Programmatic Lead, Media Management and Delivery

About WPP Media

WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands. With exceptional talent, trusted data and intelligence, and world‑class partnerships – all united by our pioneering agentic marketing platform, WPP Open – we help clients navigate change, capture opportunity, and deliver transformational growth.

WPP Media is WPP's AI‑driven media operating unit, bringing together media, data, and partnerships to deliver creative personalisation at scale. Connected through WPP Open and powered by Open Intelligence, clients see exactly where, how, and why their media investment is working.

The Role

The Global Programmatic Solutions Lead is a senior client and capability role that aims to bring forward thinking client strategy with practitioner level governance. This role will have direct responsibility for bringing together local market programmatic plans into a cohesive global operating structure — with a major focus on governance of best practice in business outcome delivery, optimisation practices, the embedding of marketing science thinking, the sharing of learnings across markets, as well as the commercial mindset and accountability that helps grow solutions further across the client media plans.

The role will cover core programmatic capabilities required within the WPP solutions stack (DSP activation, supply path optimisation, audience and data strategy, creative personalisation, measurement) with a focus on bringing best in class setup and strategy to the client working with local market solutions leads.

The role requires you to work horizontally across programmatic solutions (display, video, ATV, DOOH, audio, native) and vertically in integrating supporting capabilities from analytics, marketing science, ad operations, consumer and data strategy, and the broader world of addressable. The role will partner with local market solutions teams and the wider agency and WPP functions to ensure consistency, quality, and commercial performance across borders — aligning plans back into the overarching direction of the business to make solutions a driving force in business performance.

As a senior member of the leadership team they are expected to inspire, guide, and develop programmatic knowledge across the business to fully leverage team skills whilst also setting the foundation of decisioning, governance, and strategy for our choices in programmatic investment. As a member of the client management team, the role will actively contribute to developing long‑term strategy in line with other leadership leads.

The Ideal Candidate

As a leader, you will be responsible for inspiring and directing our clients in close partnership with the client lead. You will have a strong background in leading global programmatic accounts and managing stakeholders at the most senior level, up to C‑level where required. You will have a proven track record in managing, leading, inspiring, and integrating fast‑paced, dynamic programmatic and activation teams across multiple markets — both across the agency and within the client.

You will have worked with inter‑agency solutions and clients that operate across borders and who are looking to accelerate their programmatic maturity through consistent governance, shared best practice, robust measurement, and commercially accountable delivery.

You will be expected to demonstrate programmatic expertise covering account structuring, bidding and optimisation strategy, supply path optimisation, audience and data activation, brand safety, and the application of marketing science to inform decisioning. You should have a working knowledge of adjacent disciplines (search, social, CRM, addressable TV) from an integration point of view and be able to inspire a team to adopt and uphold the standards and frameworks you put in place. You will be expected to fluently engage on topics such as identity, clean rooms / Infosum, incrementality T&L, attribution, and commercial models (including margin, value tracking, and contractual KPIs).

The ideal candidate will have the passion to power client growth, the tenacity to enforce discipline of best practice, and the agility to adapt within an evolving organisation.

Role Responsibilities

• Bringing together local market programmatic setups into a unified global operating structure, ensuring consistency whilst respecting local nuance.
• Defining, documenting, and governing best practice standards in account structuring, campaign taxonomy, and activation hygiene across all markets.
• Establishing and enforcing optimisation best practice — from bid strategy and pacing to creative rotation, audience management, and supply path optimisation. All done in partnership with local markets with the focus on global consistency and performance continuity.
• Embedding marketing science into the programmatic thinking, ensuring decisioning is informed by testing and experimentation frameworks.
• Creating the mechanisms and rituals by which learnings are captured, codified, and shared across markets — building a culture of continuous improvement and collective intelligence.
• Leading commercial tracking and accountability with Investment teams — including investment governance, value delivery, and tracking against contractual KPIs and client commitments.
• Integrating all WPP capabilities, solutions, and programmatic disciplines linked to growth.
• Leading clients through an advancing programmatic agenda with a broad understanding of the whole media and solutions ecosystem.
• Leading direct and indirect activation teams in global programmatic growth plans across global, regional, and local markets.
• Supporting performance and client growth through the WPP framework of thinking.
• Implementing ways of working that enhance our practice — including results, decision‑making, team structures, QA processes, and group initiative deployment.
• Setting client and team KPIs, including programmatic‑specific performance benchmarks, quality scores, and maturity roadmaps.

Key Requirements

• Substantial and demonstrable success in managing and leading the global programmatic agenda for major brands across multiple markets.
• Deep expertise in account structuring, campaign setup, and optimisation best practice across major DSPs (DV360, The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, Yahoo, and others).
• Proven experience defining and rolling out governance frameworks, playbooks, and QA processes across a distributed, multi‑market team.
• Strong grounding in marketing science and the translation of insight into activation decisions.
• Track record of senior client management up to and including C‑level where required.
• Proven success in stakeholder management and ability to build relationships with all agency leads and local market teams.
• Proven track record of managing and inspiring large, distributed programmatic capability teams across multiple markets and time zones.
• Proven track record in understanding and operating in media ecosystems beyond programmatic.
• Strong technology understanding (DSPs, SSPs, ad servers, verification, clean rooms, identity solutions, AdTech and MarTech stacks) as well as attribution models, cross‑channel planning and buying, and programmatic automation/AI tooling.
• Experience building and scaling programmatic measurement frameworks.

At WPP Media we are committed to building a business and culture that is inclusive, and we believe that having a workforce that represents the society we live in is key to our success.