Senior Manager, Connections & Media

Job Description Summary:

The Senior Manager, Connections & Media is responsible—together with Brand, IMX, Content, and the cross-functional marketing community—for building and orchestrating best-in-class, end-to-end (E2E) connection plans across the most relevant paid, earned, owned, and shared touchpoints for the U.S. market. This leader translates business strategy into communications strategy and an optimal connections architecture, develops prioritized investment strategies, and ensures plans are fully integrated with core creative ideas to deliver brand and commercial objectives. The role also oversees media investment negotiations and activation in partnership with our agency ecosystem, ensuring governance, brand safety, and measurement are embedded throughout the planning and execution cycle.

Function Related Activities/Key Responsibilities:

Connections Strategy & Planning (E2E)

• Lead the development of consumer-first, audience-led connection strategies and market-appropriate plans across paid, earned, owned, and shared channels.

• Translate brand objectives into clear communications architecture, journeys, and flights that balance upper-funnel brand building with lower-funnel commerce outcomes.

• Integrate connection plans with core creative platforms and content assets, ensuring platform-specific creative and placements.

• Partner with national and field teams to de-average national assumptions where relevant and reflect local consumer, competitive, and customer dynamics.

Investment Strategy & Activation Oversight

• Develop budget allocations and channel mix recommendations based on opportunity sizing, historical performance, and market signals.

• Provide strategic direction for media investment and act as day-to-day steward with agency partners across TV/CTV, audio, OOH, programmatic, social, search, and emerging formats.

• Oversee trafficking, pacing, quality control, brand safety, and compliance; surface optimization recommendations and implications for future cycles.

• Direct and/or support negotiations of paid media investments in partnership with agencies to maximize effectiveness and efficiency.

Audience, Data & Insights

• Leverage 1st/2nd/3rd-party data and unified data platforms to refine audience strategies (e.g., geo-segmentation, propensity, lookalike modeling).

• Identify high-value cohorts, media consumption patterns, and retailer/shopper contexts to personalize messaging and placements.

• Craft clear, data-grounded briefs for agencies; challenge legacy assumptions and pilot new channels/formats for hard-to-reach audiences.

Measurement & Analytics Integration

• Set brand- and market-level KPIs (e.g., ROAS, incremental sales lift, brand lift, foot traffic) and ensure tracking/tagging are in place.

• Partner with Marketing Analytics/Insights on MMM, MTA, lift studies, and competitive spend analyses; translate findings into optimizations.

• Lead post-mortems to diagnose strategy/creative/execution drivers, codify learnings, and feed a continuous test-and-learn loop.

Cross-Functional Alignment & Integration

• Serve as the bridge between Media and Brand, IMX, Creative, PR/Comms, FLM/Commercial, and Customer/Retail teams to embed connections into broader plans.

• Translate business priorities (e.g., driving trial for a new cohort or supporting a key customer initiative) into actionable, audience-first media briefs.

• Maintain tight feedback loops during execution, sharing performance updates and rapidly reflecting budget, promo, or inventory changes in plans.

Agency & Partner Management

• Provide clear strategic direction to agency teams; uphold high standards in planning rigor, creativity, and operational excellence.

• Evaluate agency performance against benchmarks and recommend resource or scope adjustments where needed.

• Identify, nurture, and leverage external partnerships, including retail media networks and platform partners.

Innovation

• Scout, pilot, and scale modern activation opportunities (e.g., CTV/addressable, dynamic DOOH, local creators/influencers, shoppable/social commerce).

• Champion AI-powered tools for budget allocation, audience expansion, and creative personalization; set hypotheses and measurement plans for each pilot.

• Document learnings from both successful and unsuccessful tests to sharpen future efforts.

Leadership & Development

• Promote a culture of curiosity, ac