Senior Director/Director, Paid Marketing

TEGNA is hiring a Paid Marketing Director to lead and transform how we acquire and grow audiences across CTV, mobile, social, programmatic, linear, and emerging channels.

This role is responsible for building a high-performance paid marketing engine—one that drives efficient growth, improves creative effectiveness, and brings rigor to how we measure and scale performance.

This is not a role for someone who manages campaigns at a distance. This is for a leader who has personally driven performance, built systems that scale, and can materially improve how paid marketing operates.

Why This Role Matters

TEGNA is shifting from linear and web audiences to owned platforms (mobile and CTV). Paid marketing is a critical lever in that transition.

We are looking for someone who has:

• Turned paid marketing into a repeatable growth engine, not just a spend function
• Increased creative output and effectiveness through structured testing and iteration
• Brought clarity to measurement, attribution, and decision-making in complex environments
• Connected acquisition, product experience, and retention into a cohesive system

This role is expected to materially improve performance, not maintain the status quo.

What You’ll Do

Own and Improve Performance

• Own and materially improve paid marketing performance across channels, with direct accountability for efficient growth (CAC, ROAS, LTV, retention, incrementality)
• Make clear, data-informed decisions on where to scale, where to cut, and where to test, based on performance and business impact
• Build frameworks that allow the organization to allocate capital more effectively over time

Build a High-Performance Creative System

• Build and scale a high-velocity creative testing system that increases iteration speed, improves win rates, and produces repeatable insights
• Define what “high-quality creative” means in a performance context and hold teams accountable to it
• Partner closely with Creative, Design, and Lifecycle Marketing to ensure creative is not a constraint on growth
• Translate performance and user data into clear, actionable creative direction

Strengthen Data, Measurement & Funnel Performance

• Partner with Product to improve first-party data collection, acquisition funnels, retargeting capabilities, and experimentation frameworks
• Ensure paid acquisition is tightly integrated with product surfaces, conversion flows, and downstream engagement
• Use experimentation (A/B testing, holdouts, incrementality) to drive decision-making—not proxies or assumptions
• Improve signal quality over time while operating effectively with imperfect data

Build and Lead a High-Performing Team

• Build and develop a team that can operate with speed, ownership, and accountability
• Set clear expectations and operating rhythms tied to outcomes
• Raise the bar on talent, execution, and thinking across the function

Integrate Across the Full Funnel

• Ensure paid marketing is tightly connected to onboarding, activation, retention, and re-engagement, not just top-of-funnel acquisition
• Partner closely with Lifecycle Marketing to create a coherent, end-to-end user journey

What We’re Looking For (Required Qualifications)

• Has personally led and scaled multi-channel paid marketing programs, with clear ownership of performance outcomes (CAC, ROAS, LTV, retention, incrementality)
• Has driven measurable growth in consumer products or apps, ideally across mobile and/or CTV
• Brings deep, hands-on experience across major paid channels, including CTV, and has worked directly with platforms such as Roku, Fire TV, Samsung, Apple TV, or similar ecosystems
• Has built and operated high-velocity testing systems, particularly in creative, and can clearly articulate what drives performance and why
• Operates comfortably in ambiguous or imperfect data environments, using experimentation, attribution, and first-party data to inform decisions
• Has partnered closely with Product to improve first-party data collection, acquisition funnels, retargeting, and growth systems
• Is fluent in modern martech stacks, MMPs, and experimentation tooling
• Has built, led, and developed high-performing teams, and raised the bar on talent and execution
• Demonstrates a strong bias toward ownership, speed, and continuous improvement

How We Work

At TEGNA, we value:

• Outcomes over activity
• Rigor over gut feel, but speed over perfection
• Direct feedback and healthy debate
• Leaders who own problems end-to-end and raise the bar for those around them

This role is for someone who wants to own growth, build systems, and materially improve how marketing works—not maintain what already exists. #LI-MS1

Note: Final title and salary will be commensurate with the selected candidate’s experience, skills, and overall background.