Director of Media Strategy & Activation (Paid Media)

Role Description

Dropbox is looking for a Director of Media to own our total media investment—performance and brand—under a single leader.

This leader will build a unified media strategy that brings performance marketing and brand investments together into one investment thesis and one operating model. They will own the media portfolio end-to-end, from upper-funnel brand campaigns through paid search, paid social, programmatic, mobile, and emerging channels, making investment tradeoffs as business priorities evolve.

The role also owns how the media organization operates, balancing in-house expertise, agency partnerships, and specialist support to maximize speed, quality, and impact.

The ideal candidate has worked on both sides of the industry—building media expertise at an agency before leading media inside a technology or high-growth company. They understand what great agency partnerships look like while also knowing how to build world-class internal capabilities.

This role sits at the center of Dropbox's growth strategy, connecting brand, performance marketing, Product Growth, Sales, and Marketing Data Science to drive measurable business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Unified Media Strategy.
• Build and own Dropbox's media strategy across brand and performance. Set the annual and quarterly investment thesis, define the channel portfolio, and make the tradeoff decisions on where spend moves and why.
• Total Budget Ownership.
• Manage Dropbox's full media investment across paid search, paid social, programmatic, display, video, mobile, affiliate, and brand channels. Own planning, forecasting, pacing, and in-quarter reallocation against efficiency and growth targets.
• Brand and Performance Integration.
• Align reach, frequency, creative strategy, and channel mix so brand and performance investment reinforce each other rather than compete. Partner closely with the Brand organization, which owns brand positioning and creative direction, to translate brand strategy into media execution.
• Operating Model and Partnerships.
• Design and run the right mix of in-house capability and agency partnership. Own agency relationships, and build the internal muscle where needed.
• AI-Enabled Media Operations.
• Develop and execute a point of view on where agentic and AI-enabled workflows belong in the media stack — creative production and testing velocity, audience modeling, budget allocation, bid strategy, reporting, and quality control. Make deliberate decisions about where machine judgment outperforms human judgment, and where it does not.
• Connect Media to Revenue.
• Partner with Product Growth, Sales, and Marketing Data Science to connect media signals to downstream outcomes — activation, conversion, product-qualified leads, expansion, and retention. Build the acquisition layer of a unified self-serve and sales-assisted revenue system.
• Measurement Rigor.
• Partner with Marketing Data Science on attribution, incrementality testing, and media mix modeling. Be a sophisticated consumer and challenger of measurement methodology, and translate complex performance tradeoffs into crisp, executive-ready recommendations.
• Team Leadership.
• Lead and grow a team of channel and brand media leaders. Build clarity on what each person owns, how they are measured, and how their work ladders to revenue.

Requirements

• 10+ years in media, performance marketing, or digital marketing with increasing scope and leadership responsibility, at a high-growth B2B and/or B2C company
• 4+ years leading teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and org design
• Deep, hands-on expertise across paid channels — search, paid social, programmatic, display, video, mobile — including planning, forecasting, budget pacing, audience design, and performance management
• Experience owning brand media alongside performance media, with working knowledge of brand lift measurement, reach and frequency planning, and creative performance optimization
• Track record managing significant media budgets with clear, demonstrated impact on acquisition efficiency, pipeline, or revenue
• Experience managing agency and vendor ecosystems — scoping, selecting, and holding partners accountable — and building in-house capability where it creates advantage
• Strong analytical fluency: attribution approaches, incrementality testing, MMM/MTA concepts, and unit economics
• (CAC, LTV, payback)
• Experience marketing across self-serve, product-led, and sales-assisted motions, and adapting programs across consumer, SMB, and mid-market segments
• Excellent executive communication: you can turn a complicated performance picture into a clear recommendation and defend it

Preferred Qualifications

• Agency and in-house background.
• You built your craft agency-side and then brought that capability in-house at a technology or high-growth company. You have operated on both sides of the partnership.
• AI and agentic media workflows.
• Demonstrated use of AI-enabled workflows in a media context — creative generation and testing, audience modeling, automated reporting, budget or bid optimization — with a clear view of where these tools create leverage and where they introduce risk. Candidates with less conventional experience will be strongly considered if they spike here.
• Experience building a media strategy or media planning function
• Familiarity with modern martech and adtech stacks: CDPs, marketing automation, attribution platforms, tagging and data governance
• Experience navigating measurement disruption — privacy changes, cookie deprecation, first-party data strategy
• Multi-product portfolio experience, including cross-sell and attach motions
• International or EMEA media experience
• Durable Skills
• AI fluency means using these tools to amplify human judgment, not replace it. We believe people with these skills will thrive as work and technology continue to evolve:
• Awareness: U nderstand yourself and others.
• Judgment: E valuat e information and mak e decisions in complex situations.
• Adaptability: L earn, adjust, and stay effective through change.
• Connection: C ommunicat e
• , collaborat e
• , and build trust.
• To learn more about why these skills matter and what the data shows about thriving through change, read this blog post from our Chief People Officer, Melanie Rosenwasser.