Audience Development Director

Audience Development Director

Location: Los Angeles, CA or New York City, NY
Schedule/Shift: Part-time, 30 hours per week; 4 days onsite, 7.5 hours per day
Pay: $132.00 - $140.00 per hour
26-09998

The Audience Development Director will build and lead strategies, systems, and partnerships designed to increase viewership and deepen fandom across television and multiplatform environments. This role will establish a new audience development function, using media analytics, programming strategy, lifecycle marketing, metadata, platform placement, social discovery, and performance optimization to create stronger audience relationships. The successful candidate will develop show-specific audience strategies, lead activation plans with agency partners, and establish measurable frameworks for audience growth, engagement, retention, and fandom.

This role requires a strategic, cross-functional leader with extensive entertainment experience and a demonstrated track record of turning audience insights into measurable growth and fandom.

• Develop and implement comprehensive audience development strategies that increase viewership, engagement, repeat viewing, and fandom.
• Build show- and franchise-specific audience strategies across linear television, streaming, FAST, social, digital, partner platforms, and direct-to-consumer environments.
• Use linear programming as a foundation for audience development by building awareness, appointment viewing, promotional momentum, and audience cadence.
• Translate portfolio objectives into measurable initiatives with defined owners, baselines, success thresholds, and fandom indicators.
• Prioritize titles, platforms, and distribution opportunities based on audience potential, lifecycle stage, fan engagement, and business objectives.
• Serve as a strategic partner to senior leadership on audience trends, fandom behavior, platform changes, and emerging audience growth opportunities.
• Lead audience development relationships with lifecycle marketing partners and agencies to develop and execute activation plans.
• Partner with internal teams to use You Tube, Tik Tok, Instagram Reels, Snapchat, podcasts, and short-form content as measurable audience acquisition and engagement channels.
• Build always-on audience and community strategies that maintain engagement between telecasts, streaming availability, social conversations, and future seasons.
• Establish audience development measurement frameworks, executive dashboards, KPI reporting, and test-and-learn processes.
• Analyze ratings, reach, frequency, streaming engagement, social conversation, sentiment, retention, cohort behavior, discovery sources, and fandom indicators.
• Develop discovery-source attribution to understand how audiences discover content through platform home screens, search, social, paid media, and emerging AI-powered discovery environments.
• Improve content metadata, universal content identifiers, EPG information, and other inputs that support content discovery, recommendation, and search.
• Partner with Legal, Privacy, Data, Research, and other stakeholders on first-party data, identity resolution, and compliant audience development practices.
• Collaborate with Marketing, Programming, Data Science, Media Agency, Research, Distribution, Product, Platform, Social, and Ad Sales teams.
• Lead and manage agency partners by establishing priorities, expectations, and accountability standards.
• Develop repeatable audience development methodologies, standards, vendor relationships, and playbooks.
• Present audience insights, strategies, performance results, and recommendations to senior stakeholders.
• Support continuous improvement of audience development strategies through data analysis, experimentation, and performance measurement.

• 10+ years of experience in audience development, programming strategy, entertainment marketing, content strategy, streaming, television, digital media, or consumer media growth.
• Proven experience driving both viewership and fandom for television series, franchises, tentpole programming, or entertainment brands.
• Strong understanding of linear programming, on-air promotion, audience flow, scheduling priorities, and conversion of linear momentum into multiplatform engagement.
• Demonstrated experience developing audience strategies across linear television, streaming, FAST, social, digital, partner platforms, and direct-to-consumer environments.
• Strong knowledge of fandom-building strategies, including community…