Associate Director, Zulumatic

Zulu Alpha Kilo

• $110K — $140K *
Media
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 7+ years of experience in media investment, activation, operations, or analytics across various channels
  • 2+ years of team management or mentoring experience
  • Hands-on expertise in at least two channels: paid social, programmatic, search, or video/CTV
  • Strong skills in reporting and analytics, including dashboard management and KPI setting
  • Experience in vendor management and account-level negotiations

Responsibilities

  • Manage account-level negotiations and budget stewardship for assigned clients
  • Oversee trafficking processes, ensuring readiness and compliance with brand safety
  • Guide technical setups and maintain naming standards for ad servers and tracking tools
  • Monitor and optimize campaign performance across spend, reach, and frequency
  • Develop and evolve performance dashboards, translating data into actionable insights
  • Coordinate in-market testing and document findings for future strategies
  • Align with finance on monthly actualization and invoice reconciliation
  • Enhance processes and governance related to campaign execution and data privacy
  • Collaborate cross-functionally to ensure client goals are met through effective campaign execution

Benefits

  • Opportunity to mentor and lead a small team
  • Engagement in a fast-paced, client-facing environment
  • Access to advanced tools and technologies for media buying
  • Collaborative culture that values input from all team members
  • Focus on professional development and continuous improvement
Full Job Description
Who We're Looking For:

We're in search of an Associate Director, Investment & Analytics who's obsessed with turning plans into performance and excited to help scale a fast-growing discipline. This client-facing role will oversee the day-to-day investment, trafficking, optimization and reporting work across a portfolio of Zulumatic clients. By bringing systems thinking together with strong platform and vendor knowledge, they will help ensure execution is precise, transparent and connected to business growth.

We believe media buying should be fast-moving and transparent, and operational excellence in execution gets us there. Analytics is intertwined in that process, closing the feedback loop with consumers and generating insights that can inform ongoing investment and future planning.

What You'll Be Doing:

Based in Toronto, this role will manage and mentor a small team of campaign managers and analysts while staying close to the work. In partnership with senior media leadership, they will be accountable for day-to-day delivery across assigned clients and bring a strong understanding of the transactions that underpin media ecosystems and the variables affecting reach, frequency, pacing and overall performance. With an open and collaborative approach, they will build constructive relationships with creative leaders, team members, clients and partners. More specifically, you will:
  • Investment & vendor management: Manage account-level negotiations and package development; steward budgets, manage SLAs, share category intelligence and hold partners accountable for delivery; maintain financial discipline across assigned accounts
  • Trafficking & launch readiness: Oversee specs, tags, assets, QA and flighting; build and review technical spec sheets, manage deadlines and uphold brand-safety requirements
  • Platforms & administration: Guide actualization and reconciliation; oversee CM360/ad server setups, pixels, GTM and UTMs; maintain taxonomy and naming standards
  • Optimization & pacing: Monitor pacing across spend, reach and frequency; direct creative rotation, audience and placement tuning, and frequency caps; maintain clear change control
  • Measurement & reporting: Help evolve source-of-truth dashboards and visuals; translate performance data into clear, decision-ready actions for clients and internal teams
  • In-market testing: Partner with Strategy and Analytics to turn learning agendas into test plans; coordinate lift and incrementality reads, contribute inputs to MMM/MTA where applicable, and document findings and recommendations after each flight
  • Finance alignment: Manage monthly actualization, invoice reconciliation and variance resolution with vendors and Finance for assigned clients
  • Process & governance: Maintain and improve playbooks, checklists, naming conventions and approval paths; support privacy, consent and data-governance requirements
  • Technology stewardship: Contribute to the evaluation, rollout and day-to-day governance of tools that power buying, including audience insight, targeting, verification/suitability, reporting/BI, and clean-room or attribution tools where applicable
  • Team & cross-functional collaboration: Set clear priorities and review outputs, work shoulder-to-shoulder with Strategy, Creative/Production and Client Leadership to turn client goals into well-executed campaigns

Who You Are:
  • Data-literate and practical: You value rigor and have a bias towards action that builds clarity
  • A clear and concise communicator: You interpret data and deliver insights that simplify complexity
  • Detail-exact:You're focused on accuracy and delivery. Nothing ships without clean tags, specs and QA
  • A collaborative operator: You bring people across disciplines together to solve problems

What You Bring:
  • 7+ years of progressive experience in media investment, activation, operations and/or analytics across a mix of paid social, programmatic, search and video/CTV
  • 2+ years managing or mentoring team members and reviewing the quality of campaign execution, reporting and client deliverables
  • Hands-on depth in at least two channels across paid social, programmatic, search or video/CTV, plus strong working knowledge of ad servers
  • Strong reporting and analytics capability building or managing source-of-truth dashboards, setting KPIs, interpreting survey data and contributing to attribution
  • Vendor-management experienceacross account-level negotiations, packaging, delivery management and issue resolution with publishers, platforms and data partners

If you're a media thinker who loves building systems, developing people and making execution better every day, we want you on the team.

Compensation for this role ranges from $110,000 to $140,000 CAD, depending on experience.

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