Director Event Marketing

The PJL is a groundbreaking global 16-team competition defining a new era for showjumping. Backed by McCourt Global and its Executive Chairman Frank McCourt, and shaped by leaders from equestrian sport, international competition, and entertainment, the PJL brings together the world’s top riders and horses to compete for the biggest prize pot in the discipline’s history ($300M guaranteed prize money across the first three seasons), across fourteen iconic venues in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Designed to open the sport to new audiences while respecting its heritage, the PJL combines extraordinary athletic performance with premium entertainment, strengthened by the League’s partnership with Box to Box Films (production company behind F1’s ‘Drive to Survive’), and supported by a free-to-view broadcasting model.

Cutting-edge technology, radical transparency, and modern team formats enhance the drama, intensity, and rivalry that define elite sport – unlocking the full potential of jumping, demanded by today’s global sports and entertainment marketplace, without compromising its core values. This is a rare opportunity to help shape the direct marketing engine of a brand-new global sports property from the ground up working across live events, digital, broadcast, and merchandise as league scales from launch to a recognised global sports property.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own end-to-end marketing strategy for each PJL event: building awareness, driving consideration, converting to ticket sales and merchandise purchases, maximising on-site engagement and repeat attendance.
• Develop market-by-market campaign strategies with applicable local agencies/partners to adapt messaging, channel mix, and budget allocation to each host venue's audience and landscape.
• With Director, Audience Growth, set/track full-funnel KPIs (reach, engagement, cost per acquisition, conversion rate, ticket revenue, merchandise attach rate), report performance to league leadership.
• Alongside Director, Audience Growth manage event marketing budgets across markets, ensuring efficient spend and clear ROI reporting.
• Work with social, content and creative teams to deliver channel-native content across META, TikTok, YouTube to drive interest and ticket sales.
• Build always-on event-specific content calendars to build anticipation pre-event, create urgency around on-sale windows, extend engagement post-event.
• Develop audience segmentation and targeting strategies continually testing creative, messaging, and call-to-action.
• With Director of Audience Growth, develop paid media strategy for each event, determining campaign phasing, audience priorities, channel mix and investment levels.
• Oversee paid social, search, and programmatic display campaigns supporting awareness, ticket on-sales, ticket conversion and merchandise drops.
• Own audience targeting and segmentation across paid channels, developing acquisition, lookalike and retargeting strategies that move consumers effectively through the purchase funnel.
• Review and challenge Agency reporting, performance against CPA, ROAS, conversion rate and revenue targets, ensuring actionable recommendations are implemented quickly.
• Work with agencies to plan and execute OOH and digital out-of-home campaigns in host cities.
• Coordinate with venue partners, host-city media owners, and local agencies to secure placements and negotiate added value.
• Integrate OOH with paid social, search and other channels, including geo-targeting strategies that convert exposure into measurable digital action.
• Ensure appropriate localised creative and media buys, considering language, venue, audience, cultural context.
• Identify placements to amplify momentum around key event moments.
• With ticketing partner, oversee strategy, build and delivery of email marketing across fan lifecycle: pre-sale announcements, priority access, on-sale campaigns, abandoned-cart recovery, event countdowns, post-event engagement and merchandise promotion.
• Segment and grow CRM database to personalise communications and improve conversion.
• Develop distinct CRM journeys for key audience groups: prospects, first-time attendees, repeat attendees, core equestrian fans and new consumers.
• Establish continuous testing and optimisation across subject lines, creative, messaging, send times, frequency, segmentation and calls to action.
• Deliver ticket sales and revenue targets for each event, building campaign-specific sales strategies.
• Identify and address underperforming ticket categories/audience segments; targeted marketing interventions to accelerate sales where required.
• Support merchandise strategy and promotion, including event-specific collections, limited-edition drops, on-site retail and e-commerce campaigns.
• Conduct post-event analysis, establishing benchmarks and learnings for future events.
• Manage, mentor and develop team, establishing clear objectives, responsibilities and expectations.
• Work with Director, Audience Growth to build and develop event marketing function, establishing scalable processes, planning frameworks and replicable ways of working consistently across multiple international markets and events.
• Build relationships across stakeholder group, including League leadership, host venues, team owners, riders, broadcast partners, commercial partners and external agencies, working with Head of Events.
• Ensure marketing requirements and timelines are integrated into event operations.
• Identify/escalate risks early, develop mitigation plans where ticket sales, campaign delivery, stakeholder dependencies are tracking behind expectations.

Requirements:

• 7+ years’ experience in marketing; demonstrated ownership of full-funnel campaigns from awareness to conversion.
• Sector experience: Sports, live events or entertainment strongly preferred, ideally with direct experience marketing ticketed events/merchandise.
• Hands-on experience across social media marketing, paid media, OOH/DOOH and email/CRM.
• Strong understanding of performance marketing; audience acquisition, retargeting, attribution, CPA, ROAS and conversion optimisation.
• Experience using data to segment audiences, build automated journeys, improve conversion and drive retention/repeat purchase.
• Experience developing/executing campaigns across markets; ability to adapt global strategy to local audiences, cultures and commercial environments.
• Demonstrated experience managing significant marketing budgets, allocating across channels and markets, making commercially informed decisions based on performance.
• Proven track record briefing, managing and holding external paid media and media-buying partners accountable to performance targets.
• Experience managing/developing direct reports, contractors and/or cross-functional project teams.

Skills & Attributes:

• Confident, relationship-first communicator; manage and influence a range of internal/external stakeholders, including senior leadership, agencies, venues and partners across multiple markets.
• Ability to set clear direction, create accountability, bring cross-functional teams together around commercial objectives.
• Strong consumer and commercial instinct, understanding what drives awareness, consideration and purchase across audiences and markets, ticket sales, revenue and ROI targets.
• Manage teams across concurrent events and markets against live competition calendar and immovable deadlines.
• Decisive solutions-oriented, confidence to make calls quickly; course-correct when circumstances change.
• Calm/resilient under pressure; ability to operate effectively with intensity/unpredictability of live events.
• Comfortable building processes, operating with ambiguity, adapting as League scales.
• Willingness to travel internationally throughout season.
• Genuine interest in equestrian sport is a plus.

PJL is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, genetics, disability, age, familial, caregiver or veteran status, or any other status protected under applicable law.