Vice President, Research & Analytics

Ruder Finn is seeking a Vice President of Research & Analytics to join its award-winning Tech Lab team. This role will serve as a strategic partner across the agency, collaborating with client leaders, branding and communications strategists, and creative teams to deliver impactful research, analytics, and insight-driven strategies for clients and prospects. The position works closely with teams across the U.S. and India in a highly collaborative, fast-paced environment focused on innovation, AI, and emerging technologies.

The ideal candidate brings strong strategic thinking capabilities and deep expertise across research methodologies, analytics platforms, storytelling, and data interpretation. They should be highly skilled in translating complex data into actionable insights and compelling narratives, with experience spanning web analytics, social analytics, audience intelligence, and measurement strategy. This role is both strategic and hands‑on, supporting major client accounts while contributing to the agency’s broader AI and technology initiatives.

It is an opportunity to help shape the future of research and analytics within a growing, technology-forward organization.

• Drive complex and diverse communications research projects, including primary research (quantitative and qualitative), measurement, and secondary research in partnership with account teams
• Provide strategic counsel to clients and internal teams through data‑driven insights and analytics expertise
• Deliver market and audience intelligence, including social and digital landscape analysis, audience behavior analysis, sentiment analysis, keyword research, search performance, and competitive analysis such as share of voice and message pull‑through
• Partner on client analytics discussions involving reporting, optimization, and recommendations to improve performance
• Build measurement frameworks, develop searches and dashboards, and create client‑facing reports and insights
• Conduct AI‑search visibility research and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) analysis across multiple platforms and model ecosystems
• Develop strategic insights into how content is surfaced, ranked, and synthesized within AI‑driven search systems
• Translate data into meaningful storytelling, actionable insights, and strategic recommendations that support client planning and decision‑making
• Stay informed on emerging analytics technologies and recommend new tools and platforms that enhance agency capabilities
• Mentor and support research analysts and analytics managers by sharing best practices and helping improve reporting quality, speed, and accuracy
• Collaborate closely with creative planning, strategy, and other cross‑functional teams across the organization
• Support agency‑wide training initiatives focused on analytics, measurement, and AI capabilities

• Bachelor’s degree in Business Analytics, Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related field
• 7+ years of experience working with an integrated marketing and communications agency or in‑house experience in research, analytics, or insights‑focused roles
• Advanced experience working with frontier AI models (e.g., LLMs) and evaluating their behavior in real‑world applications
• Proficient in leveraging agentic platforms to design, build, and optimize automated research workflows
• Experience implementing scalable automation pipelines to improve data collection, analysis, and insight generation
• Experience defining measurement plans and analyzing performance across marketing campaigns, including media analytics, web analytics, and CRM measurement
• Skilled in creating complex Boolean queries and using analytics tools such as Cision, Brandwatch, Talkwalker, Rival IQ, Meltwater, and Signal AI
• Expertise in Excel, Google Sheets, Google Analytics, and one or more contemporary data visualization platforms (e.g., Tableau, Power BI, Google Data Studio), along with SQL
• Experience with AWS, Python, R, or other statistical computing/programming languages is a strong plus
• Experience working with third‑party APIs for data collection and processing
• Ability to evaluate and manage analytics tools and platforms,…