Senior Digital Paid Retail Media Manager

Skai•Chicago, IL

6d•Hybrid

About The Position

Skai is seeking a Senior Expert Services Manager, a senior practitioner and strategic advisor for Skai's enterprise retail media clients. This role owns the strategy, performance, and outcome of an assigned book of accounts, from planning through hands-on execution. The position requires a blend of deep channel expertise and strategic consulting, focusing on understanding client business objectives, analyzing data, and building actionable plans. The role involves working with the Retail Media Expert Services Director to serve external clients, act as a regional retail media expert, support internal stakeholders, and contribute to the future direction of Skai's platform.

Requirements

Enterprise retail media ownership, as the senior owner accountable for strategy through execution rather than delivering someone else's plan.
Amazon and Walmart, full stack (search and DSP). Hands-on across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, Amazon DSP, Walmart Connect sponsored search and Walmart DSP, plus Vendor Central, Seller Central and the 1P versus 3P distinction.
AMC beyond the out-of-the-box templates, used to answer questions standard reporting cannot, build custom audiences and analyses (for example incrementality or multi-touch attribution), and change what a client does next.
Analytical depth. Root-cause analysis rather than surface reporting, and the judgement to tie metrics back to the client's actual business objectives rather than optimising to a dashboard.
Retail media ecosystem fluency. How retailer economics, onsite, offsite and DSP, 1P and 3P, and shopper marketing fit together, and why a tactic that works on one network fails on another.
Advanced use of generative AI tools such as Claude to produce your own technical outputs, from reshaping data to reports, automations and custom agents.
Strategic translation. Turning ambiguous client goals into strategy, plans and narratives clients can carry to their own leadership, built around Skai's technology and the right partners .
Stakeholder range. Credible from the analyst running day-to-day to the executive who owns the budget, within the same account.
Cross-functional operation. Fast-paced, matrixed environments where delivery depends on teams that do not report to you.
Ownership and follow-through. Takes problems to resolution rather than to the next person, picks up what is unowned, and does the right thing because it is right rather than because it was asked for.

Nice To Haves

Breadth across other retail media networks: Instacart, Target and Roundel Media Studio, Criteo, CitrusAd, Epsilon, Kroger Precision Marketing, Amazon Retail Ad Service. Breadth across several matters more to us than depth in any single one.
Agency-side background. This is the most directly relevant experience for the role, though we welcome strong candidates from the brand, retailer and platform sides.
Coaching and informal leadership. You have mentored or trained less experienced colleagues, or built playbooks and documentation that outlast your involvement, and you are interested in growing into people management.
Commercial exposure. Retention and growth of a book of business, QBRs with economic buyers, scoping new work.
Total commerce context. Familiarity with how retail media sits alongside shopper marketing, trade budgets and joint business planning with retailers.
Skai, or a comparable retail media or search management platform.
Collaborating with a global team , both locally and virtually.

Responsibilities

Own the strategy, performance and outcomes of an assigned book of enterprise retail media accounts
Plan, build and optimise campaigns hands-on across Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, Target, and other retail media networks, including day-to-day management as the account requires it
Investigate performance issues and opportunities, and bring recommendations clients act on
Advise senior client stakeholders on media planning, budget allocation across networks, and retail media best practice
Lead QBRs and strategic reviews, and support the client services team on renewals, growth conversations and escalations
Build custom analyses, reports and automations where the standard tools and templates fall short
Serve as the retail media subject matter expert for the region, supporting internal stakeholders across the business
Mentor less experienced colleagues and contribute to team playbooks and process
Partner with product development, sales, technical account management and sales engineers to drive platform innovation and capture market opportunity