Senior Director, Industry Strategy (Advertising) in London

Zappi is looking for a senior advertising effectiveness and creative development expert to help strengthen our authority, differentiation, and commercial success in the advertising research and creative effectiveness space. This person will serve as both a trusted expert, educator, and industry advocate externally, and a strategic, cross-functional SME and connective layer internally.

The role is designed for someone who has helped major brands understand how advertising works, diagnose creative opportunities, improve campaign performance, and translate consumer insight into stronger creative decisions. They should be credible with senior Insights, Marketing, Brand, Media, Creative, Commercial, and Strategy leaders, and able to connect methodological rigor with a modern, scalable approach to advertising research.

What you'll do:

• Serve as an industry expert.
• Bring deep expertise in advertising strategy, creative effectiveness, campaign development, ad testing, and consumer research methodologies.
• Act as a senior subject matter expert on creative testing, campaign diagnostics, norms, benchmarks, competitive dynamics, and market trends.
• Understand how large enterprise organizations operate, including process, politics, agency dynamics, decision-making, budget pressures, stakeholder complexity, and media and creative timelines.
• Stay ahead of emerging trends in advertising effectiveness, AI-generated creative, synthetic respondents, creative volume, digital and social testing, predictive models, and connected learning systems.
• Function as a trusted internal advisor across the organization.
• Help drive cross-functional GTM readiness.
• Work closely with Sales, Customer, Product, Product Marketing, Marketing, and Research Science teams on strategic narratives and customer engagements.
• Help Product Marketing build messaging, frameworks, demos, POVs, enablement, competitive guidance, and customer-facing materials when expertise-level knowledge is needed.
• Support enterprise opportunities as a strategic expert and advisor, speaking directly to customers and prospects when senior advertising expertise is needed.
• Clarify where Zappi’s advertising solutions fit across the creative development lifecycle, from early creative exploration to validation, optimization, and connected learning.
• Own the competitive intelligence program for advertising research and creative effectiveness, translating market, competitor, customer, and industry shifts into internal guidance and external-facing content.
• Develop a visible external voice in the advertising effectiveness and creative development space.
• Create thought leadership on the future of advertising research, better creative decision-making at scale, AI in creative development, synthetic methods in ad testing, and connected creative learning.
• Speak at conferences, webinars, customer events, and industry forums.
• Engage with analysts, strategic customers, and industry communities.
• Co-create customer education materials and programs with Customer Marketing.
• Translate customer realities, workflow needs, agency dynamics, and competitive gaps into actionable product and GTM recommendations.
• Partner closely with Product, Research Science, and Commercialization teams.
• Align with Product Marketing, Product, and Commercialization to pressure test emerging AI, synthetic, predictive, diagnostic, and connected-learning capabilities from both methodological and commercial perspectives.
• Serve as a second voice outside of Product to help ensure product direction aligns with real-world customer workflows, buyer expectations, and unmet needs.

What success looks like:

• Zappi has a stronger, clearer, and more differentiated point of view in advertising effectiveness, creative development, and modern creative decisioning.
• GTM teams are more confident and effective in advertising conversations, with stronger discovery, sharper positioning, and better objection handling.
• Zappi’s advertising offerings are easier for Sales and Account teams to position as a strategic growth opportunity, not simply a set of point solutions or individual ad tests.
• Enterprise buyers increasingly view Zappi as a strategic partner for advertising effectiveness, creative development, and connected campaign learning.
• Product and GTM strategy are more closely aligned to customer realities, creative development workflows, competitive dynamics, and emerging market needs.
• Zappi builds greater external authority through thought leadership, customer education, industry participation, and expert-led advertising narratives.

What we’re looking for:

• 10+ years of experience in creative development, ad testing, campaign strategy, consumer insights, advertising effectiveness, or market research.
• Deep expertise in advertising research methodologies, including pre-market ad testing, creative diagnostics, campaign learning, norms, benchmarking, and KPI interpretation.
• Experience working with enterprise brands and senior stakeholders across Insights, Marketing, Brand, Media, Creative, Commercial, or Strategy teams.
• Strong understanding of how enterprise teams make advertising decisions, manage creative risk, and connect consumer insight to campaign performance.
• Ability to translate complex advertising methodologies into clear commercial narratives, sales guidance, executive-level storytelling, and customer-facing POVs.
• Experience supporting strategic sales, enterprise customer conversations, thought leadership, or consultative growth motions.
• Exceptional communication, presentation, and storytelling skills, with comfort representing a company externally as a senior industry expert.

You may come from:

• Consumer insights, brand, media, creative, or strategy teams.
• Advertising research, market research, or creative effectiveness consulting.
• Advertising effectiveness or creative development leadership.
• Senior roles within research, insights, ad tech, creative analytics, or marketing technology providers.

Why join us:

• Three company-paid mental health days of rest per year.
• Generous PTO policy - Minimum of 20 days of paid time off per year, plus national holidays.
• Private medical healthcare cover.
• Group risk, life & disability contributions.
• Flexible working arrangements, including remote.
• Thoughtfully designed offices to support both individual work and collaboration.
• Wellbeing benefits such as free yoga and access to trained therapists / counsellors.
• Enhanced parental leave policies.
• Free lunch in the office Tuesday-Thursday.
• Tax efficient pension contributions via salary sacrifice scheme.
• Salary sacrifice cycle to work scheme.
• Salary sacrifice nursery scheme.
• Tailored personal development through training allowances, coaching, mentorship and career frameworks.

We’ve been recognized as one of the hottest martech companies in 2022 by Business Insider and named Best Place to Work by Quirk’s Media for our engaging and inclusive workplace culture. We’re committed to both people and the planet.

Our belief in inclusion means we’re building an organisation of diverse individuals and helping brands eliminate cultural presumptions in their research. We are a values and behaviours driven business and believe that Trust, Truth, Ownership, Ambition and Humility describe Zappi employees on our best day.

Zappi is an equal opportunity employer; our diversity is a major strength. We are committed to providing equal opportunities for all individuals, regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws.