Paid Media Director (Social Surveys)

Reporting to the Founder and CEO. London (Shoreditch), full time, three days a week in the office.

A BIT ABOUT THISTHAT

Marketing has three eras, each with a north star. Mass media: reach. Personalisation: effectiveness. The community era: influence. Nielsen owned the measurement standard for mass media. Kantar owned it for personalisation. The community era has no governing standard yet. ThisThat is building it.

Every measurement standard stood on a collection breakthrough. Nielsen wired meters into living rooms. Kantar built the access panel. Panels are big and getting bigger, but none capture true exposure on social. We do: we re-target the people who were genuinely exposed to a campaign in the real world, in their natural environment. We mastered gamification and the motivation to complete surveys when we were a social media platform ourselves. Respondents fall asleep with everyone else’s questionnaires. Ours get completed.

Trusted by Unilever, Google, Publicis and WPP. Twice Best Influencer Marketing Technology and twice Best Data-Driven Campaign at the Global Influencer Marketing Awards.

THE ROLE

In one line: you own the cost of every survey complete we collect on social, across every lever that moves it, not just the ads.

We are looking for an ambitious, commercially minded and highly innovative Paid Media Director to lead the transformation and scaling of our paid media function. Through audience targeting, retargeting and social survey collection, we capture millions of consumer opinions a year, and every measurement we sell runs on them.

Your primary KPI is CPI, our cost per interview: what it costs to get one real, verified person from seeing our ad to completing our survey. It is quality-gated, so a complete that fails our checks does not count. CPI is won across six drivers that run from ad to answer: audience size, CPM, CPC, how many start the survey after clicking, how many are still answering past question three, and how many complete. Only the first three belong to paid media alone. The other three are shared with survey design, engineering and product design, and you are the person who runs the test across all of them.

This is not a traditional Paid Media Director role. Deep, hands-on paid social expertise is the entry ticket. Beyond it we want a strategic leader who challenges existing ways of working and fundamentally improves how we operate. The work is analytical and creative in equal measure: analytical enough to see what drives what; creative enough to find the opportunity, write the hypothesis, test it, learn, and go again.

This is not a job to take lightly. Paid media is the heart of our measurement capability, which powers our industry-leading measurement solution. ThisThat depends on it, our clients depend on it, the industry depends on it. We need an owner. One person the whole team relies on, who makes the budget calls and does the deep analysis. CPI is yours, the paid media strategy is yours, the operational performance is yours, the process automation and the team development are yours. You are a player-coach: you run campaigns yourself and you lead the people who run them.

WHAT YOU INHERIT

• The machine. The thing that put ThisThat’s name on the map, and what we mean by social surveys: our own tech and process for reaching the people really exposed on social and getting them to complete a survey. It won Best Influencer Marketing Technology at the Global Influencer Marketing Awards in 2022, holds the highest survey completion rates on social, and runs on best practices built and written over six years. It is 10x better than any other survey solution. That is no longer good enough. Your job is to 100x it.
• The scale. 100+ campaigns live at once, each with its own stakeholders, run by two people. It’s an ops problem as much as an ads problem. You build the system that runs it, not run it by hand.
• The team. Experienced paid media specialists in New York and Aruba, running survey collection and client communication daily across Meta, TikTok and YouTube for clients in the US and EMEA. You run campaigns alongside them, develop them, and are the client team’s point of escalation.
• The CPI Lab. Our cross-functional test-and-learn programme across paid, creative, tech and survey design. Each learning agenda is a few weeks of hypotheses, tests and written conclusions on one platform; the last one cut CPI there by nearly half. The founder chairs it today. You take the chair and run it without him in the loop.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

1. You own CPI

• Across all six drivers, not just the three that belong to paid. Where a driver sits with survey design, engineering or product design, you bring them in, set the test, secure the time to build it, and own the result
• Turn CPI improvements into margin, with quality held
• Be the cleanest, best-loved social surveying advertiser on every platform, and stay ahead of Meta, TikTok, Google and the emerging platforms

2. The CPI Lab: where you improve it

• Chair it: run the working group, own the sign-offs and the R&D budget, carry CPI targets on every platform we collect on
• Run the learning agendas and turn the learnings into playbooks the whole team runs the same way

3. Automation, scale and visibility

• Name the bottlenecks and the knowledge that lives in one head; with Product and Engineering, automate campaign setup, audience building, optimisation and reporting
• Standardise the workflows so no step depends on one person
• Give client teams and clients live visibility of every study’s setup, progress and completion
• Multiply study volume without multiplying headcount

4. You own paid media: all of our data collection

• The strategy and roadmap across every study, whether we reach people really exposed to a campaign or show it to them in a test: targeting the exposed and control groups, retargeting, topping up from research panels, and the fieldwork around it
• Budgets, capacity, timelines and the escalation path on every study
• Our methodology team, Solutions, briefs you like a client and sets the quality SLAs and CPI targets; you meet them every time

5. You own the team

• A player-coach on every escalation
• Clear objectives and development plans, coaching for judgement, a culture that finds and fixes inefficiencies without being asked
• Delivery runs through the team, not through you. Grow the London team once you are ramped, and own the capacity model that tells us when

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE IN YOUR FIRST YEAR

90 days

• The paid engine owned through the team with no quality drops
• The Lab chair taken, five learning agendas run, every driver moved including the three outside paid, CPI down on every platform we collect on
• The roadmap set and the first automation shipped

180 days

• CPI below our benchmark on every platform with quality held
• Automation live across setup, audience building and reporting; collection progress visible to clients; playbooks a new hire could run the machine from
• The London team ramped under you

Twelve months

• CPI still falling every quarter; the manual effort per study a fraction of where it started
• Collection live on every major platform
• A team that runs day to day without you

WHO YOU ARE

• Technically credible: you have lived inside Meta, TikTok and Google ads managers and can coach senior specialists without doing their job
• Analytically ruthless and creative in equal measure: you read the funnel daily and design the test that isolates the variable; you see the opportunity in the data, write the hypothesis nobody has tried and direct the ad, the survey and the experience that test it. Show us a learning agenda you ran and a test where the obvious metric was lying
• Innovative and automation-first: you look for better ways of working, challenge established practice and reach for the system or the tool that removes manual work before you reach for another pair of hands
• Strategic and commercial: you see the bigger picture and connect paid performance to profitability and growth. Every pound off CPI is margin, every quality miss is client conversation
• Proactive with clients: when a study is at risk, the client team hears it from you first. You hold your own with senior stakeholders and the key people at the platforms
• A leader, inside and out: you own this and relentlessly improve it, you build a team that does the same, and you are persuasive with engineers, designers, industry leaders and the key people at the platforms
• Low ego, high standards, never satisfied, reliable: you treat a rejected test as the system working, find the root cause and fix it.

EXPERIENCE

• 5+ years in paid media, performance marketing or digital acquisition, with strategic leadership responsibility
• Led and developed a paid media team
• Deep working knowledge of Meta, TikTok and Google Ads: targeting, retargeting, custom audiences and optimisation
• A record of improving acquisition efficiency and commercial performance
• Designed and led structured experimentation programmes with documented learnings
• Shipped the process improvement or automation that removed an inefficiency
• Managed substantial budgets; led change rather than maintained a process
• Survey acquisition, market research, influencer marketing or brand lift
• AI tooling, automation or platform integrations
• Scaling an operational function in a high-growth business

WHY JOIN

Every measurement standard was built by someone who solved data collection. The collection machine is the ground the whole company stands on, and this seat runs it.

• Base salary of £70,000 to £100,000. We are looking for the top 0.1%, and ready to pay for it
• Bonus and share options, so you benefit from our success
• Genuine autonomy to transform a business-critical function, with an ambitious team
• Hybrid working, three days a week in Shoreditch, dogs welcome

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION

ThisThat is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, and if you need accommodations in the process, tell us.

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