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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Interest Planner

💰 $60,000 - $105,000

MarketingMedia PlanningDigital AdvertisingAudience StrategyData & Analytics

🎯 Role Definition

The Interest Planner is a media and audience strategist who designs and executes interest-based targeting plans across programmatic, paid social, and display channels. This role combines consumer insight, data analysis, media buying know-how, and creative briefing to build scalable audience approaches that improve campaign efficiency and deliver measurable business outcomes. The Interest Planner partners closely with media buyers, data scientists, creative teams, and client stakeholders to translate product and marketing objectives into audience definitions, activation plans, and ongoing optimization frameworks.

Key SEO / LLM keywords: Interest Planner, interest-based targeting, audience strategy, programmatic planning, paid social, campaign optimization, media planning, audience segmentation, measurement & attribution.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Media Planner / Assistant Media Planner
  • Performance Marketing Coordinator
  • Audience Insights Analyst

Advancement To:

  • Senior Interest Planner / Senior Audience Strategist
  • Media Strategy Lead / Programmatic Lead
  • Head of Audience Planning / Director of Media Strategy

Lateral Moves:

  • Programmatic Trader / DSP Specialist
  • Paid Social Lead / Performance Marketing Manager
  • Consumer Insights Analyst / Data Science Associate

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Develop granular, interest-based audience strategies and segmentation frameworks for acquisition, retention, and engagement campaigns across paid social, display, video, and programmatic channels to meet KPI objectives such as CPA, ROAS, CTR and LTV.
  • Translate product and marketing briefs into actionable media plans that define target audiences by interest, behavior, demographic and contextual signals and map those audiences to optimal channels and inventory.
  • Design and execute A/B and multivariate testing strategies for interest segments, creative variants and bidding strategies to identify scaling opportunities and reduce acquisition costs.
  • Collaborate with programmatic traders and DSP teams (e.g., The Trade Desk, DV360) to build and activate audience segments, set targeting parameters and optimize bid strategies in real time.
  • Lead interest taxonomy development by synthesizing first-, second- and third-party data sources (CRM, site behavior, partner data) into consistent audience definitions and naming conventions used across campaigns.
  • Build media plans including budget allocation, pacing ladders, frequency caps, reach curves, and forecast models that align with marketing funnels and business seasonality.
  • Monitor campaign performance daily and provide prescriptive optimization recommendations (audience shifts, budget re-allocations, creative swaps, bid adjustments) to improve outcomes against KPIs.
  • Conduct audience overlap analysis, lift studies, and reach/frequency modeling to ensure efficient coverage, minimize wasted spend and maximize unique reach across channels.
  • Partner with analytics and measurement teams to define attribution strategies, uplift measurement tests (holdouts, geo-tests), and success metrics and ensure clean tagging and event tracking across platforms.
  • Create detailed audience briefs and creative targeting guides for creative teams to ensure messaging aligns with interest signals, lifecycle stage, and channel best practices.
  • Prepare regular performance reporting, executive summaries, and deep-dive analyses using SQL, Looker/Tableau, and Excel to surface trends, anomalies, and actionable insights for stakeholders.
  • Define privacy-aware targeting strategies that leverage contextual and modeled signals while adhering to GDPR, CCPA, and platform-specific policies and consent frameworks.
  • Work with data engineering and CRM teams to operationalize first-party segments (email lists, site visitors, purchase history) for activation and audience enrichment.
  • Maintain up-to-date knowledge of platform product changes, new ad formats, targeting capabilities, and bidding algorithm updates to inform planning and testing roadmaps.
  • Negotiate and manage third-party data vendor relationships (audience providers, enrichment partners), including scope definition, data hygiene, and cost-benefit assessment.
  • Build scalable audience build templates and automation routines (scripts, macros, API integrations) to speed up campaign setup and reduce manual errors.
  • Act as the primary point of contact for client stakeholders or internal business owners on audience strategy, sharing rationale, expected outcomes, and next-step recommendations.
  • Conduct competitive and category research to inform interest mapping, identify high-value interest clusters, and surface white-space targeting opportunities.
  • Drive cross-functional workshops to align product, creative and paid teams around audience hypotheses, testing priorities, and measurement plans.
  • Mentor junior planners and provide clear documentation, playbooks and quality checks for audience building, campaign setup, and reporting.
  • Forecast audience scale, cost projections and potential reach for proposed interest segments and provide sensitivity analysis for different spend scenarios.
  • Support new business pitches by developing audience strategies, expected results, and sample media plans that differentiate on insight-led interest targeting.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist with cross-channel tagging governance and QA to ensure consistent event taxonomy for reliable measurement.
  • Provide input on creative briefs and test results to influence product and campaign roadmap decisions.
  • Help maintain documentation for audience taxonomies, naming conventions, and SOPs for campaign setup and validation.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Audience segmentation & interest taxonomy development for digital media campaigns.
  • Programmatic activation & DSP management (The Trade Desk, DV360, MediaMath) — build audiences, set bids, and optimize deals.
  • Paid social platform expertise (Meta Ads Manager, X/Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, TikTok Ads).
  • Measurement & attribution knowledge (multi-touch, incrementality testing, holdout design) and familiarity with analytics platforms (Google Analytics/GA4).
  • SQL for data extraction, cohort analysis and audience validation.
  • Advanced Excel skills (pivot tables, advanced formulas, macros) and experience with visualization tools (Tableau, Looker, Power BI).
  • A/B testing and experimentation design and interpretation for audience and creative tests.
  • CRM and data onboarding (CSV segmentation, hashed PII handling, CRM-to-platform activation).
  • Tagging and analytics debugging (GTAG, Google Tag Manager, server-side tagging).
  • API usage and automation for campaign setup and audience management (platform APIs, scripting with Python/JavaScript).
  • Knowledge of privacy, consent, and compliance best practices (GDPR, CCPA, platform policies).
  • Budget pacing, forecasting and media mix modeling fundamentals.

Soft Skills

  • Strong analytical and critical thinking to translate data into strategic audience recommendations.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication for presenting complex audience strategies to non-technical stakeholders and clients.
  • Cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder management across media trading, analytics, creative, and product teams.
  • Project management and organization to handle simultaneous campaigns, testing roadmaps and launch deadlines.
  • Attention to detail and quality assurance mindset for audience builds, tagging, and reporting.
  • Problem-solving and curiosity-driven experimentation mindset to iterate on failed tests and scale winners.
  • Time management and prioritization in dynamic, high-velocity campaign environments.
  • Coaching and mentoring skills to upskill junior planners and share best practices.
  • Commercial acumen to balance performance goals with media economics and vendor cost structures.
  • Adaptability to rapidly changing platform capabilities, privacy landscape and business objectives.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Advertising, Communications, Statistics, Economics, Computer Science, Data Science, or related field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree (MA/MS) in Marketing Analytics, Data Science, Business Administration (MBA) or equivalent practical experience in media strategy and programmatic advertising.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Marketing and Advertising
  • Data Science / Analytics / Statistics
  • Economics
  • Computer Science / Information Systems
  • Communication Studies
  • Business / Finance

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 2–6 years of experience in media planning, audience strategy, programmatic trading, or performance marketing.

Preferred:

  • 4+ years of hands-on experience designing and activating interest-based or behavioral audience strategies across programmatic and paid social channels, with demonstrated results on CPA/ROAS and measurement projects.
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