Media Strategy Director

We're MXB. We're an award-winning marketing agency built around brand, strategy, creative and digital, and we're looking for a Media Strategy Director to lead our media discipline into its next chapter.

This is a role for someone who can think in headlines and in spreadsheets. Someone who treats digital channels as their natural habitat. Someone who's genuinely excited about what AI is doing to our industry rather than nervous about it, and ready to help us shape what brilliant media looks like in an AI-native world.

You'll be the most senior media voice in the agency. The person clients want on the call. The leader your team learns from. And you'll have the autonomy to build the discipline the way it needs to be built.

About MXB

We're a full-service agency based in Belfast, working with brands across Northern Ireland, the Republic, and beyond. Our clients include the kinds of names you'll know, Musgrave, Centra, SuperValu, Daybreak and a lot of growing brands you'll want to know.

We're proud of the work. Northern Ireland Social Media Agency of the Year. Digital Agency of the Year. Spider Awards finalists more times than we can count. But the awards aren't really the point, the point is that our clients come back, our people grow, and the work keeps getting better.

"Imagine Beyond" is our mindset and our promise. It's how we work with clients. It's how we hire. It's the standard we hold ourselves to.

What you'll actually do

• Lead media strategy across the agency: Own the strategic media product at MXB, set the standards, frameworks and ways of working that define how we plan.
• Lead cross-channel strategy across paid search, paid social, programmatic, video, OTT/CTV, audio, DOOH and the right slice of offline.
• Build plans that connect to real business outcomes, audience architecture, channel mix, budget allocation, KPIs, measurement.
• Be the senior strategist in client meetings, the person who can hold the room, simplify the complex, and turn data into a story leadership teams want to act on.
• Run the digital media engine: Provide oversight across all our digital media activity, quality, performance, optimisation, measurement.
• Stay close enough to the platforms (Meta, Google, TikTok, You Tube, the trade desks) to challenge specialists constructively and spot what's changing before clients ask about it.
• Lead our thinking on social-first brand architecture, treating social not as a channel to fill but as the place modern brands are increasingly built, with a clear point of view on how paid, organic, creator and community work together.
• The presence and outreach to grow our creator network.
• Lead our AI agenda inside media: Set our point of view on AI in media, what we believe, what we use, what we won't.
• Identify, test and roll out AI tools that genuinely improve the work; planning, audience modelling, creative production, optimisation, reporting.
• Build AI literacy across the media team. Run sessions. Coach people. Create the kind of culture where experimenting with new tools is the default, not the exception.
• Govern it sensibly; data privacy, client confidentiality, IP, transparency. The exciting bit and the responsible bit, together.
• Be a credible external voice on this, at industry events, in client conversations, in our content.
• Build and lead a brilliant team: Lead, coach and grow our team. We're proud of how people progress here, keep that going.
• Set the bar for the work and the culture. People should learn faster at MXB than anywhere else they've worked.
• Partner with Creative, Strategy, Brand, Social and Account Leadership so media isn't a silo, it's stitched into how we make the work.
• Play a leading role in new business, pitches, scoping, pricing, and the ways of working that win us the right kind of clients.

What good looks like

• In your first 90 days: meet every client, every member of our team, and you know where the real strengths and gaps sit.
• Form a clear view on our media product, what we want to keep, change, build.
• Start shaping our AI roadmap for media, with two or three early wins identified.
• By the end of year one: Our media strategy approach is sharper, more consistent, and visibly better than when you arrived. Clients can feel the difference.
• AI is woven into how the team works day-to-day, with measurable time saved and quality improved.
• Growth of our digital team capability.
• Help us win work we wouldn't have won without you.
• Year two and beyond: You're a known voice in media across Ireland and the UK, externally as well as internally.
• The discipline you lead is one of the reasons clients choose MXB and stay with MXB.
• You're helping shape where the agency goes next.

About you

• Experience: Around 6+ years in media, with meaningful time in strategy at an agency. You've led cross-channel planning at a senior level.
• Digital depth: You really know digital media, not just the buzzwords. You can challenge a programmatic trader, push back on a media plan, and explain attribution to a CMO.
• AI fluency: You're already using AI tools in your work and have views on where they help and where they don't. You don't need to be technical, you need to be curious, practical, and unafraid.
• Strategic instinct: You can find the story in the data. You think in audiences, behaviours and business outcomes, not just impressions.
• Leadership: People who've worked for you would work for you again. You build teams up rather than burn them out.
• Reach and presence: You bring a network with you. You know creators, talent managers and platform partners across Ireland and the UK, and you use that network generously to open doors for the team and for clients.
• Social-to-web fluency: You've delivered work where social and website worked as one, campaigns where the website was built to receive social traffic, hold creator content, and convert the audience social brought in.
• Client presence: Senior clients trust you. You can hold a room, simplify the complex, and disagree without disagreement.
• Commercial nous: You understand how agencies make money and how to scope work that's both ambitious and profitable.

You'll love it here if...

• You're genuinely excited about AI and what it could do for media and frustrated when agencies treat it as a buzzword.
• You want senior responsibility but also want to stay close to the work.
• You like independent agencies the pace, the autonomy, the chance to actually shape something.
• You're a generous collaborator and a confident leader, in that order.

It probably isn't for you if...

• You'd rather not get into the detail of a media plan.
• You're looking for a role with a fixed playbook and well-trodden processes.
• You'd find leading a team and being the senior at the same time frustrating rather than energising.

The practical stuff

• Where: Our home is Belfast, BT9. The role is remote-friendly but we'd want you in the office with the team and clients regularly.
• Salary: We're happy to talk openly about this.
• Start date: As soon as we find the right person.

How to apply

Send a tailored CV and letter to: karen@mxb.agency telling us what you'd want to do in your first 90 days, and what you think the most interesting thing happening in media right now is. We read everything.

MXB is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds. If there's anything we can do to make the process work better for you, please tell us.