Principal, Communications & Audience Strategy

Key Skills

Articulate Storyline, Ecommerce, Effective communication skills, Leadership, Writing

Job Description

Overview of Position

In partnership with the Senior Director, the Communications & Audience Strategy Principal will –

• Design and build customer-based longitudinal audience strategy inclusive of activation workflow and channel specific implementation (i.e., digital & traditional media, CRM, and loyalty).
• Translate customer priorities into audience segmentation & activation strategies that drive measurable media attributed customer outcomes.
• Translate business priorities into media strategy and investment recommendations that drive measurable brand lift & bottom-line efficiencies.
• Work with customer strategy, measurement, and analytics teams to uncover performance trends and unlock opportunities for improvement through recommended enhancements and plans.
• Lead and identify new processes and innovative programs opportunities that align with the Macy’s brand while driving retail innovation.

Key Accountabilities

• Audience strategy – 
• Help internal teams think holistically for how available data and technology can best support insight, targeting, media and campaign goals.
• Develop definition of addressable audiences and campaign specific target variation.
• Assess available 1P data and provide strategic audience build recommendations to communications planning (peer group) and activation teams.
• Map existing and design new communication strategies based on insights and marketing technology capabilities.
• Media strategy & investment planning – 
• Link business strategy to communications strategy and optimal media investment recommendations.
• Consult on multi-touch attribution and marketing mix models to optimize channel mix, spend, flighting and return on ad spend.
• Lead the development and implementation of benchmarking and measurement standards to improve tracking of campaign effectiveness.
• Work with measurement and analytics to set learning agenda, develop tests to gather learnings with the intention to discover opportunities, find efficiencies, and reduce overlap.
• Drive innovation & newness – 
• Working closely with Brand, Merchant & Corporate Strategy teams, design and ignite new programs, ideas, ways of working within the Macy’s ecosystem.
• Develop a strategic roadmap for innovation investments and explorations.
• Advise on best opportunities to create or participate in any Metaverse and Web3 projects.
• Project manage initiatives through the concept, pitch meetings, design, and development process.
• Own and lead knowledge sharing discussions with key stakeholders and senior leadership team on all programs.
• Create scalable, repeatable structures for planning, execution, and measurement across multiple initiatives; define and enhance ways of working to best leverage in-house and agency-led expertise.
• Work with analytics and data science to define performance metrics, marketing reports, executive dashboards, and measurement requirements.

Core Competencies

• Strong business acumen.
• Understands big picture but will sweat the details.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to produce high-quality decks and present with confidence to senior marketing leaders.
• Passion for process mapping and structured analysis with an ability to take complicated processes or workflows and make them clear, clean, and easy to follow.
• Ability to translate a combination of large, disparate data sets into strategically focused storytelling connected to brand objectives.
• High risk tolerance and aptitude for experimentation; ability to articulate risk and explain emerging industry dynamics.

Skills Summary

• We encourage candidates with either a bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience in a related field to apply.
• The most-qualified candidate will have – 
• Experience designing, building and leading customer-based marketing initiatives and campaigns.
• Experience with CDPs, people-based audience platforms, and leading media attribution and media mix modeling is a plus.
• Experience in channel mix planning and optimization, tactical media planning, and measurement.
• Management consulting experience
• Will have proven leadership abilities.
• Will have a baseline understanding of ecommerce: site operations, taxonomies, team structures, workflows, marketplaces, media networks, etc.