Paid Media Manager | Cape Town

If running paid campaigns across a bunch of platforms is your happy place, and you think as much about the journey as the click, this could be a good fit. You're in Google Ads in the morning, LinkedIn Campaign Manager over lunch, and Reddit or TikTok in the afternoon. In between, you're thinking about how these campaigns work together to move real people through our funnel.

We're hiring a Paid Media Lead to plan, deploy, and optimize campaigns across our paid channels. This role isn't just about setting campaigns live and watching the numbers. It's about thinking carefully about the marketing funnel, inventing new ways to bring quality leads and accounts into it, and using paid media to move them all the way through to sales-ready. You'll work closely with our Senior Director of Creative Performance Marketing, turning creative briefs and campaign strategies into live campaigns that actually perform. You'll own the technical craft

of paid media (structure, targeting, bidding, testing, iteration) and the strategic craft of designing campaigns that do their job at each funnel stage.

This is an individual contributor role with no direct reports. What you'll be doing is deep, hands-on platform work combined with real strategic thinking about how paid fits into the broader journey.

Day to day, you'll:

• Plan campaign architecture across platforms with clear funnel intent (awareness, consideration, decision) and matching audience, creative, and CTA logic for each stage

• Get creative about lead acquisition itself: figure out how to reach new audiences, test new platforms and formats, and keep growing both the quantity and quality of leads coming into the funnel

• Design retargeting and lifecycle audiences that work with email nurture, content offers, and sales outreach to move leads through the funnel

• Partner with the rest of the marketing team on lead qualification and hand-off criteria, so what reaches sales is actually ready to convert

• Contribute creative direction to ad concepts and copy, working with our creative resources on work that resonates

• Build and launch campaigns in Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Reddit, TikTok, and emerging platforms like Chat GPT Ads

• Set up and manage audience targeting, including custom audiences, lookalikes, contextual, intent, and account-based lists

• Own bid strategy selection and budget pacing across campaigns

• Traffic creative assets, keep naming conventions consistent, and manage UTMs

• Set up conversion tracking (pixels, server-side, offline conversions) and make sure GA4 is telling us the truth

• Run structured A/B tests on copy, creative, audiences, and bidding

• Pull data, build reports, and share what's working (and what isn't) with the team

• Continuously optimize campaigns, moving budget toward what's performing and shutting off what isn't

What matters most

You should be a technically strong paid media operator with meaningful hands-on time across multiple platforms. Not just Google. Not just Meta. You should be genuinely comfortable in three or more, and hungry to learn new ones as they emerge.

Just as important: you should think in funnels, not just campaigns. The point of running paid isn't to hit CTR benchmarks in isolation. It's to move real people from not knowing us to considering us to choosing us. You'll design campaigns that work alongside nurture, content, and sales to do their actual job at each stage of the journey.

You'll also need to be a creative problem-solver about lead acquisition itself. Not just running the campaigns we've imagined, but figuring out how to reach audiences we haven't reached yet, inventing new ways to bring net new leads and accounts into the funnel, and partnering with the rest of marketing so those leads are qualified for sales when they hand off. Growing both the quantity and quality of leads in the pipeline is the real measure of success.

And the best paid media leads bring real creative instinct alongside the technical craft. They can look at ad copy and know why it will or won't land. They can spot the audience insight that turns a decent campaign into a great one. They have opinions about hooks, headlines, and offers.

That creative sensibility, on top of the technical skills, is what we're really looking for.

• 5+ years of hands-on paid media experience across multiple platforms

• Advanced expertise in Google Ads, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, and Meta Ads Manager

• Working experience with at least two of: Reddit Ads, TikTok Ads Manager, ChatGPT Ads, YouTube, Microsoft Ads, programmatic, or other emerging platforms

• Strong understanding of the marketing funnel and how paid media integrates with nurture, content, and sales to move leads through it

• Real creative instinct: you have opinions about ad copy, hooks, and concepts, and can point to work you've influenced or written that performed

• Creative problem-solving around lead acquisition: a track record of finding new ways to reach audiences and grow both the quantity and quality of leads in the funnel

• Strong grip on conversion tracking (pixels, server-side, offline conversions, GA4)

• Experience building custom audiences, lookalikes, and account-based targeting

• Structured A/B testing experience and a track record of using test results to actually improve performance

• Comfortable in dashboards and pulling your own data

• Bachelor's degree

  Nice to have: experience with paid campaigns in multilingual markets. Localization, SaaS, professional services, or complex B2B global marketing experience. Hands-on with AI tools in performance workflows (creative variation, audience research, copy testing, predictive bidding, personalization). Familiarity with attribution modeling beyond last-click. Working knowledge of SEO, CRO, or organic social.

  A quick note on fit

  This role sits at the intersection of technical execution, funnel strategy, and creative problem-solving (both on the ad craft side and on the lead acquisition side). If you love the platforms, have real opinions about creative, think about paid as a way to move people through a journey, and enjoy the challenge of finding new ways to bring quality leads in, you'll thrive here. If you're purely a media buyer with no creative interest, or purely a creative with no platform depth, one side of this role will probably feel like a stretch. Applicants should be ready to talk through specific campaigns they've built, the creative behind them, how those campaigns fit into the funnel, and an example or two of creative problem-solving on lead acquisition.