Contract - Automobile Paid Media Lead

At Honda we embrace inclusion in our various policies, so whilst our contracts state that the hours are as required to fulfil the role with a minimum of 35 hours per week, we offer flexibility for when you work.  The regular office hours are 08:00 – 16:00 Monday to Thursday with a half hour lunch break & 08:00 – 13:00 on a Friday.  However, we offer flexibility of when you work with our daily flex-time start of between 07:00 and 11:00 providing that there is no business requirement.

Whilst there is no contractual right to work from home, the flexibility we offer is that you can request to work from home 2 days per week, again providing there is no business requirement to attend the office.

Role:
As Paid Media Lead, you will lead the strategic planning, execution, governance, and optimisation of all paid media campaigns in the UK, focused on brand health and the full funnel approach for all Honda automobiles. 

You will manage significant budgets, select audience-first media placements, and collaborate extensively across HME-UK teams and with European colleagues.
Additionally, this role serves as the lead project manager for all UK product launches, ensuring all activities, assets, and media go live on time, with full cross-functional coordination and alignment.

Main Responsibilities:

• Support the strategic consultation, planning and activation of full funnel paid media campaigns, enhancing brand health, awareness, consideration and conversion stages, with all decisions grounded in customer insight and performance analytics.
• Own the media placement strategy with an audience-first approach, selecting platforms and formats that maximise consumer engagement, brand relevance, and measurable impact—working closely with our Media agency partner.
• Operationally own the relationship with our Media agency partner, ensuring they fully understand our business priorities to deliver efficient, insight-led media strategy, planning and activation.
• Own the full briefing process for all campaigns, ensuring collaboration with key stakeholders, including Honda commercial planning, to align model priorities, business objectives, and customer needs.
• Proactively lead the response-to-brief process with the Media agency, resulting in robust, data-informed media plans ready for sign-off within Honda’s governance processes.
• Lead and prepare all media plans for internal sign-offs with senior stakeholders, ensuring clear objectives, measurement frameworks, and evidence-based rationale are put forward to secure approval.
• Work to agreed timelines for campaign go-lives, owning all agency status meetings, flagging risks, and proactively defining countermeasures to mitigate delays.
• Ensure full optimisation of media campaigns is in place and all reporting is accurate to help make informed decisions on media planning and optimisation.
• Track and report on media effectiveness, using performance analytics and customer behaviour data to refine strategies and optimise future campaigns.
• Own the paid media budget, with full responsibility for governance, financial control, and driving efficiency across monthly, quarterly, and annual cycles.
• Collaborate with the content team to brief content needs for media placements, agreeing timelines and go-live dates based on media plans and strategic priorities.
• Collaborate closely with Honda Europe media team to align strategies, share insights and best practices, and ensure consistency across markets.
• Oversee all UK product launches from a marketing project management perspective, coordinating across Product, Marketing, Retail, PR, CRM, and Digital teams to ensure successful, customer-aligned execution.
• As lead for Product Launches, secure internal sign-offs with senior stakeholders on strategy, objectives, tactics, and KPIs—ensuring launch plans are insight-led and performance focused.
• Monitor automotive market trends, consumer behaviour, and media innovations to ensure continuous improvement in both strategic direction and day-to-day execution.

Qualifications, skills and experience: 
Required

• Significant experience in paid media planning and management.
• Proven leadership in managing significant media budgets with full governance responsibility.
• Extensive cross-functional project management experience, ideally including responsibility for product launches.
• Expertise in audience targeting, cross-channel paid media strategy (Display, Video, Programmatic, Social, Emerging Platforms).
• Strong customer-centric mindset with the ability to plan and place media based on audience needs, preferences, and behaviours.
• Strong collaboration, communication, and stakeholder management skills with internal audiences and partners.
• Data-driven approach with the ability to translate performance metrics into strategic actions.

Desirable

• Automotive industry experience (OEM or agency side).
• Experience delivering brand lift studies and analysing upper funnel performance metrics.

Honda is committed to the principle of equal opportunity in the workplace for all employees, temporary workers, contractors, applicants and visitors. Honda also encourages respect for the individual differences and talents of others while making full use of one's own abilities, based on Honda's philosophy of respect for the individual.

At Honda, we value and celebrate diversity and are committed to being a fair, non-discriminatory company that promotes and welcomes the uniqueness and differences of people around the world. We recognise that a diverse workforce allows for different ideas and perspectives, and we encourage everyone to share them. We strive to foster a culture of belonging that is consistent with Honda's core values and lived out in the way we work and respect each other. For us at Honda, diversifying our workforce means increasing its overall strength by providing people with equal opportunities - regardless of personal characteristics or previous careers.

This commitment flows directly from the Honda philosophy and the belief that we are all working towards a common goal. Honda recruits, hires, trains and promotes the most qualified/experienced individuals at all levels without regard to race, origin, religion or belief, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability or any other protected characteristic.