Advertising Manager at Red Bull

• The South African Brand Team act as brand guardians for the ZA company. The primary department responsibilities include consumer insights, product marketing; in-store and packaging activation – including new product/variant launches, advertising; creative development, media planning and buying for brand/product activities, content, and events.
• The Advertising Manager is responsible for the overall ZA Media and Advertising strategy acrossall campaigns, including delivery, performance measurement and optimisation, media agency management and working with Brand Specialists to ensure optimised media spend, efficient and effective creative and high impact campaigns that help us to grow our energy drinks business, our media properties, and events.

RESPONSIBILITIES
Areas that play to your strengths
All the responsibilities we'll trust you with:

ADVERTISING STRATEGY

• Responsible for overarching, integrated media strategy across all advertising campaigns – ensuring all advertising plans are optimised to deliver awareness, impact, and engagement to achieve overarching marketing objectives
• Collaborate with internal stakeholders across owned/earned/shared media, events, content production, commercial partnerships, ensuring integration across all touch points
• Deliver impactful campaigns that are aligned to sales objectives and account plans
• Assess advertising ROI based on marketing mix modelling learnings to grow effectiveness of advertising and its contribution to sales

MEDIA PLANNING AND BUYING

• Ensure media plans deliver effective, efficient, best-practice advertising campaigns
• Support Brand Specialists in the best implementation for advertising campaigns
• Ensure media planning and buying tactics are clear, fact-based, and optimised throughout each campaign and that post-buy learnings are collected
• Guide the ZA Brand Marketing Team on data-driven advertising opportunities, constantly identify, analyse, and leverage the latest media trends and emerging technologies, seeking out new opportunities and applying them to our media strategies
• Build in-team expertise across all relevant media channels including programmatic, social, search and broadcaster VOD/connected TV
• Understand and apply the DV360 and Google Campaign Manager tools and other relevant tools from main Social Media platforms to assess targeting and performance management quality
• Ensure compliance to GDPR in all advertising buying

CREATIVE AND MEDIA SYNERGIES

• Work with Brand Specialists, the Media Agency, and Creative Agencies to deliver impactful, fit-for-purpose creative formats across our Red Bull advertising campaigns

BUDGET & MEDIA AGENCY MANAGEMENT

• Manage the media agency to inspire excellence and deliver best-practice integrated campaigns, with maximum effectiveness and efficiency, while constantly optimising ways of working and exploring new, innovative ways to connect with consumers
• Keep close cost-controlling systems in place, ensuring TV cost per GRP commitments and digital performance guarantees are held and TV inflation is pro-actively managed to minimize impact
• Cultivate a collaborative culture and strong agency-client relationship, ensuring best practice planning and buying and account servicing
• Perform annual media agency evaluation and develop/implement performance plans as needed
• Manage the budget, spend and ROI

BUSINESS PLANNING

• Contribute to the annual business planning process including analysis of media planning and buying and advertising creative effectiveness to deliver plans and initiatives that will grow brand health and sales
• Responsible for KPI setting, benchmarking, and controlling across all media to increase the value of media buys on an ongoing basis
• Manage and maintain the annual media budget

EXPERIENCE
Your areas of knowledge and expertise that matter most for this role:

• University Degree
• Track record of delivering impactful campaigns of various sizes, from tactical online activations to multi-million-rand, 360° campaigns aligned across paid, owned, managed, and earned channels
• Project management experience, coordinating internal stakeholders, agencies, and other external partners (e.g., media publishers)
• Comfortable with data – you have an excellent understanding of TV and digital KPIs, their measurement and how to use data to unlock actionable insights
• Analytical and strategic mindset – you are a natural problem-solver, solution-focused and you know what it takes to build and grow brands
• FMCG experience with advertising budget responsibility or media agency background with deep knowledge of planning and buying, particularly TV and digital
• Budget management – capable and confident managing complex budget lines to deliver accurate phasing of large-scale, multi-channel media plans, including media cost controlling
• Media agency management experience, including negotiating optimal commercial conditions and optimising processes and quality of service
• Ability to build strong and effective working relationships with stakeholders of all levels and experience
• Experience in developing activities that resonate with consumers through creative empathy, innovative thinking, and good judgment of the creative work of others to achieve business results
• Solid understanding of the 18-24 Gen Z audience, their needs, pressure points, aspirations, and drivers is an advantage
• Minimum of 5 years professional experience in Marketing
• ZA market experience is essential