Director, Media Planning

About the Role

Mass Culture treats paid media as a single, orchestrated growth system, not a set of channels running in isolation. The Director, Media Planning owns the architecture behind that system: the cross-channel plan that connects paid social, paid search, CTV, retail media, and emerging platforms to a client’s real business goals, margins, and growth stage.

This is a strategy-first role focused on planning and optimizing media execution. You will build the media plans clients act on, defend the logic behind budget allocation across channels, and make sure up-funnel and down-funnel investment work together instead of competing for the same dollar. You will stay close enough to the campaigns themselves to know when a plan needs to change, and why, and you will be the one to change it.

You will say what you expect each dollar to do before you spend it, define in advance what would make you move it, and come back to every allocation decision to say whether it worked. That is a higher bar than most agencies hold themselves to, and it is why clients trust us with the whole mix instead of one channel.

You will plan inside a proprietary platform. Channel budgets and line items, monthly pacing, KPI targets, market splits, and a surplus ledger that records the rationale behind every dollar that moves. You will co-own the planning surfaces of that product alongside agency leadership. What a plan should capture, and what we should be able to model before committing a budget.

• Build full-funnel, cross-channel media plans that tie budget allocation, channel mix, and pacing directly to each client’s revenue, margin, and growth targets.
• Define the role each channel plays in the plan, whether that is reach, demand capture, retention, or proof, before arguing its number.
• Own the media mix model for assigned accounts: determine how up-funnel investment (CTV, paid social awareness, emerging platforms) and down-funnel investment (paid search, retargeting, retail media) should work together, and adjust as performance and market conditions shift.
• Translate client business objectives into measurable media plans, KPIs, and testing roadmaps.
• Lead media planning sessions with clients, presenting the strategic rationale behind channel and budget decisions, not just the numbers.

• Set reallocation triggers up front: the conditions under which money moves, agreed in collaboration with the client.
• Defend the plan without inflating it. Say what we don’t know. And call out risks and assumptions.
• Hold the up-funnel line. The hardest budget to defend is the one that doesn’t convert this week. Build that case in advance, with evidence from the analytics team.
• Grade our own allocations. Revisit every significant allocation decision against what actually happened, and say plainly when we got it right and when we got it wrong.

• Partner with channel leads across paid social, paid search, CTV, and retail media to ensure each channel’s execution ladders up to one plan.
• Identify where channels are working against each other, where budget is misallocated, and where a mixed media stack would reduce risk and capture more attention.
• Use the agency’s forecasting and planning models to show clients how channels interact, not just how each performs on its own.

• Own budget pacing across assigned accounts. Know where every account stands against plan, and act before a month closes badly rather than explaining it afterward.
• Own reallocation end to end. When a channel under delivers, you decide where the money goes, and the rationale gets written down at the moment of the decision.
• Maintain the surplus ledger for your accounts:…