WPP Media is hiring a Senior Director-Media Planning

Responsibilities

• Act as the senior planning lead and strategic partner for global and multi-market clients, ensuring media planning excellence aligned with client business objectives.
• Maintain a relentless focus on driving client outcome growth, applying performance-led planning principles, data-informed audience insights, optimisation thinking and advanced analytical perspectives to planning decision-making.
• Serve as a subject-matter expert across multiple channels and planning practices, with a strong understanding of how channels work together to deliver short- and long-term client outcomes.
• Provide strategic guidance and recommendations on the optimal use of media products, services and solutions, ensuring alignment with client needs, business strategy and return on investment expectations.
• Act as a trusted advisor to senior client stakeholders, nurturing long-term relationships and supporting clients in navigating complex business challenges, organisational change and evolving market dynamics.
• Demonstrate deep understanding of client businesses, including successes, challenges and strategic priorities, and apply experience-based judgement to identify opportunities, risks and trade-offs from a business perspective.
• Lead senior-level planning discussions across multiple stakeholders, effectively synthesising and reconciling diverse or conflicting inputs to drive alignment and shared understanding.
• Embed performance-led and outcome-oriented thinking into the planning process by ensuring that insights, intelligence and forecasts from activation and specialist teams are reflected in strategic recommendations.
• Define and oversee planning-level KPIs, governance frameworks and planning processes that enable optimisation, benchmarking and continuous improvement across client portfolios.
• Champion a data-driven planning culture, partnering with analytics and data science teams to prioritise initiatives and ensure insights are effectively translated into planning outputs.
• Develop high-level growth and commercial planning perspectives for assigned clients or portfolios, including directional forecasts, profitability considerations and identification of priority growth areas.
• Maintain a strong understanding of WPP Media agency deliverables and committed campaign KPIs, ensuring planning outputs are aligned with agreed client expectations.
• Represent the planning discipline with credibility in senior client meetings, contributing technical and strategic expertise when required.
• Own the senior client engagement cadence from a planning perspective, including strategic sessions, status forums and cross-functional meetings, ensuring consistent and high-quality representation of the planning function.
• Take ownership of key planning workstreams on complex or multi-market initiatives, ensuring clarity of scope, appropriate governance and high-quality outputs.
• Identify capability gaps within media planning teams supporting client portfolios and define actions to address them through development, upskilling or targeted hiring.
• Partner with global planning practices, investment, product and solutions teams to help develop and drive adoption of new proprietary solutions on behalf of the OpCo.
• Represent the planning perspective in shaping capability priorities for the Polish GOC, ensuring alignment with broader WPP Media standards, expectations and strategic direction.
• Own the development and long-term evolution of the Media Planning discipline within the Polish GOC, including definition of role profiles, competency frameworks and quality standards.
• Provide leadership and oversight for planning talent, establishing consistent development approaches, evaluation principles and coaching practices that support high performance and career progression.
• Build and maintain planning governance, including methodologies, templates and quality assurance standards, to ensure consistency, scalability and excellence of planning outputs.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement and knowledge sharing within the planning community, supporting best-practice exchange across teams and markets.
• Operate effectively within a complex, matrixed organizational environment, providing leadership through influence and partnership across client, planning and activation teams.
• Collaborate closely with client leadership, activation leads and regional stakeholders to ensure alignment between strategic intent, planning outputs and execution delivery.
• Represent the planning discipline with credibility across cross-functional forums, ensuring consistent understanding of objectives, priorities and expectations.
• Enable effective communication and knowledge sharing between planning and activation teams, fostering clarity, collaboration and continuous improvement.
• Outline, monitor and support adherence to agreed client and WPP Media standards, ensuring planning excellence is consistently reflected across engagements.
• Partner with senior stakeholders to identify gaps, risks or misalignments, and contribute to the development of action plans and improvement frameworks.
• Act as a senior counterpart to Activation Directors and Leads, promoting shared accountability for client outcomes and strong collaboration across disciplines.
• Lead by example in building a collaborative, inclusive and high-performance culture, encouraging teamwork, ownership and professional growth across teams.
• Utilize advanced data analytics to understand media performance deeply, and guide optimization strategies ensuring maximum ROI.
• Provides expert insights on the application of data science and how to effectively use client and all biddable data signals.
• Stay ahead of media and technology trends, providing guidance on emerging opportunities and threats.
• Proactively develops blueprints and action plans to help propel achieving client business objectives by bringing together practitioners across practices, proprietary solutions and extended WPP Media capabilities, at a regional level.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience in across paid media, strategy, retail, or consulting, including senior roles requiring leadership and accountability for teams and stakeholders.
• Expertise in digital media, adtech, martech and data platforms
• Proven track record of managing complex, multi-market accounts where you’ve delivered measurable business outcomes.
• Deep knowledge of multi-practice area/industry usage and trends, and how it impacts customer businesses.
• Ability to communicate in a way that is highly persuasive, engaging and comprehensive (written and verbal).
• Fluent in different types of media strategy – and understands that the road to strong brand is paved with performance marketing principles at the core.
• Sophisticated understanding of the media investment, ad tech and agency ecosystem
• Experience overseeing technology and/or operations transformation programs.
• Ability to tell complex narratives in a simple and compelling way.
• Passion for digital and data, well versed on the latest global advancements & dynamics.
• Ability to lead through influence, demonstrating strong interpersonal skills, empathy and credibility across seniority levels.
• Demonstrated experience owning and leading senior client planning relationships across large, complex, and matrixed client teams.
• Proven capability leadership: building a planning team, hiring for defined profiles, and developing a discipline at scale, including people development, performance management and succession planning.

Work Arrangement

Hybrid — Poland, U.S., Europe, Asia

Team

Structure: Global Operations Centre (GOC)

Additional Information

• Hybrid work approach with teams in the office around four days a week.
• Accommodations or flexibility available upon discussion with hiring team during interview process.
• Employees can tap into the global WPP Media & WPP networks to pursue their passions, grow their networks, and learn at the cutting edge of marketing and advertising.
• Employee resource groups and frequent in-office events showcasing team wins, sharing thought leadership, and celebrating holidays and milestone events.