Digital Media Manager - #2093331

We are Running Total, a Manchester media agency dedicated to being the best independent full-service media partner. Our ambition drives us to innovate and help our clients thrive in a dynamic media landscape.

We are leaders in effectiveness, holding the IPA Effectiveness Accreditation since its inception. Everything we do - our people, processes, tools, and focus - is designed to support our clients’ growth and business goals.

Our digital media team is deliberately lean and cross-functional. Everyone runs campaigns across multiple channels, generates actionable insight from data, and speaks to clients directly. We don’t separate thinking from doing, and we don’t hide practitioners behind layers of management. If that sounds appealing, read on.

The Role

Day-to-day, you’ll own the activation and optimisation of paid media campaigns for a portfolio of performance clients. The channel mix covers paid social (Meta, TikTok), paid search (Google, Bing), and programmatic display.

The clients you’ll work with are obsessed with media performance, predominantly focused on immediate results such as cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, revenue volume and profit margin. When something isn’t working, they’ll know the same day, and they’ll expect you to know why and what you’re doing about it. The role suits someone who finds that energising rather than exhausting.

Typical client spend sits below £500k per month across the portfolio. Our clients are challenger brands and expect us to invest their budgets as if it was our own cash. Our clients value agility, precision, accountability, and doing the craft well.

One thing worth saying upfront: you’ll have a lot of autonomy here. We expect you to use it. That means making your own calls, challenging how things are done, and being comfortable rolling up your sleeves across planning, measurement, and reporting when needed — rather than waiting to be told.

What you will be doing

· Planning, building, and optimising campaigns across paid social, paid search, and programmatic. We expect you to have real depth in at least two of these channels

· Getting to the root of client problems, not just patching symptoms. We want people who think through issues properly rather than bouncing from one fire to the next.

· Using data to inform high value decisions. You will be data led, iterative through structured experimentation and have the ability to prioritise actions to generate maximum impact.

· Engaging client direct, spotting what’s underperforming before the client flags it, and coming with a recommendation.

· Contributing to the team’s test-and-learn approach. Sharing findings, documenting what works, building on what doesn’t

· Supporting team members as part of a genuinely collaborative structure.

· Managing the medium-term roadmap for your clients, making sure they’re always moving forward, not just maintaining.

· Looking beyond the ad platforms to advise on the full picture (creative, landing pages, funnel conversion) You’ll understand all the levers that drive campaign success, not just the ones inside the platform UI.

· Ensuring the ad platforms are leveraging high quality inputs and configured effectively to power key products such as Smart Bidding and Advantage+.

What we are looking for

· Solid hands-on experience running biddable media. Agency side background preferred, strong in-house experience considered

· Demonstrable depth in paid social and paid search, working knowledge of programmatic is an advantage

· Comfortable with performance KPIs (CPA, ROAS, CVR, Margin, Profit).

· Someone who finds data interesting rather than tedious, able to spot trends and insight from large datasets.

· Clear communicator in writing and in conversation; you can draft a client-facing email without the need for review and can lead client calls independently

· A curious mindset, you want to challenge your own and other people’s assumptions, you are the opposite of “we’ve always done it that way”. You use data to validate your hypotheses

· You possess technical skills beyond campaign creation, you understand all of the levers that can influence campaign success and know how to leverage them e.g. server-side tagging, landing page consultation, first party data consultation.

· T shaped thinker. You have deep enough knowledge in your core channels to make confident decisions without a second opinion, but curious enough about the wider media landscape to connect the dots when a client's problem doesn't have an obvious biddable answer.

We’re looking for someone with strong foundations, genuine curiosity about the work, and the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely cares about delivering success for our clients.

We are committed to diversity & inclusion and providing equal opportunities for everyone. We are dedicated to ensuring our processes are free from any form of discrimination or bias, right from the application process to life as part of the Running Total Media team.