collide.

REQUIREMENTS:

• 7+ years in media planning or integrated communications planning, including 2+ years managing planners.
• Deep command of media fundamentals and the ability to coach planners on them, from interrogating a brief through audience, channel mix, R&F, flighting, budget accuracy, and the investment handoff.
• A track record of driving measurable business outcomes (acquisition, sales, leads) on performance-driven businesses, alongside the brand work that feeds them.
• Experience planning across the full vehicle set, from broadcast and streaming to search, social, programmatic, and local media, with real depth in performance channels.
• Experience directly managing and developing planners, ideally across more than one account.
• Experience with businesses whose footprint varies market to market and that need local or regional media to work as hard as national is a strong plus, as is breadth across categories such as subscription services, retail, or QSR.
• Working fluency in measurement approaches (incrementality and geo testing, attribution, MMM), enough to be a real partner to analytics and to act on what they find.
• Experience working hand in hand with investment teams on in-flight optimization: reading performance, agreeing on shifts, and holding the plan to the business goal.
• Hands-on strength in the planning toolkit: flowcharting and budget management platforms, R&F and cross-media modeling, syndicated and competitive research tools, and Excel and PowerPoint.
• Comfort with active use of AI tools in planning workflows.
• A track record of contributing to new business pitches.
• A working understanding of scope, staffing, and how planning work gets resourced.
• Confidence and clarity as a communicator in front of clients, including when the message is a difficult one or the answer is needed on the spot.
• This position may require occasional travel for client meetings, agency events, and other business needs. The employee must be willing and able to travel as reasonably required, sometimes with limited advance notice.

Please Note: This is a hybrid position requiring a combination of in-office work at our Chicago location and remote work from home. The specific schedule will be finalized upon hire. We are only looking for candidates in/around the Chicago Metro Area and do not offer relocation assistance.

Position Salary

We are committed to providing salary ranges for all open positions. Please note that the specific compensation for this role will be determined based on your experience, qualifications, location, and internal equity considerations. The salary range for this position is: $100,000 - $120,000. This range reflects the base salary for this position.

NOVUS Benefits

NOVUS offers a full array of health care and wellness benefits, which currently includes medical, prescription, dental, vision, life and accidental death & dismemberment insurances, short and long-term disability, pre-tax flexible spending accounts, a health savings account, legal services, identity theft protection and an employee assistance program. Eligible employees are those that are full-time salaried or part-time salaried employees working 30 hours per week or more, as well as those whose eligibility is required by applicable state law. A group retirement savings plan is also available to all salaried employees. While the Company continually seeks to improve upon and add to its current benefits suite, it believes you will find the benefit programs as comprehensive as any in the industry.