Director - Media Planning & Strategy

At DICK’S Sporting Goods, we believe in how positively sports can change lives. On our team, everyone plays a critical role in creating confidence and excitement by personally equipping all athletes to achieve their dreams.  We are committed to creating an inclusive and diverse workforce, reflecting the communities we serve.

If you are ready to make a difference as part of the world’s greatest sports team, apply to join our team today!

OVERVIEW:

Job Duties & Responsibilities

Strategy and Long-Term Planning

The Director defines and owns the Media Planning team's long-range strategy, ensuring it is aligned with DMN's commercial objectives, annual OKRs, and the broader commerce media landscape. This includes:

• Building and maintaining the strategic storytelling frameworks that govern how DMN positions its media products to brand partners, including audience narratives, channel value propositions, and performance proof points.

• Defining the annual priorities and key results for the Media Planning function, cascading them into team-level goals and tracking progress with rigor throughout the year.

• Establishing DMN's point of view on emerging media planning trends, audience strategies, measurement methodologies, and competitive positioning, and bringing that perspective into plans and client conversations.

• Communicating the team's strategic direction and performance to internal leadership on a weekly basis, including flagging risks, surfacing opportunities, and advocating for resources and tooling investments.

People Leadership and Team Development

The Director directly manages a media planning manager, with accountability for the performance, development, and culture of the full media planning team. Responsibilities include:

• Setting clear performance expectations and development plans for each team member, conducting regular 1:1s and formal reviews, and recognizing and rewarding high performance consistently.

• Recruiting and onboarding top media planning talent, with an emphasis on candidates who combine strong analytical instincts with the ability to build a compelling narrative around data.

• Identifying skill gaps across the team and designing or sourcing the training, tools, and experiences needed to close them, with a particular focus on retail and commerce media fluency and storytelling craft.

• Building a team culture that prizes intellectual rigor, creative problem-solving, and collaborative client service, and that attracts strong talent.

• Build effective teams that apply their diverse skills and perspectives to achieve common goals by establishing common objectives and a shared mindset.

• Manage execution responsibilities and workload of direct/indirect reports to achieve functional deliverables on time and with quality.

• Develops talent through coaching, feedback, exposure, and stretch assignments in order to meet their own career goals as well as the organization’s priorities

• Establish strategic staffing and succession plans; successfully deliver on proposed staffing objectives.

• Drive the talent selection process in alignment with the company’s talent philosophy for open direct/indirect reporting positions; Ensure all direct reports are appropriately trained and on-boarded.

• Drive engagement by creating a climate where people are motivated to do their best to help the organization achieve its objectives; focus on voice of teammate data (e.g., Engagement & Pulse results), partnering with organization leadership to drive necessary changes.

Media Strategy and Plan Quality

The Director is ultimately accountable for the quality and strategic coherence of every media plan produced by the team. This means:

• Establishing and enforcing the standard for what a great plan looks like, including how audience data is surfaced, how channel recommendations are structured and justified, how performance projections are modeled, and how the narrative ties objectives to outcomes.

• Reviewing and providing substantive feedback on plans before they go to clients, ensuring they meet the strategic bar, are free of errors, and are positioned to generate brand confidence and investment.

• Building reusable planning templates, data-driven benchmarks, and storytelling frameworks that enable planners to work more efficiently and consistently without sacrificing strategic depth.

• Staying close to brand and category-level trends to ensure plans are informed by what is actually happening in the market, not just by channel inventory and audience availability.

Tooling, Product, and Process Influence

The Director actively shapes how the Media Planning team works by influencing the tools, systems, and workflows available to them. Responsibilities include:

• Maintaining a clear point of view on what tools and product features would most meaningfully improve the quality and efficiency of the planning process, and advocating for those investments through structured product partnership engagements.

• Working with product and engineering teams to scope, prioritize, and test new planning capabilities, audience tools, and data visualization features, representing the planner's perspective in the product roadmap process.

• Establishing standard operating procedures for plan development, approval workflows, version control, and client handoff that scale as the team and portfolio grow.

• Identifying and eliminating friction in the planning process.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

The Director represents the Media Planning function across the organization and ensures it is well-connected to the teams it most closely supports and depends on. This includes:

• Partnering with Sales and Account Management to ensure plans are produced on the timelines clients need, are responsive to the commercial context of each opportunity, and are positioned to close business and retain investment.

• Collaborating with Analytics and Reporting to ensure that performance measurement methodologies, attribution approaches, and reporting frameworks are reflected accurately in how plans are built and how expectations are set with clients.

• Engaging with the Monetization team to ensure that new inventory, audience, and targeting capabilities are understood by the planning team and incorporated into plans as soon as they are available.

QUALIFICATIONS:

• Bachelor's Degree

• 7 - 10 years with 8+ years of experience in media planning, media strategy, or a related discipline, with at least 5 years in a people management role.

• Demonstrated ability to build data-informed media strategies and translate quantitative analysis into compelling, accessible narratives that drive executive and client alignment.

• Deep familiarity with the retail and commerce media landscape, including how sponsored products, onsite display, offsite programmatic, CTV, and social channels operate and how brands evaluate their value.

• Proven track record of developing media plans that win business and deliver measurable performance outcomes against advertiser objectives.

• Experience influencing cross-functional teams and stakeholders without direct authority, and building productive working relationships across Sales, Account Management, Analytics, and Product.

• Strong presentation and communication skills, with the ability to distill complex planning rationale into clear, persuasive narratives for senior audiences

• Analytical proficiency: comfortable working with audience data, reach and frequency models, performance benchmarks, and campaign measurement methodologies.

• Preferred prior experience at a retail media network, commerce media platform, or major publisher, with direct exposure to first-party audience data activation and closed-loop measurement.

• Preferred familiarity with media mix modeling (MMM), multi-touch attribution, and incrementality testing, and the ability to apply those frameworks to how plans are structured and sold.

• Preferred experience working with or alongside media agencies, with an understanding of how brands and agencies evaluate media investment decisions in a retail media context.

• Preferred background in media planning tools, audience analytics platforms, or data visualization tools, with a track record of advocating for and adopting technology that improves team output.

VIRTUAL REQUIREMENTS:

At DICK’S, we thrive on innovation and authenticity. That said, to protect the integrity and security of our hiring process, we ask that candidates do not use AI tools (like ChatGPT or others) during interviews or assessments.

To ensure a smooth and secure experience, please note the following:

• Cameras must be on during all virtual interviews.

• AI tools are not permitted to be used by the candidate during any part of the interview process.

• Offers are contingent upon a satisfactory background check which may include ID verification.

If you have any questions or need accommodations, we’re here to help. Thanks for helping us keep the process fair and secure for everyone!