Associate Director, Search

WE HAVE CREATED A WORLD WHERE ART AND SCIENCE ARE BEST FRIENDS

Known is a modern marketing company engineered for the unprecedented opportunities and challenges facing marketers today. We are about 250+ people strong, pairing PhD data scientists with award-winning creatives, strategists, engineers and expert research teams to produce some of the most innovative and cutting-edge creative work in culture. We believe that when creative truly collaborates with science, strategy, and technology, amazing things can happen. 

Ad Age touted that “Known may be the ultimate example of a full-service agency,” and honored us with top ten status on The Agency A-List for 2024 & 2025, and as Ad Age’s Data & Insights Agency of the year for a record third year in a row. Without our incredible partnerships with our clients, spanning across the leading brands in finance, technology, entertainment, media, CPG, real estate, and many other categories, honors like this could not be possible, and also have helped us earn additional awards and recognitions over the years like: Emmys, Clios, Effies, Cannes Lions Awards, ProMax Agency of the Year, Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas, Digiday’s 2025 Best AI Platform and Digiday’s Most Innovative Media Agency, to name a few.

We couldn’t create this award-winning work without seeking out and hiring the best talent. What does it mean to be a Knowner? We are curious innovators, knowledge-hunters who are constantly challenging ourselves to do better and be better for our clients, for our team and for our world at large. Our offices around the U.S. are open and while most of our people work in a hybrid setting, we are a distributed workforce with a number of Knowners working remotely.

BUT ENOUGH ABOUT US, LET'S TALK ABOUT YOU

About the role:

Known’s Media Science team uses advanced analytics, machine learning, statistics, and algorithms to plan and optimize advertising dollars. We partner with our clients to translate their business goals into meaningful metrics, and buy media across all channels to drive those target outcomes.  

As an Associate Director, Search, you own performance and optimization for the campaigns you’re on. You will lead paid search team members in daily account management, strategy creation and implementation, tracking performance against goals, and adherence to deadlines, among other topics.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Driving performance for our media campaigns and amazing our clients, both by meeting their targets and creating insightful narratives
• Design and author overall team strategy and approach to paid search management across multiple clients
• Ensure best practice in all paid search activities as well as knowledge sharing across teams.
• Manages and develops direct reports and is responsible for complete team development.
• Be a point of escalation, identifying and resolving problems in a client-centric environment and coordinating efforts across the team.
• Manage achievement of KPIs and deadlines.
• Understanding the client’s overall business objectives and translating them into paid media
• Coordinate search strategy with other media channels
• Day-to-day management and coordination of advertising spend you’re responsible for, including working with channel specialists on strategy, insights, optimizations, and improvements
• Occasionally communicating how modern techniques (e.g., ML models, optimization algorithms, and automation) can be used to optimize KPIs 
• Building analyses, stories, and slides for client media plans and reports

WHO YOU ARE AND WHAT YOU HAVE

• A degree from a well-regarded college or university
• 5+ years of hands-on experience in management of the buying, strategy, and execution of highly data-driven performance Search campaigns, ideally in a digital agency environment
• Understanding of how Paid Search / SEM works with Display Media, Paid Social, SEO, Mobile, Social, and Attribution
• Broad range of experience managing across verticals and direct response/branded campaigns

Skills, Abilities, and Knowledge

• Understanding of the basic stats and math that inform smart media buying
• Superb communication and presentation skills
• Comfort going in-platform to pull analyses when necessary
• In-platform experience with, Google and Bing Ads
• Expertise designing high performance media Search campaigns --e.g. allocation, measurement plan, strategy, and scaling budgets
• Experience multi-tasking in a fast-paced environment is a plus
• Experience working directly with data scientists