Paid Search Associate Director

Lamark Media ("Lamark") is an integrated digital marketing firm driven by a simple philosophy: create extraordinary marketing campaigns that yield positive, measurable results for clients and strategic partners. Lamark’s methodology is to create a custom omni‑channel strategy that leverages digital marketing assets, allowing measurement, optimization, and scalability for long‑term success.

As an Associate Director, you own strategic quality, performance outcomes, and team development across a defined book of business. You provide strategic direction and operational leadership for pod structures consisting of Managers and Specialists, ensuring best‑in‑class paid search execution, innovation, and scalability. This role is designed for a senior leader who thrives at the intersection of people leadership, platform expertise, and systems thinking, and who wants to help modernize and elevate a paid search organization.

• Strategic Ownership & Performance
  • Own the strategic direction, performance outcomes, and execution quality of all accounts within your pod.
  • Set clear account‑level and pod‑level strategy, ensuring alignment to client business goals and agency standards.
  • Serve as a senior escalation point for complex performance, platform, or client challenges.
  • Translate performance data into clear, executive‑level narratives that reinforce client trust and retention.
• People Leadership & Development
  • Lead people management, performance reviews, coaching, and career pathing for a cross‑functional team of Managers and Specialists.
  • Build succession plans and actively develop future leaders through mentorship and promotion readiness.
  • Foster a high‑accountability, high‑support culture focused on continuous improvement and strategic thinking.
• Operational Excellence & Systems Thinking
  • Drive operational leverage through process standardization, automation, and tooling (e.g., scripts, dashboards, QA frameworks).
  • Improve forecasting accuracy, budget fluidity, and performance visibility in partnership with analytics and leadership.
  • Ensure alignment between Client Services and Paid Search teams to support scalable, profitable growth.
• Innovation & Platform Leadership
  • Establish points of view on platform changes (e.g., PMax, AI bidding, Demand Gen, privacy shifts) and translate them into actionable team guidance.
  • Lead structured testing frameworks and experimentation to move beyond “best practices” toward differentiated performance.
  • Pilot and help productize new tools, workflows, and service offerings that improve results and margin.
• Departmental Leadership
  • Surface trends, insights, and risks across accounts to inform department‑wide strategy and improvements.
  • Contribute to department‑level forecasting, resourcing, and capacity planning.
  • Partner cross‑functionally to support innovation, efficiency, and long‑term growth.

• Deep fluency across Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and emerging AI‑driven search experiences.
• Ability to guide teams beyond tactical execution into strategic frameworks and scalable systems.
• Strong perspective on automation, measurement, and platform evolution, and how to operationalize them.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity while setting clarity and direction for others.

• Team engagement, retention, and internal promotion velocity.
• Consistent achievement of client performance targets relative to forecast.
• Client retention, expansion, and executive‑level trust indicators.
• Adoption and measurable impact of standardized frameworks (testing, QA, automation).
• Improvements in operational efficiency, margin stability, and workload balance.

• 7+ years of progressive experience in paid search and performance media, including leadership responsibility over accounts, teams, or pods.
• Advanced platform expertise across Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, including complex account structures, Shopping/feed‑driven programs, automation, and AI‑driven campaign types (e.g., PMax, Demand Gen).
• Strategic audience and intent modeling experience, including first‑party data activation, signal layering, and audience strategy aligned to full‑funnel…