Amazon Advertising Manager

Rockstar is recruiting for a marketplace management firm that specializes in operating brands' presence on Amazon, Walmart, Target Plus, and other channels. The client handles catalog, content, retail operations, and advertising for brands in CPG, cosmetics, skincare, apparel, footwear, and handbags. They are seeking a manager to lead their advertising and media program for a portfolio of client brands.

The client manages the marketplace business for brands that can't afford to get it wrong. They handle catalog, content, retail operations, and advertising across Amazon (Seller Central and Vendor Central), Walmart Marketplace, Target Plus, and other emerging channels, and they run an AI Agentic Commerce practice building their own tooling for this work.

Their clients span consumer packaged goods, cosmetics, skincare, apparel, footwear, and handbags. They hire them to operate their channel, not to advise from a distance.

They are hiring a manager to run the advertising and media program for a portfolio of client brands, and to lead the analysts who execute it.

The position exists because strategy has outgrown a single seat. Their analysts are strong at execution — campaign builds, bid management, optimization, reporting — but they need someone above them who owns the plan: what the strategy is, what it costs, what it should return, and how it gets sold to the client. You'll be the person client leadership talks to about media, and the person their analysts come to when they don't know what to do next.

The work runs on two clocks. Quarterly and annually you're planning: building the media plan and budget for each brand, forecasting the sales that spend produces, and getting client sign-off. Weekly you're operating: reviewing performance with your analysts, deciding what to shift, catching problems before the client does, and pushing the tests that inform the next plan.

The hard part isn't campaign mechanics — it's judgment under incomplete information. You'll commit to a forecast while a client's inventory position is uncertain, defend upper-funnel budget that won't read cleanly for two months, and distinguish a strategy that isn't working from one that hasn't had time. You'll also be asked to find growth in accounts where the obvious moves are already made, which means identifying demand the brand isn't capturing rather than optimizing what's already there.

You'll have real latitude over strategy, budget, and how your team works, and they'll expect you to own outcomes rather than effort. You'll partner with their Strategy & Implementation Team on retail readiness and their Design Team on creative, since performance in these channels is capped by the quality of what the ads point to.

Amazon is their center of gravity, and Amazon DSP and Amazon Marketing Cloud are central to how they differentiate. This is not a Sponsored Products–only role.

• Media planning: Annual, quarterly, and event-level plans across Amazon Sponsored Ads, Amazon DSP, Walmart Connect, and Target Roundel — channel and tactic mix, funnel allocation, and spend timed to the calendar that matters. Plans should account for inventory, retail readiness, competition, and seasonality, reserve budget for testing, and state assumptions clearly enough to defend six weeks later.
• Forecasting and budget management: Budget forecasting, pacing, and sales forecasts that connect spend to topline results. Scenario ranges with stated assumptions, not single-number promises. Efficiency targets managed without losing sight of incrementality.
• Analysis: You'll do the analytical work yourself rather than wait on a dashboard — interrogating search term, placement, product-level, DSP, and business reports, and using AMC for path to purchase, audience overlap, frequency, cross-channel assist, and new-to-brand contribution. They want people who know what question they're asking before they query, can tell signal from a short-term wobble, connect ad data to retail data, and check their own math.
• Growth and new audiences: Find the demand a brand isn't reaching: unclaimed search terms, untargeted subcategories, competitor share worth contesting, unused placements, adjacent use cases. Build and test audiences in AMC and DSP beyond the obvious — lapsed and repeat purchasers, cross-category buyers, in-market adjacents, lookalikes from high-value cohorts, prospecting pools sized for real new-to-brand reach. Run it as a program: hypothesis, test, clean read, scale or kill.
• Team leadership: Lead, coach, and develop the analysts running daily campaign work. Set the standard for QA, bulk-operation hygiene, naming conventions, and documentation. Review closely enough to catch the change that shouldn't have shipped, and explain the reasoning rather than just correcting it.
• Client communication: Bring plans, strategy, and performance to client senior management with a recommendation rather than a set of options. Anticipate the objection, name the tradeoff, show what you'd trade to get what you're asking for. Adjust for the audience — a CFO wants payback and risk, a brand lead wants positioning and reach, a founder wants to know whether it works. When results disappoint, say so first and bring a plan.
  

Required

• 5+ years creating, managing, and optimizing Amazon Sponsored Ads campaigns (Sponsored Products, Brands, Brands Video, Display) and Amazon DSP campaigns
• Experience leading digital advertising teams — hiring, coaching, reviewing, holding a standard
• Hands-on experience pulling insights from Amazon Marketing Cloud and acting on them
• Strong analytical skills; comfortable building your own models and reasoning about incrementality, attribution, and significance
• Media planning, budget forecasting, and sales forecasting experience
• Depth in PPC management and optimization, and in programmatic display
• A track record of new-to-brand acquisition and consistent incremental sales growth, with numbers you can walk us through
• Clear writing and speaking, including presenting media plans to client senior leadership and getting agreement
• Honesty by default: you report the number you wish were different, and you persuade by being prepared rather than polished
  

Preferred

• Google Data Studio / Looker Studio and SQL, particularly for AMC queries
• Agentic AI workflows — using AI to speed up analysis and build tooling
• Walmart Connect and/or Target Roundel campaign management
• Retail fundamentals: Buy Box, inventory health, catalog integrity, promotions, subscriptions, and how each limits what advertising can do
• Agency or multi-brand portfolio experience
• Advanced Excel and bulk operations; Python or scripting a plus
  

The work is cyclical and the peaks are demanding — Q4 and Prime Day compress a quarter of decisions into a few weeks. The people who do well here treat a bad month as information rather than a setback, and tend to show up already three hypotheses deep.

They also look for ownership (you escalate early and don't lose things), intellectual honesty (you'd rather be corrected than confidently wrong), client empathy (your recommendation lands inside someone else's budget and headcount), attention to detail, and a habit of fixing a manual process the third time you run it.

• 90 days: You know your portfolio cold — structure, history, constraints. Your analysts know what you expect. You've given them a clear read on what's working and what isn't.
• 6 months: You've materially improved the ad architecture on your priority accounts, you own the client strategy conversation, and you have tests in market on untapped demand.
• 12 months: Your portfolio shows new-to-brand and incremental growth that holds up under scrutiny, your analysts have grown, and clients ask for you by name.
  

Be ready to talk about one account you turned around and one you didn't, and what each taught you. They care more about how you think than where you've worked.