Merkle Hiring for Associate Director – Performance Media Job at Dubai Full Time

About Merkle

Merkle is a leading data-driven, technology-enabled, global performance marketing agency that specialises in the delivery of unique, personalised customer experiences across platforms and devices. We call it ‘people-based’ marketing, and with over 25 years’ experience, we are proud to be recognised as a global leader.

Merkle’s heritage in data, technology and analytics is the foundation for our understanding of consumer insights that drives our people-based marketing strategies. Combined with our expertise in performance creative and media, we can then offer our clients content-driven, contextual and compelling customer experiences that drive business growth.

In 2016, the agency joined dentsu, one of the world’s biggest media companies to form the Customer Experience Management (CXM) Line of Business.

The Role

We are on the lookout for an Associate Director with strong cross channel Performance Media experience to join our rapidly growing Performance Media department. The role involves supporting on Tier 1 clients, acting as a trusted strategic advisor to clients, whilst overseeing integrated media delivery excellence and digital media maturity to drive client business value.

The Associate Director role involves developing and overseeing cross-channel digital media strategies and brief responses to successfully achieve your client portfolio’s KPI’s whilst ensuring high quality digital media campaign delivery. This requires in depth knowledge of the Paid Search, Paid Social and Programmatic digital media channels and platforms, as well as a breadth of understanding of the digital landscape and general marketing principles. The role is diverse and requires the individual to efficiently prioritise and manage multiple work streams to drive the biggest impact, own and nurture the client relationship and have an ability to continuously self-educate in this dynamic digital marketing space.

Above and beyond this, you will take ownership of our Graduate training program that we have initiated in Egypt, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, overseeing our Graduate assessment recruitment days, forecasting hiring plan in line with business growth, delivering the highest level of training for Graduates joining Merkle and maintaining and adjusting our Training syllabus in line with the ever-changing Digital landscape.

Life as a Performance Media Associate Director at Merkle

• Leadership of your internal cross-channel digital media client account team, implementing and managing effective ways of working to achieve your long-term account vision
• The go-to client facing lead for Performance Media excellence, building and nurturing long standing strategic partnerships with your clients
• Understand your client’s long-term business objectives, aligning your digital media strategy to contribute to their overarching goals
• Drive digital media maturity for your client portfolio, keeping up to date with the digital marketing industry and platform updates to identify new opportunities to help your clients grow
• Contribute to departmental initiatives, collaborating on the strategic development of the Performance Media vision, and helping to constantly evolve our client servicing
• Provide thought leadership through award entries, blogs, case studies and events around integrated media strategies and success stories
• Working alongside our analytics team to understand where clients need further support to track their activity
• Proactively support in new business pitches

What we are looking for in you

• We anticipate the successful candidate will have 6+ years of agency experience across Performance Media channels
• Practical experience managing and directing a minimum of two of our core paid media channels: Paid Search, Paid Social, Programmatic
• Leadership abilities to be able to supervise and support a large account team
• Previous account director roles across large clients
• Worked primarily with clients on a performance basis, optimizing to ROAS or other conversion-based goals.
• Experience of building and nurturing strong client relationships
• Familiarity of the Google Marketing Platform, especially Campaign Manager and Google Analytics
• Ability to handle multiple projects and prioritise effectively
• Demonstrated ability to support in winning and growing cross channel Performance Media accounts
• Well versed in reporting platforms like Microsoft Excel, Data Studio
• Fluent English (written and spoken)

A Few Of The Benefits

As we progress and develop as a company, you will too. Within our fast-growing company, there’s plenty of opportunity to develop your skill set and you’ll be encouraged to be curious and share new ideas. In exchange for your contribution to our award-winning company, we make sure you take advantage of a generous holiday allowance and are paid a competitive salary. We’re really proud of our company values and culture; we have regular company / team socials and want all our employees to enjoy coming into work. Some of our benefits include:

• Friendly, approachable office atmosphere – and business-casual dress code
• Flexible working with on average 3 days in the office and 2 days working from home
• Regular company socials
• On-site Games Room with ping pong and Xbox
• Team lunch once a month
• Private healthcare
• Relocation package if you are currently based outside of the UAE

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

At Merkle, a dentsu company, we believe that creating diverse and balanced teams is not just a moral imperative, it is a business imperative. To help our clients reach millions of different people every day, we need our people to reflect the society that we represent.

We aim to create an inclusive culture where all talent thrives, and we champion meaningful progress in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) for our people, clients and partners.

DEI is firmly embedded into our shared values – the 8 Ways to Never Before – and our Leadership Framework, which applies to all of our people. And our Global DEI Principles reflect our pledge to be an organisation that promotes wellbeing and inclusivity for everyone – regardless of ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, gender (incl. gender identity and gender expression), age, neurodiversity or physical ability.

We are proud of what makes us different and encourage applicants from all different backgrounds to apply to join us. We are always happy to discuss all flexible and agile approached to working and should you have any reasonable adjustment needs arising from a disability or medical condition to fully participate in the recruitment process, please discuss this with our recruitment teams.