Associate Director, Paid Media (San Diego)

Associate Director, Paid Media & Performance Creative

About KaramMD Skin

KaramMD Skin is a prestige anti-aging skincare brand founded by facial plastic surgeon Dr. Amir Karam. Built on clinical science, ingredient integrity, and a distinct point of view on skin aging, our mission is simple: help people look as young as they feel.

We’re growing quickly and looking for a creative performance marketer who can help build a paid acquisition engine that is as distinctive and disciplined as the brand itself. Someone who combines bold creative instincts with analytical rigor—and understands that great performance creative should strengthen the brand, not dilute it.

About the role

We’re looking for someone who lives at the intersection of paid media, performance creative, and growth .

You’ll own how we translate the KaramMD story, product science, founder authority, customer insights, and visible results into paid creative that performs. You’ll develop the paid media strategy, generate and test creative concepts, brief creators, manage our paid media agency, and use performance data to determine what we make and fund next.

You should be equally comfortable developing a great hook and digging into CAC, LTV, retention, and attribution.

You’ll report to our VP of Growth and work closely with our founder, Finance, and our creative, social, analytics, and agency partners.

What you’ll do

Build winning paid creative

• Own paid creative strategy across Meta, Google/YouTube, TikTok, and emerging channels.
• Generate a constant pipeline of concepts, hooks, messages, formats, and creator ideas grounded in our brand story, approved messaging, product truths, and customer insights.
• Translate complex science, product differentiation, clinical evidence, and customer outcomes into compelling concepts that drive action without sacrificing credibility.
• Concept and art-direct static, video, UGC, creator, and other performance assets with designers and editors.
• Translate media performance into clear creative briefs: what to test, why we’re testing it, and what we learned.
• Identify creative fatigue, audience signals, and emerging opportunities and turn those insights into the next generation of creative.
• Ensure the story holds from ad to landing page to checkout.
• Protect KaramMD’s brand identity. We are not interested in copying what every other DTC skincare brand is doing simply because it is currently performing.

Develop creator content that performs

• Write sharp creator briefs with clear hooks, proof points, must-says and must-avoids while leaving room for an authentic creator voice.
• Help identify and vet creators, UGC talent, and expert voices who fit a prestige, science-first brand.
• Give direct creative feedback and push for alternate hooks, iterations, or reshoots when needed.
• Partner with our internal team and agencies to build an always-on pipeline of creator content for paid acquisition.
• Maintain rigorous standards around usage rights, FTC requirements, and claims accuracy.

Test, learn, and optimize

• Build a structured testing roadmap across concepts, messages, hooks, creators, formats, audiences, offers, and landing pages.
• Establish a clear hypothesis and success metric for every meaningful test.
• Break down performance by creative concept, hook, message, creator, format, and placement—not simply by campaign.
• Identify winners quickly, scale what works, and document learnings so every dollar we spend teaches us something.
• Build a performance-creative playbook that gets smarter over time.

Own paid media performance

• Own the paid media plan, execution, and performance within our overall growth strategy and approved budget.
• Manage our paid media agency day to day, set priorities, challenge assumptions, and hold partners accountable for results.
• Recommend how spend should be allocated and reallocated across channels based on performance and business objectives.
• Measure performance through CAC, LTV, retention, new-customer acquisition, subscription growth, profitability, attribution, and incrementality—not ROAS alone.
• Use platform lift studies, holdouts, attribution tools, and other methods to understand what is actually driving incremental growth.
• Present weekly and monthly performance with a clear point of view on what we should make, test, scale, reduce, or stop.

Partner across the business

• Work with the VP of Growth and Finance to establish forecasts, overall marketing budgets, and financial guardrails around CAC, LTV, retention, and profitability.
• Partner with social, creative, site, and email/SMS so winning ideas strengthen the entire customer experience.
• Work closely with our founder on medical, scientific, and expert-led content.
• Support product launches, promotions, and major brand initiatives.

You’ll love this job if

• You’re highly creative. You have more ideas than time to make them.
• You understand that performance and brand are not competing objectives .
• You can turn complicated science into simple, compelling creative without exaggerating it.
• You’re rigorous. You test with discipline and don’t fall in love with your own ideas.
• You’re analytical. You’re as comfortable discussing creative hooks as CAC, LTV, retention, and incrementality.
• You’re a builder. You like creating systems, not simply operating someone else’s playbook.
• You understand the prestige skincare customer and know that trust has to be earned through credibility and results—not hype.

Qualifications

• 8–10+ years in performance, growth, or paid media at a DTC/eCommerce consumer brand. Meaningful experience in beauty, skincare, wellness, or another science-backed consumer category is required.
• Demonstrated experience managing and scaling meaningful paid-media budgets across Meta, Google/YouTube, TikTok, or comparable channels.
• A portfolio of paid creative concepts and campaigns you personally helped develop, with measurable results.
• Proven ability to ideate, brief, and art-direct high-performing creative, including UGC and creator content.
• Experience translating complex or science-backed concepts into compelling consumer communication.
• Experience building structured creative and media testing programs with clear hypotheses and documented learnings.
• Strong understanding of CAC, LTV, retention, subscription economics, attribution, incrementality, and profitability.
• Fluency in Meta Ads Manager, TikTok Ads Manager, Google Ads, Google Analytics, and attribution/creative analytics tools.
• Strong Excel/Sheets skills.
• Clear, confident communicator who can present results and recommendations to a founder and leadership team.
• Self-starter who thrives in a fast-moving entrepreneurial environment and is equally comfortable setting strategy and rolling up their sleeves.

Nice to have

• Experience in prestige or clinical skincare, particularly marketing to women 40+.
• Experience with subscription businesses where retention matters as much as acquisition.
• Relationships with dermatologists, aestheticians, medical experts, or skin-science creators.
• Experience with TikTok Shop, Amazon, retail, or omnichannel growth.
• Hands-on familiarity with Figma, Canva, CapCut, Premiere, Motion, Foreplay, ShopMy, LTK, Cohley, or similar tools.

Compensation

Base salary range: $130–$160k, plus bonus eligibility and benefits. Final compensation will depend on experience, skills, and qualifications.