Senior Director, Health Strategy & Insights

Job Title

Senior Director, Health Strategy & Insights

Job Description

About the Position:

Dotdash Meredith is looking for a Senior Director, Health Strategy & Insights to lead our research strategy for our Health vertical  (Core endemic portfolio: Verywell Health, Verywell Mind, Verywell Fit, and Health). Dotdash Meredith is a top resource in health on the internet, reaching over 200 million unique users a month. Our high-quality content is aimed at helping people make decisions, find inspiration, and take action. 

Our first-party data is at the heart of informing everything we do--and not just on our health sites, but across powerful brands in home, food & beverage, tech, travel, family, beauty, and entertainment (including powerhouses like People, Better Homes and Gardens, Travel and Leisure, and AllRecipes).  This robust first-party data is especially important when it comes to the patient journey--at Dotdash Meredith we don’t just see patients from an endemic health perspective; we see and seek to help them as whole humans, understanding how their health journeys connect to and impact their everyday lives and supporting them in those arenas. This data set is supplemented with our own primary research capabilities and robust syndicated data, providing a rich opportunity for uncovering insights and translating them to actionable recommendations for the overall health business.

This role is an opportunity to lead the health-focused research team, going beyond providing insights to ensure your team is actively helping shape the strategy and execution for the health vertical at Dotdash Meredith. The role is located in our New York office, with a hybrid work schedule aiming for 3 days a week in-office (specific days are not fixed, and are flexible according to business needs).

About the Team:

This role reports to the VP of Research and Insights (on the larger Data Strategy & Insights team), with an overall purpose of using all of our insight into our users (both in interacting with our content and advertising campaigns) and the industries we work with to inform business strategies and decisions across the company--including supporting our ad sales, editorial, custom content, product, licensing, and commerce teams. Moving beyond data dumps, our team strives to translate insights into specific recommendations for both strategy and activation. 

The Data Strategy and Insights team is comprised of 4 key sub-teams:

Research & Insights: This team draws on first party, DDM primary research, syndicated data sources, data partnerships (e.g., a custom engagement with IQVIA in health), industry data, and publicly available information to understand our users and the broader set of consumers in order to inform business decisions both for internal stakeholders and external advertising partners. They are also the team responsible for developing and recommending intent targets using our proprietary tool, D/Cipher. This team is verticalized with a vertical lead over each topic area, including: finance, auto/tech/travel, beauty & entertainment, home/food/retail/CPG, and health.

This role leads the health vertical on this team.

Measurement Innovation: This team is responsible for conducting (whether with third-party measurement partners or internally) campaign effectiveness studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of media spend with DDM, as well as identifying learning from that performance to inform future partnership decisions. They are also responsible for driving continuous innovation to ensure that DDM is preparing for the cookieless future in measurement and can always offer our partners the highest quality offerings appropriate to their needs. 

Specific to health, we have a small team who conduct proprietary MMM analyses focused on understanding and quantifying script lift as well as providing comprehensive insights to accompany the outcome data. 

Primary Research: This team is responsible for conducting primary research (whether qualitative or quantitative) internally and in partnership with third-party market research firms. This work focuses on understanding consumers in their moments of need to inform business decisions inside DDM and with our advertising partners. In addition, they build and manage our user communities across all verticals, engaging with them when appropriate to augment our understanding of behaviors we’re seeing onsites (the what) with the values, motivations, and needs driving those behaviors (the why).

Data Journalism: This team is responsible for drawing on multiple information sources (including conducting their own research) to create research-driv