Paid Digital Media Manager

The Spectator and its sister publication UnHerdare seeking an experienced Paid Digital Media Manager to lead and scale our paid audience growth across platforms. This is a pivotal role for a commercially minded digital specialist who understands how to balance subscription growth, top-of-funnel traffic, and brand engagement for premium media brands.

The role requires someone who is equally comfortable setting strategy and running campaigns day-to-day, and who understands how to balance subscription growth, top-of-funnel traffic, and brand engagement for premium media brands.

Working closely with editorial, marketing, data, and events teams – and with the support of Junior Execs working across the marketing team – you will own the strategy and execution of paid media campaigns that drive subscriptions, promote live and digital events, and expand the reach and influence of our journalism.

Key Responsibilities

● Plan, execute, and optimise paid digital media campaigns end-to-end, from audience strategy and budget allocation through to creative testing, bidding, optimisation, and post-campaign analysis across platforms including Meta, Google, YouTube, X, LinkedIn, and emerging channels.

● Act as hands-on platform expert across Meta, Google (Search, Display, YouTube), LinkedIn and X, with deep understanding of campaign structures, bidding strategies, audience signals, creative formats, and attribution nuances for each platform.

● Drive subscription acquisition and retention, with clear ownership of CPA, ROI, and LTV performance

● Develop top-of-funnel strategies to grow high-quality traffic and introduce new audiences to The Spectator, UnHerd and Apollo magazine

● Support the promotion of live events, podcasts, newsletters, and special projects

● Own a structured experimentation roadmap, including creative testing frameworks, audience segmentation tests, funnel experiments, and landing page optimisation, with clear hypotheses and documented learnings.

● Work closely with editorial and design teams to ensure paid campaigns are on-brand, compelling, and intellectually distinctive

● Collaborate with data and engineering teams to ensure robust tracking, attribution, and measurement across platforms, including pixel implementation, server-side tracking, and evolving privacy constraints.

● Manage six-figure+ monthly paid media budgets, including forecasting, pacing, scenario planning, and reallocation of spend based on performance and business priorities.

Stay ahead of platform changes, media trends, and best practice in subscription marketing

Requirements:
● At least 3–5 years’ experience in paid digital media, performance marketing, or growth marketing, with demonstrable ownership of strategy and execution, ideally either from an agency or otherwise a publishing, media, or subscription-led business

● Comfortable operating as a senior individual contributor: self-directed, highly organised, and confident taking full ownership of a critical growth channel.

● Proven track record of driving paid subscription growth at scale

● Strong understanding of full-funnel marketing, from awareness to conversion

● Highly analytical, comfortable working with data, dashboards, and experimentation

● Confident managing six-figure+ paid media budgets

● Collaborative and editorially aware, with an appreciation for quality journalism and ideas-led brands

● Naturally outgoing, commercially astute, comfortable taking ownership and working across teams

Benefits:
● Opportunity to shape the foundations of paid media across the group, with scope over time to influence tooling, processes, and future team growth.

● Work with two of the most influential and intellectually distinctive media brands in the UK and beyond (we have a strong presence in the US and Australia in particular)

● A collaborative, ideas-driven culture with real autonomy and impact

● Competitive salary and benefits, depending on experience

If you’re excited by the challenge of growing subscriptions while protecting and amplifying strong editorial brands, and want to be part of a renowned and rapidly expanding business, we’d love to hear from you.