Currently available for select engagements

Hire Paid Media Director — the full paid mix, owned

A Paid Media Director owns the entire paid media portfolio: which platforms deserve budget, how spend splits between them, what efficiency each must hit, and when to test something new. They think in media mix, not single channels — balancing Google’s intent, Meta’s scale, TikTok’s creative edge, and LinkedIn’s B2B precision against one set of business targets. This is the hire when paid spans multiple platforms and nobody owns the whole picture.

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15+

Years Experience

100+

Projects Delivered

Countries Served

$25M+

Revenue Enabled

I'm Omer Muneer Qazi, a Dubai-based Fractional CTO & Solutions Architect with 15+ years of experience and 100+ projects delivered across 6 countries. Media mix decisions are measurement decisions, and I vet directors on their grasp of attribution across platforms — because the mix is only as good as the numbers behind it. For hands-on paid operations, see head of paid media.

What You Get

Paid media as one portfolio

Media mix strategy

Each platform assigned its role: Google for intent capture, Meta for scale, TikTok for creative reach, LinkedIn for B2B — with budget weighted by proven efficiency, not fashion.

Cross-platform budget allocation

Total paid budget allocated and reallocated across platforms monthly. Winners get fed; the mix stays fluid instead of freezing around last year’s plan.

Efficiency targets per platform

CAC or ROAS targets set per platform reflecting their different roles — prospecting and retargeting judged differently, as they should be.

New channel testing program

Emerging platforms evaluated on a schedule with real test budgets and kill criteria. You find the next efficient channel before competitors do.

Creative strategy across platforms

Creative direction coordinated so each platform gets native-feeling assets from one brand story — not the same ad resized four ways.

Consolidated paid reporting

One view of all paid: spend, efficiency, and incrementality by platform, reported against the blended targets the business actually cares about.

How It Works

From scattered spend to a managed mix

A structured engagement with no surprises — you’ll always know what’s happening and what’s next.

Mix audit

Every paid platform assessed: spend, efficiency, role in the funnel, and data quality. Overlaps and gaps mapped.

Strategy & targets

The mix defined with budgets and per-platform targets. Each platform gets a job and a number.

Manage the portfolio

Monthly reallocation, quarterly mix review, creative coordinated across platforms. Paid behaves like one investment.

Evolve the mix

New channels tested on schedule; the mix shifts as platforms and audiences change. No sacred cows.

Why Omer

Why hire a paid media director through a Fractional CTO

Media mix quality is a measurement problem in disguise: directors who trust each platform’s self-reported numbers will misallocate systematically. I check that candidates understand cross-platform attribution and incrementality, because the whole value of this role is seeing the portfolio clearly.

To get your paid mix under real ownership, get in touch.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What does a Paid Media Director cost?

Full-time $130k–$190k. Fractional directors fit companies with meaningful multi-platform spend that does not yet warrant a full-time executive.

What team or agencies do they manage?

Usually platform specialists in-house or one agency per major platform. The director’s job is making the portfolio coherent, not running every account.

First 90 days?

Mix audit, reallocation of obvious mis-spend, per-platform targets, consolidated reporting live. Efficiency typically improves as the mix gets rationalized.

How is success measured?

Blended CAC or MER against target, efficiency by platform, and the quality of new-channel tests. One portfolio number, honestly reported.

Paid Media Director vs Performance Marketing Director?

Paid media owns the media mix across platforms; performance marketing owns the full paid P&L including landing pages, offers, and funnel economics. They overlap heavily — the right title depends on whether funnel ownership sits with the role.

The measurement edge

Why I treat "hire a paid media director" as a measurement job first and a buying job second

Most teams who come to me to hire a paid media director describe a buying problem — CPMs climbing, ROAS falling, Performance Max quietly eating the budget — but what they usually have is a signal problem. Across fifteen-plus years and a hundred-plus builds, I've learned that each platform optimises towards whatever conversions you feed it, so if your tracking is leaking or double-counting, better bidding only scales the error faster. My first move is almost always forensic: I reconcile platform-reported conversions against the back end, GA4, and the finance numbers. I nearly always find a double-digit gap nobody could explain, and closing it is where the real performance hides.

Because I come from a solutions-architecture background, I rebuild the measurement layer rather than just complain about it. In practice that means a server-side Google Tag Manager container feeding Meta's Conversions API, Google Enhanced Conversions, and TikTok's Events API, with shared event IDs for deduplication and Consent Mode v2 wired in properly rather than bolted on. For lead generation and considered purchases, I pipe CRM-stage data back as offline conversions so the algorithms bid towards qualified pipeline instead of raw form-fills. The decisions here are unglamorous but decisive: what actually counts as a conversion, how long the window runs, and whether you bid on value or on volume. Get these right and every downstream choice becomes easier.

With clean signal, I can finally run the tests that matter. I lean on geo holdouts and matched-market design, platform conversion-lift and ghost-ad studies, and a lightweight marketing-mix model once spend justifies it — because last-click will always flatter branded search and retargeting while starving the channels that genuinely create demand. On structure, I consolidate over-segmented accounts so the bidding algorithms get enough data to learn, feed real value signals into Advantage+ and Performance Max instead of letting them run blind, and protect spend with hard kill criteria on every test. Good looks like a blended cost of acquisition I would defend line by line to a CFO, not a dashboard full of green platform ROAS.

The mistakes I fix are predictable. Teams judge channels on self-reported ROAS and let Meta and Google both claim credit for the same sale. They over-segment campaigns into a dozen tiny ad sets that never escape the learning phase. They treat branded search as acquisition and congratulate themselves on a fifteen-times return. They scale creative volume with no testing framework, so winners and losers blur together. I make the numbers honest first, then scale deliberately. I will also tell you plainly when paid is not your problem: if the offer, the pricing, or the landing experience is the real bottleneck, more spend only buys you faster disappointment, and no director worth hiring will pretend otherwise.

Who it's for

When clients hire me for this

Three platforms, no single owner

Spend is split across Google, Meta and TikTok, each run by a different agency or in-house specialist, and every report claims the same conversions. I build one blended view, de-duplicate the attribution, and decide what job each platform is actually doing so the budget stops being allocated on flattering self-reported numbers.

Tracking broke and nobody noticed

After a site replatform or a round of signal loss, conversions under-report, CAC looks catastrophic, and the team is pausing winning campaigns on bad data. I rebuild server-side tracking and the Conversions API so the picture is trustworthy again before anyone touches a budget line.

Stuck at a spend plateau

Performance Max and Advantage+ are consuming budget, but you cannot separate incremental sales from branded search and retargeting. I run geo and lift tests to isolate genuine demand creation from harvesting, then reallocate towards the channels that actually grow the business rather than the ones that merely report well.

Not ready for a full-time hire

Monthly spend has grown past what a junior buyer should own, but you don't yet need a six-figure full-time director on the payroll. Companies in this position hire me fractionally to set the strategy, measurement and guardrails, then supervise the day-to-day buyer against targets that hold up.

Questions buyers ask

Can you work alongside our existing agency instead of replacing them?

Yes, and that is often the better call. When you hire a paid media director fractionally, I usually sit above your agency, setting the targets, auditing their attribution, and holding them to incremental results rather than self-reported ROAS. Strong agencies welcome a competent client-side owner because it ends the monthly guessing game. I only recommend changing partners when an agency resists independent measurement.

Do you actually build the tracking, or only advise on it?

I build it. My background is solutions architecture, so I will stand up the server-side GTM container, wire Meta's Conversions API, Google Enhanced Conversions and offline conversion imports, and fix deduplication and consent myself. Most people who hire a paid media director get strategy slides; I am effective because I can also deliver the plumbing those strategies depend on, then hand it over properly documented.

How quickly will we see results?

Measurement fixes land in the first two to four weeks and often expose wasted spend immediately. Reallocation and structural cleanup show through within a quarter. Incrementality testing takes longer, since a clean geo holdout needs several weeks to read, so I am wary of anyone promising a transformation in thirty days. Durable gains come from compounding better decisions, not one heroic optimisation.

Which platforms and tools do you work across?

The core buying platforms: Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and Microsoft, plus programmatic where it earns its place. On the data side I work in GA4, server-side GTM, BigQuery, Looker Studio and the major conversion APIs, and I will integrate whatever CRM you run, whether HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive, for closed-loop reporting. The platforms matter less than whether they are all measured on the same honest basis.

How is hiring you different from hiring a media buyer or a PPC freelancer?

A buyer executes inside the platforms. When you hire a paid media director you are buying the layer above that: which channels to back, how to measure them honestly, and how spend ladders up to revenue a CFO will trust. I am glad to work with a strong buyer underneath me. If all you need is someone to manage keywords and bids day to day, a specialist is more cost-effective than me.

Can you handle B2B and long sales cycles, not just e-commerce?

Yes, and long cycles are where measurement discipline matters most. With a six-month sales cycle, optimising to form-fills simply trains the algorithms to chase cheap, unqualified leads. I pipe CRM stages back as offline conversions so bidding targets pipeline and closed revenue, build LinkedIn and search programmes around the buying committee, and judge success on cost-per-opportunity rather than cost-per-lead.

Currently available for select engagements

Own the whole paid mix

Tell me your platforms and spend split — I will tell you what the mix should look like and who should own it.

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