VP, Audience Strategy & Activation

Be essential at Cars Commerce

At Cars Commerce, we’re fanatical about simplifying everything about car buying and selling. We do right by our customers and consumers to better connect the industry with simplified and tierless technology to enhance, measure and drive local automotive retail. Whether through our No.1 most recognized marketplace, Cars.com, our industry-leading digital experience, Dealer Inspire, our trade and appraisal technology, AccuTrade, or our new Cars Commerce Media Network, Cars Commerce is essential for success in the automotive industry.  

No one ever travels alone here: at its core, Cars Commerce is collaboration. In fact, it’s built into the very fabric of our shared values. We like to say we Rise Together – putting people at the center of what we do, from consumer to customer to community. Life at Cars Commerce makes it easy when we share the ethos to be Open to All, encouraging open-minded communication because we know diverse thinking yields better outcomes. But critical to our success is Caring to Challenge and Taking Ownership, fueling a competitive spirit in a respectful environment where we think about tomorrow but act today. At our foundation, we have integrity, Doing the Right Thing, even when it’s hard. It’s our shared commitment to these values that makes Cars Commerce a place where growth becomes not only possible, but downright unavoidable.

But don’t take our word for it. As a U.S. News & World Report Best Company to Work For in 2024, we're obsessive about the employee experience. We are among the top 20% being declared “Best” of our industry based on six critical factors that are important to employee wellbeing, like quality of pay, benefits, work life balance and more.

About the Role:

Reporting to the Chief Marketing Officer, the Vice President of Audience Strategy and Activation oversees the design, implementation, and measurement of the Cars Commerce approach to audience-based media products and internal audience usage for Marketing purposes.

A member of Marketing Leadership and highly influential leader within the extended executive team, this role interfaces with Data, Product, Corporate Marketing, Analytics, Marketing Services, and Revenue teams to ensure our approach in these areas is future-proof and provides maximum value to internal stakeholders and external clients.

In addition to cross-functional leadership, this person will develop and manage relationships with key third parties to augment and optimize internal audience and outcome data and co-lead the development of a MarTech stack that allows for unified execution and measurement across channels.

The VP is directly responsible for managing various audience-based media buying and operations activities, including supply-side strategy for the Cars.com site and margin delivery of all media products.

This person will also lead the Marketing Analytics team and Marketing Technology team, providing audience strategy, media analysis, and ad ops capabilities on behalf of the entire Marketing organization. 

This executive is expected to represent Cars Commerce and Cars Commerce Media Network externally at industry events.

Responsibilities include:

• Optimizing zero-party and first-party data strategies to drive media efficiency and audience insights
• Leveraging and selecting enterprise data products and platforms, 3rd party data sets, resolved identity data, and partner data to maximize audience size, efficiency and performance
• Designing and executing a marketing-wide measurement strategy and audience segmentation that addresses the full funnel of automotive shopping behavior
• Establishing clear and measurable media attribution methodologies that track engagement and value of multiple conversion events across Cars Commerce products and properties
• Working closely with internal Media Buying and Lifecycle teams to ensure alignment with audience best practices and emerging KPI’s
• Establishing a culture of testing and data-driven decision making in all aspects of our business
• Working closely with the Data and Engineering teams to introduce new projects to the roadmap and providing actionable insights to relevant stakeholders and teams
• Managing the Marketing Analytics team, which provides reporting, dashboards and insights for internal Marketing teams and Cars Commerce Media Network
• Directing media activities for various audience-focused executions (ie. Programmatic, Social, Native, etc) for both internal marketing efforts and client-facing products
• Overseeing Ad Product Delivery for the Cars.com site, ensuring our o