About the Position:
Dotdash Meredith is looking for a Senior Director, Health Strategy & Insights to lead our research strategy for our Health vertical (Core endemic portfolio: Verywell Health, Verywell Mind, Verywell Fit, and Health). Dotdash Meredith is a top resource in health on the internet, reaching over 200 million unique users a month. Our high-quality content is aimed at helping people make decisions, find inspiration, and take action.
Our first-party data is at the heart of informing everything we do--and not just on our health sites, but across powerful brands in home, food & beverage, tech, travel, family, beauty, and entertainment (including powerhouses like People, Better Homes and Gardens, Travel and Leisure, and AllRecipes). This robust first-party data is especially important when it comes to the patient journey--at Dotdash Meredith we don’t just see patients from an endemic health perspective; we see and seek to help them as whole humans, understanding how their health journeys connect to and impact their everyday lives and supporting them in those arenas. This data set is supplemented with our own primary research capabilities and robust syndicated data, providing a rich opportunity for uncovering insights and translating them to actionable recommendations for the overall health business.
This role is an opportunity to lead the health-focused research team, going beyond providing insights to ensure your team is actively helping shape the strategy and execution for the health vertical at Dotdash Meredith. The role is located in our New York office, with a hybrid work schedule aiming for 3 days a week in-office (specific days are not fixed, and are flexible according to business needs).
About the Team:
This role reports to the VP of Research and Insights (on the larger Data Strategy & Insights team), with an overall purpose of using all of our insight into our users (both in interacting with our content and advertising campaigns) and the industries we work with to inform business strategies and decisions across the company--including supporting our ad sales, editorial, custom content, product, licensing, and commerce teams. Moving beyond data dumps, our team strives to translate insights into specific recommendations for both strategy and activation.
The Data Strategy and Insights team is comprised of 4 key sub-teams:
Research & Insights: This team draws on first party, DDM primary research, syndicated data sources, data partnerships (e.g., a custom engagement with IQVIA in health), industry data, and publicly available information to understand our users and the broader set of consumers in order to inform business decisions both for internal stakeholders and external advertising partners. They are also the team responsible for developing and recommending intent targets using our proprietary tool, D/Cipher. This team is verticalized with a vertical lead over each topic area, including: finance, auto/tech/travel, beauty & entertainment, home/food/retail/CPG, and health.
This role leads the health vertical on this team.
Measurement Innovation: This team is responsible for conducting (whether with third-party measurement partners or internally) campaign effectiveness studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of media spend with DDM, as well as identifying learning from that performance to inform future partnership decisions. They are also responsible for driving continuous innovation to ensure that DDM is preparing for the cookieless future in measurement and can always offer our partners the highest quality offerings appropriate to their needs.
Specific to health, we have a small team who conduct proprietary MMM analyses focused on understanding and quantifying script lift as well as providing comprehensive insights to accompany the outcome data.
Primary Research: This team is responsible for conducting primary research (whether qualitative or quantitative) internally and in partnership with third-party market research firms. This work focuses on understanding consumers in their moments of need to inform business decisions inside DDM and with our advertising partners. In addition, they build and manage our user communities across all verticals, engaging with them when appropriate to augment our understanding of behaviors we’re seeing onsites (the what) with the values, motivations, and needs driving those behaviors (the why).
Data Journalism: This team is responsible for drawing on multiple information sources (including conducting their own research) to create research-driven content on our sites to serve our readers and to arm our brand spokespeople with compelling and brand-enhancing talking points in the marketplace.
About the Positions Contributions:
Driving Health Strategy: Going beyond providing health-related insights for our editorial, commerce, and revenue teams, the person in this role will work cross functionally to inform, support, and shape the business strategy for one of the largest health media & advertising businesses in the world. This strategy will leverage our unique first-party insights, syndicated and primary research, and our unique ownership of leading health endemic brands alongside brands across other life moments (e.g., travel, food, home, finance, etc.).
Strong Client Presence: As the representative of our users’ health needs, along with broader lifestyle insights, this role requires bringing a confidence, presence, and flexibility of thinking to client meetings and engagements, ensuring that we are guiding our advertising partners to solutions at DDM that will serve their overall goals and align with patient needs.
Pharmaceutical Industry Knowledge: Alongside the ability to communicate powerful insights that identify and clarify patient needs, this role requires awareness of the pharma business at large. Specifically: awareness of drug pipelines and how that pipeline impacts pharma advertiser and agency decision making; knowledge of how pharma brands make their marketing decisions and deploy their budgets; an understanding of the processes and priorities at pharma agencies and companies to ensure our recommendations are well-positioned for easy adoption.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: This role will work closely with the head of health sales marketing, the Chief Revenue Officer, the GM of the health brands, the health measurement team, and others to provide a holistic view on strategy--helping to identify key hypotheses or gaps in knowledge, then mobilizing the team to address them with research & insights.
Proactive Engagement: The person in this role will go beyond executing stakeholder requests and instead deeply understand the overall business needs and goals and proactively design and recommend approaches in research to support the success of the business. This role requires the desire to lead the creation of new processes, analyses, and deliverables to meet the needs of an ever-changing landscape in publishing.
Thought Leadership: The ideal candidate for this role will have a passion for sharing our point of view and helping to shape the industry’s approach to meeting the needs of patients, caregivers, advertisers, and more. This role will collaborate very closely with our Chief Medical Officer to identify opportunities for thought leadership in the marketplace and to identify robust insights that ensure our thought leadership is grounded in the medical expertise of our Chief Medical Officer, an understanding of the industry, and in a deep knowledge of our audience and their needs.
Team Management: Critically, this person in this role will provide leadership, guidance, career & skill development, and support to a strong team of researchers to help ensure their efforts are pointed at the things that will drive maximum impact for our readers and our business.
The Role’s Minimum Qualifications and Job Requirements:
Education:
Minimum Bachelor’s degree
Experience:
7-10 years experience in the health media industry, whether agency, pharma brand, publisher, or other pharma related fields
Specific Knowledge, Skills, Certifications and Abilities:
Direct knowledge of the pharma business
Ability to analyze data from multiple sources and synthesize insights in compelling manner
Understanding of how to use insights to formulate and support business strategies
Ability to present findings in compelling manner (stage presence)
Desire to collaborate across multiple functions, including sales people, marketers, data scientists, and more
% Travel Required (Approximate):
5-10% (client meetings, industry events and conferences, as appropriate)
What the Team is Saying
What We Do
Dotdash Meredith's vibrant brands help over 200 million users each month find answers, solve problems, and get inspired. Dotdash is among the largest and fastest growing publishers online, and has won over 50 awards in the last year alone, including Digiday's 2020 Publisher of the Year. Dotdash Meredith brands include Verywell, Investopedia, The Balance, The Spruce, Simply Recipes, Serious Eats, Byrdie, Brides, People, Food & Wine, Shape, Entertainment Weekly, Travel & Leisure, Better Homes and Gardens, Southern Living, Health, InStyle, Parents, EatingWell, Magnolia Journal, MyDomaine, Lifewire, TripSavvy, Liquor.com, and TreeHugger.
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Dotdash Meredith Offices
Hybrid Workspace
Employees engage in a combination of remote and on-site work.
Our employees work 3 days in office across our NYC, Des Moines, Birmingham, Seattle, LA, and Chicago locations. A couple of our orgs have remote teams (please refer to job descriptions). We are accommodating towards various exemptions and situations.
