Director of Media

At Backbone, we live by the mantra that passion drives results. We partner with leading lifestyle brands to drive growth through integrated marketing and strategic communications. We work with brands we believe in and pair our teammates with brands matching their interests and expertise. When you join our team of smart, driven marketers, you’ll become part of an extended work family, drawn together by a passion for the outdoors and doing great work for great brands.

The Director of Performance Media leads our performance paid media practice and the client relationships that depend on it, with a particular focus on ecommerce and DTC brands. You will own cross-channel paid media strategy across paid social, paid search, retail media, programmatic and emerging channels, and you will lead the people who build and run it. This is a senior seat.

You set the standard the work is measured against, you sit across the table from client executives, and you are accountable for whether the media investment actually moves the business.

The job does not stop  will connect media spend to customer economics, working in contribution margin, payback period and LTV:

CAC rather than platform-reported ROAS, and you will partner with lifecycle and retention teams so the customers we buy are worth buying. When a client’s CFO asks what the marketing budget bought them, you are the person who answers.

The ideal candidate has seen this from both sides. You have led accounts at an agency and you have carried a number inside a brand, or you have worked closely enough with brand-side finance to think the way they think. You are a critical thinker who is proactive and decisive, you build teams that outlast your tenure, and you treat AI-driven buying tools as something to steer rather than something to trust blindly.

Signal keeps degrading, platforms keep consolidating and automation keeps absorbing the manual work. Staying ahead of that shift, and bringing the team with you, is pivotal to the success of this position.

Over time, this role will carry direct management responsibility for a team of growth media practitioners and is accountable for their workload, development and career growth.

• Own growth media strategy for a portfolio of ecommerce and DTC clients, and stand behind the recommendations with clear rationale
• Serve as the senior growth media voice in the client relationship, counseling marketing and executive leadership through annual planning, quarterly business reviews and budget decisions
• Frame media investment in the language of the client’s business: contribution margin, payback period, customer lifetime value and profit
• Build forecasts, scenario plans and zero-based budgets, then hold the work accountable to them
• Own cross-channel budget allocation across paid social, paid search, programmatic, retail media, and emerging channels, moving spend toward what’s working
• Partner with the Analytics team to set the measurement standard for growth media at Backbone, including incrementality testing, media mix modeling and how we reconcile both with platform reporting
• Partner with Analytics to design and read geo-lift, holdout and platform conversion-lift studies, and translate the results into media decisions clients can act on
• Directly and indirectly manage, mentor and develop a team of growth media practitioners, including workload, performance and career paths
• Hire for the practice and build the bench as the book of business grows
• Connect acquisition to retention, partnering with lifecycle, CRM and client teams so paid investment compounds after the first order
• Collaborate with Paid Social Team to direct the creative testing agenda with Backbone creative and client creative teams, including hypothesis,…