PPC / Paid Media Team Lead

Salary to £50k (either via perm PAYE or equivalent monthly invoice). Role is fully remote with quarterly in-person strategy days in London. UK hours: Monday-Thursday 10am-6pm, early 4pm finish on Fridays.

This role is a Team Lead role managing a team of four Paid Media Buyers across Meta, TikTok, and Google Ads. The client is only looking for people who've been in this role before. They need somebody who is currently, or has recently been, a leader of a team who has trained people, hired people, mentored people. The role is client-centric and will require somebody who is charismatic, very well organised, technically gifted, analytical, has a lot of attention to detail, and can uphold quality standards.

This company is a performance marketing agency for live experiences. They work exclusively with immersive attractions, competitive socialising venues, and live events/festivals. Their job is to drive ticket sales, bookings, and reservations at scale, and they do it with an insider's understanding of the industry.

As their Paid Media Team Lead, you will own the performance, delivery quality, and client experience of their paid media teams. You will lead a team of Paid Media Account Managers plus a dedicated QA Manager, with direct accountability for approximately 30-40 client accounts across Meta, Google, and TikTok. You won't be running campaigns day-to-day, but you'll stay close enough to the platforms to step in when issues arise, cover during absences, and hold the quality bar everyone is calibrating to. Developing your people is equally core to the role, raising your team's technical skill level is something you'll own. Expect a strong analytical pull throughout, interpreting team-level performance, pressure-testing forecasts, and making evidence-based calls about where to push or pull investment. If you don't enjoy working with numbers and structured analysis, this won't be the right role. You'll sit at the Team Lead level of management alongside their other Team Leads, working together to keep their paid media function delivering at a consistently high standard.

Responsibilities

• Develop and oversee full-funnel paid media strategies across Meta, Google, and TikTok that drive ticket sales, bookings, and reservations against each client's commercial targets.
• Guide Account Managers through planning, building, launching, testing, and optimising campaigns, pushing for the strongest possible CPAs and ROAS across every account.
• Interpret campaign data with confidence, spotting patterns, diagnosing underperformance, navigating seasonal dynamics, and identifying opportunities before they're obvious.
• Oversee budget pacing across the team's portfolio, pressure-testing forecasts against on-sale timelines and major campaign moments and making confident calls about where to push or pull investment.
• Work hand-in-hand with their in-house Creative Studio, contributing to creative strategy, briefing in assets, feeding back on performance, and keeping both teams aligned on priorities.
• Support Account Managers in building strong, long-term client relationships, and step in as the senior voice on key accounts, escalations, and commercially sensitive conversations.
• Drive client retention and portfolio growth by partnering with Account Managers on renewals, upsells, and commercial expansion.
• Conduct account audits across existing accounts and prospective clients, surfacing risks, opportunities, and quick wins.
• Step directly into accounts when issues need senior hands on the campaign, or to cover Account Managers during absences and peak booking periods.
• Lead, coach, and develop your team through regular 1:1s, clear expectations, and structured support.
• Run quarterly and annual reviews with your direct reports, working through PDPs, goal setting, and progression.
• Own training and development actively identifying skill gaps, running or commissioning training, supporting onboarding for new members, and raising the technical bar of your team over time.
• Manage the QA Manager who checks your team's accounts and campaigns weekly, reviewing findings, prioritising fixes, and feeding insights back into coaching, SOP improvements, and training priorities.
• Carry out your own reviews of account work in parallel, campaign builds, tracking, optimisation, creative, and reporting, holding everything to the company's quality bar.
• Participate in weekly senior management calls alongside other department leads, plus a weekly 1:1 with the Founder.
• Ensure weekly client reports are submitted by close of business every Monday with clear insights and recommendations.
• Given the nature of the industry, occasional after-hours or weekend communication may be required around key moments, ticket on-sales, campaign launches, and live event windows.

Required

• 4 years in a PPC / paid media role, with hands-on experience running campaigns across Meta, Google, and TikTok.
• Prior experience managing a team or department, ideally in an agency environment.
• Strong hands-on platform skills, you can jump into any account, diagnose, optimise, and deliver at pace.
• Detailed working knowledge of measurement and supporting platforms, GA4, Looker Studio, Tag Manager, and the wider Google advertising suite.
• Experience developing other paid media professionals, identifying gaps, coaching, and raising skill levels over time.
• Confident, fluent data analysis, you can look at a performance report / ad account and immediately see what's working, what isn't, and why.
• An on-time, on-budget, on-target track record, you've consistently delivered against commercial targets without surprises.
• A confident client communicator, able to hold strategic conversations and build rapport at senior level.
• Direct experience working with clients in hospitality, leisure, events, or live experience sectors, or a genuine interest in the industry (desirable).