Senior Director, Industry Strategy (Advertising

Senior Director, Industry Strategy (Advertising)

Final date to receive applications: 27 August 2026

Department: Marketing

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: United States (East Coast)

Reporting To: Melissa Coito

Compensation: $190K - $200K base + $13K bonus

CPG or QSR Advertising Research Expert-in-Residence

Zappi is looking for a senior advertising effectiveness and creative development expert to help strengthen our authority, differentiation, and commercial success in the advertising research and creative effectiveness space.

This person will serve as both:

• A trusted expert, educator, and industry advocate externally
• A strategic, cross-functional SME and connective layer internally

The role is designed for someone who has helped major brands understand how advertising works, diagnose creative opportunities, improve campaign performance, and translate consumer insight into stronger creative decisions. They should be credible with senior Insights, Marketing, Brand, Media, Creative, Commercial, and Strategy leaders, and able to connect methodological rigor with a modern, scalable approach to advertising research.

• Bring deep expertise in advertising strategy, creative effectiveness, campaign development, ad testing, and consumer research methodologies.
• Act as a senior subject matter expert on creative testing, campaign diagnostics, norms, benchmarks, competitive dynamics, and market trends.
• Understand how large enterprise organizations operate, including process, politics, agency dynamics, decision-making, budget pressures, stakeholder complexity, and media and creative timelines.
• Stay ahead of emerging trends in advertising effectiveness, AI-generated creative, synthetic respondents, creative volume, digital and social testing, predictive models, and connected learning systems.
• Function as a trusted internal advisor across the organization.

• Work closely with Sales, Customer, Product, Product Marketing, Marketing, and Research Science teams on strategic narratives and customer engagements.
• Help Product Marketing build messaging, frameworks, demos, POVs, enablement, competitive guidance, and customer-facing materials when expertise-level knowledge is needed.
• Support enterprise opportunities as a strategic expert and advisor, speaking directly to customers and prospects when senior advertising expertise is needed.
• Clarify where Zappi’s advertising solutions fit across the creative development lifecycle, from early creative exploration to validation, optimization, and connected learning.
• Own the competitive intelligence program for advertising research and creative effectiveness, translating market, competitor, customer, and industry shifts into internal guidance and external-facing content.

• Develop a visible external voice in the advertising effectiveness and creative development space.
• Create thought leadership on the future of advertising research, better creative decision-making at scale, AI in creative development, synthetic methods in ad testing, and connected creative learning.
• Speak at conferences, webinars, customer events, and industry forums.
• Engage with analysts, strategic customers, and industry communities.
• Co-create customer education materials and programs with Customer Marketing.

• Translate customer realities, workflow needs, agency dynamics, and competitive gaps into actionable product and GTM recommendations.
• Partner closely with Product, Research Science, and Commercialization teams.
• Align with Product Marketing, Product, and Commercialization to pressure test emerging AI, synthetic, predictive, diagnostic, and connected-learning capabilities from both methodological and commercial perspectives.
• Serve as a second voice outside of Product to help ensure product direction aligns with real-world customer workflows, buyer expectations, and unmet needs.

• Zappi has a stronger, clearer, and more differentiated point of view in advertising effectiveness, creative development, and modern creative decisioning.
• GTM teams are more confident and effective in advertising conversations, with stronger discovery, sharper positioning, and better objection handling.
• Zappi’s advertising offerings are easier for Sales and Account teams to position as a strategic growth opportunity, not simply a set of point solutions or individual ad tests.
• Enterprise buyers increasingly view Zappi as a strategic partner for advertising effectiveness, creative development, and connected campaign learning.
• Product and GTM strategy are more closely aligned to customer realities, creative development workflows, competitive dynamics, and emerging market needs.
• Zappi builds greater external authority through thought leadership, customer education, industry participation, and expert-led advertising narratives.

• 10+ years of experience in creative development, ad testing, campaign strategy, consumer insights, advertising effectiveness, or market research.
• Deep expertise in advertising research…