Director, Audience Analytics & Insights

PRIMARY FUNCTION / POSITION SUMMARY: 

We are looking for a strategic storyteller and analytical leader on our Marketing Analytics Team. This role is equal parts client partner, insight translator, and data strategist. You will work directly with clients and cross-functional stakeholders to understand their business challenges, then navigate a wide variety of disparate data sources to uncover answers and build compelling, data-driven narratives. While the primary focus is audience-related — identifying, analyzing, and activating different customer segments — the work spans the full scope of marketing strategy.

This is not a traditional reporting role. You will be responsible for scoping, creating, developing, and presenting data-heavy marketing analyses that drive real business decisions for a Fortune 100 automotive manufacturer. The ideal candidate is someone who deeply understands data in its many forms, knows how to connect insights across sources, and can confidently present a strategic point of view to senior stakeholders.

MAJOR RESPONSIBILITES:  

• Client Partnership & Strategic Consultation: Serve as a trusted advisor and day-to-day partner for senior clients. Proactively identify business challenges, translate them into analytical questions, and present findings in a way that resonates with non-technical audiences. Act as the connective tissue between the analytics team and client/agency stakeholders.
• Team Leadership: Serve as the operational lead of the analytics team, helping to prioritize workstreams, mentor junior analysts, and ensure quality and consistency across deliverables. Help shape the team’s strategic direction and elevate its profile within the agency.
• Audience Discovery & Segmentation: Lead the approach to understanding customer demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and motivations. Define audience frameworks that inform media, creative, and broader marketing strategy.
• Strategic Storytelling: Scope, develop, and present data-rich analyses that translate complex findings into clear, persuasive narratives for senior management and clients. Own the consumer perspective narrative and ensure every deliverable tells a coherent story.
• Data Navigation & Synthesis: Identify, access, and synthesize information across a wide variety of data sources and formats — including databases, flat files, third-party research tools, CRM platforms, and unstructured data. You don’t need to write complex scripts yourself, but you must understand the data landscape well enough to guide the team and ensure analytical rigor.
• Stakeholder Communication: Lead discovery conversations with clients and internal teams to deeply understand business needs before jumping into analysis. Translate ambiguous or undefined requests into structured, actionable analytical plans.
• Analysis & Recommendation: Conduct and oversee exploratory analyses to answer high-stakes business questions. Generate actionable recommendations grounded in data and deliver them with confidence and clarity.

KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS:

• Strategic Storytelling: Exceptional ability to build narratives from data. You can take a complex dataset and distill it into a clear, compelling story for C-level and client audiences.
• Client & Stakeholder Management: Strong interpersonal and communication skills. You are comfortable leading meetings, facilitating discovery sessions, and presenting recommendations to senior stakeholders.
• Leadership & Mentorship: Experience managing or mentoring analysts. You can elevate a team’s work, set standards for quality, and help develop talent.
• Data Fluency: Deep understanding of data in its different forms (structured, unstructured, survey, behavioral, third-party, etc.) and how to combine different data types to build a business case or analyze a customer segment. You should be comfortable working in or around database environments (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks).
• Technical Literacy: You don’t need to be a daily coder, but you should be able to read and understand SQL and have a working familiarity with tools like Python or R. Proficiency is a plus, but the ability to understand and guide technical work is the baseline.
• Data Visualization: Experience creating polished, insight-driven visualizations and presentations (e.g., PowerBI, Tableau, or similar tools).
• Strategic Mindset: You lead with the business question, not the technology. You deeply understand the problem before choosing the method.
• Ambiguity Management: Comfort operating in environments with undefined requests and unstructured data. You can bring order to complexity and guide a team through it.
• Consumer Research: Familiarity with segmentation, survey data, and third-party research tools (e.g., mTAB, Polk, JD Power) is a strong plus.
• Marketing Data: Familiarity with CRM, website analytics, and platforms like Adobe Analytics, Salesforce, etc.
• Ability to Learn: Willingness and ability to pick up new tools, technologies, and methods quickly.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:

• Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Business Analytics, Mathematics, Economics, or related field
• 6–8+ years of experience in data analytics, consumer/market research, management consulting, or marketing analysis
• Demonstrated experience leading or mentoring a team
• Track record of presenting data-driven insights and recommendations to senior or executive audiences
• Ability to work on-site in Detroit, MI or New York, NY
• Automotive marketing background is highly preferred