Senior Director, Paid Media
MediaAlpha is a customer acquisition solutions provider powered by technology and data science. The company provides industry-leading solutions designed to reach consumers shopping within high-consideration categories such as property and casualty insurance, health insurance, life insurance, and more.
Role Overview
MediaAlpha (NYSE: MAX) operates the world’s largest insurance advertising marketplace, connecting leading carriers and agents with high-intent insurance shoppers at scale. Our owned-and-operated media properties are a cornerstone of our business, and we’re building the paid media function that will drive transformational growth.
We’re looking for a Senior Director of Paid Media to lead that effort. Reporting into the VP of Growth Marketing, this is a high-impact, high-ownership role: you’ll set the strategy, own the budget, and build the team. You are first and foremost a paid social expert - specifically Meta - but you think like an investment manager across every channel you touch. You know how creative drives downstream lead quality, not just click-through rate, and you’re excited about using AI to produce and test creative at a scale most teams only dream about.
This role isn’t about managing agency relationships or reporting on what happened last week. It’s about building a best-in-class paid media capability from the ground up, inside the company that powers more insurance advertising than anyone else on the planet.
Responsibilities
- Own the full paid media strategy across social, search, native, display, and retargeting, with Meta as your primary channel and proving ground
- Set channel-level investment strategies, budget allocation frameworks, scaling criteria, and ROI guardrails across the portfolio
- Define the strategic direction for paid media, aligning it with MediaAlpha ’s broader growth strategy
- Ensure positive ROI across all paid media investment; own performance accountability end-to-end
- Hire, lead, coach, and develop a team of channel-specific analysts (paid social, paid search, native/display, etc.)
- Translate campaign performance into clear, executive-ready narratives that connect channel metrics to business outcomes: cost per lead, revenue per lead, GP contribution, and margin
- Partner directly with cross-functional leadership, extending your influence beyond the paid media team
- Leverage AI tooling (both off-the-shelf and custom-built) to accelerate creative production and UGC video at scale
- Build and run a high-velocity creative testing engine across static, video, and UGC formats, with a clear methodology for learning and scaling winners
- Understand how ad creative affects downstream quality and conversion, and use that lens to guide every creative and targeting decision
- Ensure all paid media activity complies with applicable laws, regulations, and platform policies — including TCPA and state-specific advertising requirements relevant to the insurance vertical
Requirements
- You have personally managed $1M+ per month in Meta ad spend. This is a hard floor, not a preference; you’ve done this hands-on, not just at a strategic level
- A proven track record running profitable, ROI-positive paid media in the lead generation space. eCommerce or brand-building backgrounds are not the right fit for this role
- Experience working in a performance-first environment where every dollar of spend is expected to earn its place
- A genuine command of what makes paid social work: creative diagnosis, audience strategy, bidding mechanics, and the ability to distinguish a creative problem from a targeting problem from a measurement problem
- Experience running ads across search, display, native, and retargeting platforms - even if Meta is your primary channel
- Experience building or scaling a paid media team, including hiring and developing junior channel specialists
- Genuine enthusiasm for using AI tools to accelerate creative production at scale
- A strong understandi