Media Director (Pharma)

The Media Director is a senior member of the GA media practice who serves as a strategic media leader for GA and their clients. They oversee and guide the development and execution of comprehensive media strategies across their direct teams, and the MD is responsible for aligning these strategies within Good Apple’s overall goals, ensuring effective use of media budgets, fostering collaboration across disciplines, and driving creation of bespoke media and analytics solutions that drive our client’s business impact. They play a crucial role in maintaining their client partnerships, managing/negotiating vendor relationships, and their direct team skills/professional development. The MD is starting to get more involved with overall media team strategic planning, staying abreast of industry trends, and driving innovation in media campaigns across the media organization. Leadership, strategic thinking and a deep understanding of media channels and technologies are essential for success in this role.

• Media Team Management & Leadership
  • Partners with senior media team members to build an overall successful media organization
  • Take a leadership role in the recruitment process to attract, evaluate and select top talent
    • Aim for diversity in skill sets and backgrounds to enhance team capabilities
  • Collaborate with senior media leadership to align media strategies with overall organizational goals
  • Ensures that media efforts contribute to the broader success of the organization
  • Ensure that team members are informed about the broader company vision and how their work contributes to it.
  • Cultivates a work environment that encourages positivity, creativity, collaboration and innovation
  • Conduct regular team-building activities to enhance camaraderie and communication within the team
  • Fosters a sense of unity and shared purpose through team-building initiatives
  • Defines specific, measurable, and achievable performance goals for each team member, aligned with overall departmental and organizational objectives.
  • Regularly assess team members’ performance through constructive and timely reviews - provides feedback on strengths, areas for improvement and areas of outstanding contributions
  • Works collaboratively with team members to create individual development plans, career growth and opportunities for skill enhancement.
  • Identifies training needs within the team and implements professional development programs to address skill gaps and enhance overall team capabilities
  • Stays informed about industry developments and shares relevant knowledge with the team
  • Conducts regular training sessions to keep the team updated on best practices and emerging trends
  • Encourage and support team members in pursuing relevant certifications and educational opportunities that enhance individual and team expertise
  • Provides opportunities for skill development by strategically assigning tasks aligned with growth areas
  • Empowers team members to take ownership of projects, fostering a sense of accountability and autonomy.
  • Provides guidance and support while allowing space for creativity and independent decision-making.
  • Allocates resources efficiently to ensure the team's success in executing media campaigns.
  • Monitors workloads and adjusts team assignments as needed to maintain a balanced workload.
  • Collaborates with other department heads to share resources and expertise as necessary.
  • Encourage cross-functional projects to promote a holistic approach to marketing and media within the organization.
  • Address conflicts or issues within the team promptly and professionally.
  • Mediate disputes when necessary, fostering a positive and collaborative team dynamic.
  • Recognizes and celebrates team achievements, both big and small.

• Strategic Media Leadership
  • Responsible for ensuring the team’s media strategy aligns with the brand’s SIs and goals
    • Collaborate with key stakeholders to analyze overall business objectives and marketing goals, to develop cross-discipline solutions
  • Align media strategies with broader organizational goals, ensuring contribution to Good Apple KPIs
    • Provides strategic guidance to align the team’s efforts with broader GA goals
    • Ensures teams are adhering to overall GA media team goals - 2024 goals include scorecard based media planning, R/F measurement, migration to self-service, preferred managed service partners
  • Fiscally responsible for the media budget in partnership with the senior media team and Account
  • Leads internal cross-discipline collaboration & integration, swim lane identification and execution oversight
  • Establishes Good Apple and the media team as thought leaders internally and externally
  • Fosters an agile mindset within the media team, enabling quick adaptation to changing market conditions
  • Stays informed about media-related regulations and compliance standards - ensures that all media activities adhere to legal and ethical guidelines
  • Embraces flexibility in strategies and tactics to respond to evolving industry and client landscape
  • Creates high-level CMO level decks that show how Good Apple is driving business impact and value 
  • Leads new business pitches - responsibilities include brainstorming, media strategy development, tactical slides, and pitching 
  • Leads the team to develop value creating client deliverables - rebates, savings analysis, competitive analysis
  • Leads future-proofing thinking and strategic roadmap developments incorporating latest GA products and industry technology (i.e. AI)
  • Represents the organization at industry events, contributes to publications and participates in relevant speaking engagements
  • When applicable, presents the overall strategy of the media plan and larger strategic presentations - larger value-add wins (i.e. rebate, savings decks) across brands to senior level client leadership (i.e. procurement)

• Client Partnership
  • Partners with account lead (i.e. AD) to drive client satisfaction, deliver business outcomes and to drive account/business innovation and opportunities
  • Partnership with account lead should serve as leadership example to the team with successful communication, strategic synergy, proactive, positive dialogue and continued encourage of the team to execute in support of the client’s vision
  • Leads and guides client conversations to empower them with the media decisions and strategic rationale for the media decisions that drive business impact
  • Communicates persuasively tying back to business and media landscape, audience trends, client business climate, consumer/HCP insights
  • Supports and actively leads client’s media education - explains media concepts, l eads Media 101s, spearheads Media Day efforts and brokers publisher relations when applicable
  • Guides the team to provide the appropriate level of detail based on receiving audience - tactical information vs high-level CMO communication needs
    • Assembling the right resources/support to achieve comms needs
  • Presents to the most senior level clients (i.e. procurement, CMO) 
  • Translates clients wishes/request into actionable plan for internal cross-discipline team - the what, the why, the how 
  • Remains up to date with marketplace and industry trends and overall understanding and landscape of client business
  • Creates and proactively socializes POVs along with presenting to clients

• Vendor/Partner Relationship Management
  • Negotiates larger account-wide or agency-wide partnerships with media, data, or measurement partners 
  • Drives awareness and education of new channels/partners among the media team by organizing relevant learning sessions and sending out POVs/trends 
  • Educates their team on the larger media landscape by organizing training sessions and sending out industry POVs
  • Promotes a culture of curiosity and continuous learning by encouraging team members to ask questions and to setup new partner learning sessions 
  • Teaches the team how to negotiate using techniques like outcomes-based and value creation and how to measure negotiated savings using SQAD benchmarking data
  • Regularly audits and guides the team on how to evaluate and analyze partner proposals using a scorecard based framework
  • Responsible for making sure the team is reviewing Ts and Cs to ensure desirable payment terms, out clauses and sequential liability; instills importance of desirable Ts and Cs among internal media team 
  • Responsible for escalation and resolution of partner issues, bringing senior media team members and other relevant team members along to teach/guide them on partner conflict resolution techniques

• Media Innovation
  • Inspirational leader who motivates their team to develop transformative media solutions at all levels
  • Fosters a mindset of continuous improvement, regularly seeking feedback and identifying areas of enhancement in team processes and workflows
  • Creates frameworks, processes and structures for the team to develop media innovation ideas - meeting of the minds, cross-discipline and cross-team share-outs
  • Partners with discipline leads to ideate, detail, phase and execute opportunities that improve and make GA workflows more efficient and cost-effective → Adops solutions, PRISMA adoption, AI & automation
  • Leads key GA agency initiatives that drive differentiation in the marketplace - proprietary products marketing
  • Leads the team to develop inspirational, mind-blowing Media Days that wow and inspire the client to expand beyond their media horizons
  • Attends industry conferences and studies market trends; shares their strategic POVs on how teams could leverage it for their clients.
  • Partners with the other senior media leads on larger strategic initiatives - adops integration, video education/expansion

• Requires minimal supervision, relies on advanced experience/judgment
• 8+ years media planning experience and 4+ years of management experience
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Negotiation and influence skills - steeped in required industry, brand, and competitive knowledge