Group Strategy Manager, Audience Activation

General Motors • Full-time • United States • 4d ago

The Role

General Motors' Marketing Applied Sciences (MAS) team is seeking an experienced, strategic, and data-fluent leader to serve as Group Strategy Manager, Audience Activation. This role sits at the heart of GM's marketing transformation, leading a team of audience strategists responsible for developing, governing, and activating data-driven audience strategies across GM's brand portfolio.

Success in this role requires a unique blend of audience strategy expertise across Media, site, and CRM, technical acumen, cross-functional leadership, and the ability to translate complex data into compelling marketing decisions. The ideal candidate brings deep, hands-on media expertise, including a strong command of programmatic ecosystems, paid media activation, media measurement frameworks, and addressable audience delivery. This is an opportunity to shape how GM uses first- and third-party data to reach the right customers at the right moment.

What You'll Do

Lead and develop a team of audience strategists, providing coaching, prioritization, and career development across cross-brand activation work

Collaborate closely with the Media team on the end-to-end audience strategy process, ensuring accurate and efficient audience builds aligned to Media strategy and successful activation, including but not limited to audience sizing, reach/frequency planning, and segment-level performance expectations

Serve as the primary MAS point of contact for audience strategy across brand and agency partners, working closely with the Media team to align on campaign needs, taxonomy, audience development timelines, and channel-specific delivery requirements (programmatic, social, display, etc.)

Serve as an experienced interpreter of marketing and media requests, translating ambiguous campaign briefs and brand objectives into clear, defined audience strategies

Oversee the development and activation of Pronghorn-powered audiences across media, site, and CRM channels, ensuring alignment with marketing objectives and model recommendations

Partner closely with MAS Data Scientists and the Media team to translate modeling outputs into actionable, campaign-ready audience segments. Advise on match rate optimization, addressability, and scaling trade-offs across activation platforms.

Manage audience workflows across platforms including Databricks, Adobe Real-Time CDP, AEP, LiveRamp, and other onboarding and activation tools

Support the product development team in building, testing, and deploying new media capabilities and platforms. Translate technical capabilities into actionable pilot opportunities. Work with the T&L team to lead development of testing strategies and campaigns to deliver new marketing opportunities and channels

Demonstrate strong leadership and decision-making in establishing audience best practices, including standards for audience building, scoring, and sizing, to ensure consistent, scalable segmentation logic across brands and channels

Establish and maintain governance standards for audience documentation, segmentation logic, and operational data flows (Confluence, SharePoint, etc.)

Drive audience insights and persona analysis by synthesizing behavioral, transactional, and demographic data to inform targeting strategy, connecting audience insights directly to media performance outcomes

Champion data quality and privacy compliance across audience workflows, ensuring audiences are built and activated in alignment with GM's data governance and privacy requirements

Represent the Audience Activation capability in cross-functional planning sessions, brand standups, and MAS leadership forums; serve as the internal SME on how media and audience strategy intersect to drive campaign effectiveness.

Provide transparency and accountability on timelines, prioritization, and progress

Identify opportunities to incorporate AI and agentic tools into audience operations to improve speed, quality, and scale

Your Skills & Abilities (Required Qualifications)

Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Business, Data Science, Computer Science, or a related field

8+ years of experience in a media, audience, or marketing analytics role, spanning strategy, planning, or activation, within an enterprise or agency environment

4+ years of direct people leadership experience, with a track record of developing high-performing, cross-functional teams

Deep expertise in audience segmentation, customer data platforms (CDP), and data onboarding platforms (e.g., Adobe AEP, LiveRamp, or similar)

Comprehensive understanding of the programmatic media ecosystem, including DSPs, SSPs, DMPs, identity graphs, and the mechanics of real-time bidding
Experience in scaled media audience planning and execution

Strong understanding of cross-channel marketing activation including media (programmatic display, paid social, CTV/OTT, search), CRM, site, and digital channels

Demonstrated experience navigating identity resolution challenges, including knowledge of first-party data strategies, universal IDs, and privacy-preserving measurement

Experience translating audiences into creative implications
Ability to collaborate effectively with Data Scientists, translating technical model outputs into practical activation strategies

Excellent stakeholder management skills, with experience navigating matrixed organizations and aligning brand, agency, and analytics teams

Strong analytical and storytelling capabilities, able to translate complex data into powerful stories and actionable recommendations, synthesizing audience, media, and marketing performance data into clear, executive-ready narratives that drive confident decision-making and inspire action across brand, agency, and leadership stakeholders

What Will Give You a Competitive Edge (Preferred Qualifications)

Experience working with identity resolution platforms

Hands-on platform experience with major DSPs (TTD, DV360) and paid social platforms (Meta Ads Manager, Pinterest Ads) in an audience strategy or media planning capacity

Experience managing 1st party and device-based identity signals

Hands-on experience with Databricks, SQL, or PySpark for audience analysis and data enablement

Familiarity with AI-powered audience tools or agentic marketing workflows

Experience with data governance practices and privacy compliance in marketing contexts

Background working within an in-house marketing science or advanced analytics function

Master's degree in a quantitative or marketing-related field

The salary range for this role is ($134,700 - $207,600). The actual base salary a successful candidate will be offered within this range will vary based on factors relevant to the position.

Bonus Potential: An incentive pay program offers payouts based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.

Benefits: GM offers a variety of health and wellbeing benefit programs. Benefit options include medical, dental, vision, Health Savings Account, Flexible Spending Accounts, retirement savings plan, sickness and accident benefits, life insurance, paid vacation & holidays, tuition assistance programs, employee assistance program, GM vehicle discounts and more.