Associate Director of Paid Media, Performance Video

Associate Director of Paid Media, Performance Video

Chicago, IL (remote); Columbus, OH (remote); Detroit, MI (remote); Kansas City, KS (remote); Madison, WI (remote); Saint Louis, MO (remote)

Launch Potato is a profitable digital media company that reaches over 30M+ monthly visitors through brands such as FinanceBuzz, All About Cookies, and OnlyInYourState.

As The Discovery and Conversion Company, our mission is to connect consumers with the world's leading brands through data-driven content and technology.

Headquartered in South Florida with a remote-first team spanning over 15 countries, we've built a high-growth, high-performance culture where speed, ownership, and measurable impact drive success.

Your Role

We're looking for a performance video growth leader to take full ownership of Launch Potato's video business, starting with YouTube and expanding into other video-first platforms over time.

This is a builder's role. You'll combine hands-on campaign management with high-level strategy, owning execution, P&L, pacing, reporting, growth targets, creative testing, and operating cadence. You build, optimize, and scale campaigns yourself while creating the systems and playbooks that let the channel grow beyond the limits most teams assume.

The initial focus is Insurance, with ownership across auto, home, health, ACA, Medicare, and other call-based or lead-based products. Each vertical has different customers, intent signals, creative needs, and monetization dynamics, so you'll adapt buying strategy and messaging by audience, product, and funnel stage. Over time the role expands into streaming, linear TV, Meta, TikTok, and other emerging video channels.

Experience

• 8+ years managing high-growth performance marketing portfolios.
• 3+ years managing and scaling YouTube, Meta, TikTok, and/or other video-first portfolios with budgets of $20M+/year.
• Experience scaling performance video in at least one major lead gen niche: affiliate, call-based, insurance, financial services, health, or marketplace.

What You'll Own

• P&L and performance: Full ownership of spend, pacing, reporting, operations, and profitability for Insurance YouTube campaigns. Target: 2x annualized run rate in year one at a minimum 110% ROAS.
• In-platform execution: Live in Google Ads, owning campaign architecture, audience strategy, bidding, budget allocation, conversion events, targeting, exclusions, and testing frameworks. You set the standard for execution quality others orient around.
• Multi-vertical scaling: Scale across the insurance verticals, tailoring strategy to each one's customer journey and economics, then expand into new insurance and financial services verticals to drive incremental growth.
• Lead and call generation: Build campaigns that drive both leads and inbound calls, with a working grasp of call quality, conversion rates, advertiser feedback, and downstream monetization. Move the metrics that matter: CTR, CVR, ROAS, call volume, lead quality, advertiser quality, margin.
• Creative strategy: Own creative from a performance lens (audience selection, messaging angles, funnel-stage alignment, hooks, offer positioning, formats, testing priorities). Partner with the creative team while using AI and self-serve tools to test fast and reduce bottlenecks.
• Communication: Proactively and clearly communicate performance, insights, and decisions to stakeholders, teams, and executives on a daily basis. This is not a reporting afterthought. You drive alignment across analytics, creative, sales, product, and leadership through direct, frequent, well-structured updates in Slack, Zoom, and executive-facing settings.
• Playbooks and team: Build repeatable operating systems for video buying, creative testing, audience expansion, call-based campaigns, and multi-vertical scaling. Generate learnings that push the whole paid media team forward. Build and lead a video-first team as investment scales.

Competencies

• Technical Mastery: Depth in Google/YouTube Ads architecture, bidding, audience strategy, conversion events, and analytics.
• Platform Execution: Builds and troubleshoots directly in-platform; spots tactical opportunities others miss.
• P&L Ownership: Manages budget at scale against growth, ROAS, and margin goals.
• Creative Strategy: Connects customer psychology and funnel stage to creative that performs.
• Multi-Vertical Buying: Scales across distinct customer types and product categories.
• Call-Based Marketing: Drives and optimizes inbound call traffic, intent, and quality.
• Communication: Articulates data, recommendations, and POV clearly for leadership alignment.
• Problem-Solving: Turns performance data into growth strategies across campaigns, creative, and landing pages.
• Adaptability: Tests, iterates, and runs multiple projects in a fast-paced environment.
• Leadership Potential: Ready to grow into building and leading a video team.
• Operational Efficiency: Builds campaigns to scale, even when that means breaking from standard best practice.

Must Haves

• Video-first scaling track record: Proven success profitably scaling brands across video performance platforms, with deep hands-on expertise in YouTube, Meta, and TikTok.
• Hands-on platform execution: Comfortable living in-platform and building campaigns directly (campaign architecture, audience and bidding strategy, conversion event setup, testing design, budget pacing, daily optimization), not managing from a distance.
• Affiliate lead gen: Strong grasp of monetization dynamics, advertiser quality metrics, funnel optimization, and scaling traffic profitably across variable-payout partner ecosystems.
• Multi-vertical buying: Experience buying across multiple verticals at once, adapting structure, audience, creative, and messaging to distinct customer journeys. Insurance experience (auto, home, health, ACA, Medicare) especially valuable.
• Analytical depth: Proficiency in BI tools (Looker, Google Analytics) plus advanced Excel/Sheets (pivot tables, VLOOKUP, regression, correlation, performance modeling).
• Video creative judgment: Strong understanding of what drives high-performing video (YouTube ABCDs, hooks, category entry points, funnel stage, audience intent, offer positioning, trending formats) and how to adapt creative per platform. Able to think like the customer and map angle, audience, and format to funnel stage.
• AI-enabled speed: Able to move quickly on creative testing using AI and self-serve tools (Higgsfield, Runway, CapCut, MidJourney, Gemini, VEO3, Claude, or similar) to develop concepts and iterate without leaning on centralized creative resources.
• Cross-functional partnership: Builds strong relationships across analytics, sales/account management, leadership, vertical stakeholders, creative, product, and external vendors.
• P&L ownership: Demonstrated experience owning P&L, hitting aggressive growth and profitability goals, and building repeatable playbooks that scale wins across brands and verticals.
• Communication: Exceptional, proactive written and verbal communication; comfortable presenting insights and influencing decisions through Slack, Zoom, and executive-facing updates.

Nice To Haves

• Measurement sophistication: MMM, incrementality, geo holdouts, or brand lift to quantify video's halo across channels.
• Lead gen verticals beyond insurance: personal finance, lending, credit cards, home services, consumer subscriptions.
• Scalable best practices: Team building, mentoring channel owners, or formalizing playbooks across brands.
• Competitive intelligence tools: SimilarWeb, AdBeat, Ahrefs, SpyFu, Pathmatics.
• Specific Compliance: Background in regulated marketing environments (consumer finance, insurance, healthcare).

Total Compensation

Base salary is set according to market rates for the nearest major metro and varies based on Launch Potato's Levels Framework.