Senior Director, Industry Strategy (Advertising)

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.
What you'll do:

Serve as an industry expert

- 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.

Help drive cross-functional GTM readiness

- 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.

Build external credibility

- 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.

Influence product and strategy

- 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.

What success looks like

- Zappi has a stronger, clearer, and more differentiated point of view in advertising effectiveness, creative development, and modern creative dec