Audience Strategy Manager

This job was posted by https://illinoisjoblink.illinois.gov : For more information, please see: https://illinoisjoblink.illinois.gov/jobs/13741473 For further inquiries regarding the following opportunity, please contact one of our Talent Specialists, Manoj at (224) 303-4454 or Tenish at (224) 507-1292 Title: Audience Strategy Manager\ Location: Bolingbrook, IL (Remote candidates will be considered, however preference is given to local candidates)\ Duration: 5 Months with possible conversion to Full Time Only W2 candidates are eligible for this position. Third-party or C2C candidates will not be considered. Description:\ Position Summary:\ Client Media is seeking a strategic and operational leader to own the strategy, execution, and continuous evolution of our audience capabilities. The Manager, Audience Strategy & Operations will serve as the subject matter expert for audience targeting and activation, translating advertiser objectives into actionable audience strategies while ensuring those strategies can be executed effectively across client Media's activation ecosystem.\ This role will own the end-to-end audience operating model, including audience planning, agency workflows, distribution, activation readiness, platform management, and operational governance. The Manager will partner closely with Sales, Account Management, Audience Product, Data, Reporting & Measurement, Marketing Technology, external agencies, and publisher partners to ensure client Media audiences are strategically relevant, operationally scalable, and delivered accurately and on time.\ The role will also evaluate audience performance, identify best practices and opportunities for improvement, and help shape the evolution of client Media's audience product and capabilities. Success in this role requires equal comfort operating at the strategic level and getting into the operational details necessary to solve complex problems and improve the client experience. You'll Accomplish All Of This By:\ Audience Strategy & Client Advisory\ Serve as the subject matter expert for client Media audience strategy and targeting.\ Translate advertiser objectives, campaign goals, and business requirements into strategic audience recommendations across client Media channels.\ Partner with Sales and Account Management to develop audience targeting recommendations for client opportunities, campaign planning, and strategic conversations.\ Advise internal stakeholders and clients on audience capabilities, limitations, requirements, and activation considerations, ensuring expectations are aligned with what can be operationally delivered.\ Develop and maintain audience targeting best practices by campaign objective, category, audience type, and activation channel.\ Identify opportunities to improve audience relevance, precision, scale, and usability while balancing advertiser needs with available first-party data and activation capabilities.\ Audience Operations & Activation\ Own the end-to-end audience operating model from audience request through development, distribution, activation, maintenance, and deprecation.\ Manage day-to-day audience operations with external agency and technology partners, establishing clear workflows, ownership, timelines, and escalation paths.\ Identify recurring operational challenges, root causes, and points of friction within the audience workflow and lead solutions to improve efficiency, quality, and speed to activation.\ Establish and maintain operational standards and governance to ensure audiences are appropriately named, documented, distributed, maintained, and retired.\ Oversee audience distribution and activation readiness across publisher platforms, proactively identifying issues that may impact campaign launch timing or audience availability.\ Manage audience platform hygiene and cleanup, including identification and retirement of outdated, duplicative, or o longer needed audiences.\ Monitor audience readiness and distribution timelines across publishers and partners and proactively communicate potential risks to campaign stakeholders.\ Serve as the escalation point for complex audience activation issues and coordinate resolution across agency, publisher, technology, and internal teams.\ Audience Product & Capability Development\ Evaluate the current client Media audience offering to identify gaps, inefficiencies, and opportunities for new or enhanced audience capabilities.\ Partner with Audience Product, Data, Marketing Technology, and external partners to define, prioritize, and implement enhancements to audience products and activation capabilities.\ Translate business and client needs into audience capability requirements and operational improvements.\ Evaluate emerging audience technologies, data sources, activation capabilities, and industry practices to identify opportunities for client Media.\ Develop recommendations for audience taxonomy, segmentation, distribution, and activation approaches that improve scalability and consistency across the RMN.\ Help establish a clear roadmap for the evolution of client Media's audience capabilities.\ Audience Performance & Insights\ Evaluate audience-level performance across campaigns to identify trends, opportunities, and potential areas of audience fatigue or inefficie