Media Strategic Specialist (Brand)

Media Strategic Specialist (Brand)

(Fulltime/Parti-time – 32-38 hours per week)

As a Media Strategic Specialist (Brand) at Action, you safeguard the overarching brand and media strategy across all markets. You ensure that our large-scale marketing campaigns are brought to life consistently and effectively, using a full-funnel approach developed together with the broader media team. You combine marketing science principles, internal customer insights, and a clear experimentation roadmap to guide decisions and strengthen brand impact.
You do not execute campaigns yourself. Instead, you oversee strategic quality, challenge assumptions, and ensure that all creative and media choices ladder up to our long-term brand growth goals. You lead and support our external media agency or in-house teams, providing direction, frameworks, and strategic guardrails.

This is your daily action

In this role, you safeguard the quality and strategic integrity of Action's large-scale marketing campaigns across markets. You work from a full-funnel perspective, ensuring that awareness, consideration, and conversion objectives are addressed in a coherent, brand-led way. You bring marketing science thinking and customer insights into how campaigns are shaped, evaluated, and evolved over time.
You provide strategic direction and guardrails to our external media agency and internal teams. You review plans critically, challenge assumptions, and ensure that every creative and media decision connects back to long-term brand growth goals.
You drive consistency and quality across markets. You develop and maintain frameworks, guidelines, and strategic briefs that give agency partners and local teams the direction they need to execute effectively, without losing sight of the bigger picture.
You lead with an experimentation mindset. You help shape and maintain a clear roadmap for testing and learning, ensuring that insights from campaigns are systematically captured, evaluated, and fed back into future strategy.
You act as a senior sparring partner. For agencies, for the broader media team, and for internal stakeholders, you bring a well-founded point of view, ask the right questions, and elevate the quality of thinking across the board.

Main responsibilities

• Safeguard brand and media strategy across all markets and large-scale campaigns, ensuring every campaign ladders up to long-term brand growth goals 
• Develop and maintain strategic briefs, frameworks, and guardrails that enable consistent, high-quality campaign execution by agency partners and internal teams 
• Oversee the strategic quality of campaigns, challenging creative and media choices where needed, and ensuring they reflect a full‑funnel approach fully aligned with our long‑term media strategy and vision 
• Lead and support the external media agency, providing clear direction, accountability, and strategic oversight, building a strong agency relationship built on shared ambition 
• Maintain and evolve a structured experimentation roadmap, ensuring learnings are systematically captured, documented, and applied to future strategy 
• Collaborate closely with the broader media team to align on strategy, priorities, and ways of working 
• Contribute to measurement frameworks that track brand impact and assess long-term media effectiveness across markets

Meet your team

With tens of millions of fans across Europe, we keep surprising them week after week. We are constantly expanding the Action brand using a data-driven approach and by working in agile teams. In Marketing and Digital, we are responsible for the marketing and communication strategy and its execution. We are building more and more digital visibility and interaction – from customer surveys to designing our award-winning leaflet in our own Action Studio, and from private labelling to webcare, the app and social media campaigns. Our biggest challenge is using one voice and one format, online and in more than 3,000 stores in 13 different countries. Learning new things every day and working with the nicest colleagues to make our popular brand even more successful is what makes us happy. Does this apply to you, too?

This is you

You are a strategic thinker with a genuine passion for brand building and media. You bring structure and clarity to complex challenges, and you know how to translate high-level strategy into direction that agencies and teams can act on. You are confident challenging assumptions - including your own - and you hold yourself and others to a high standard of strategic rigour.
You are grounded in marketing science. You understand how brands grow, how media works over time, and how to build campaigns that create both short-term results and long-term brand equity. You bring customer insights into your thinking and you know how to design meaningful experiments that generate real learning.
You are a natural collaborator and sparring partner. You work closely with agencies, the broader media team, and internal stakeholders, bringing a well-founded point of view while remaining genuinely open to input. You lead through influence rather than control, and you create the conditions for others to do their best work.
You follow industry developments with curiosity and apply what you learn. You are ready to take ownership of a strategically significant role and grow alongside a media function that is building towards something substantial.

In addition:

• Minimum of 3 years of experience in managing multimedia channels on strategic planning level
• Experience overseeing large-scale, multi-channel campaigns with a strong brand and upper-funnel focus 
• Solid understanding of marketing science principles and how they apply to media planning and evaluation 
• Familiarity with experimentation frameworks and a structured approach to testing and learning 
• Strong analytical mindset, with the ability to translate insights into strategic direction 
• Good foundational knowledge of traditional media (TV, radio), buying principles, planning logic, and role in the broader mix
• Experience in retail or e-commerce is a plus 
• Proven experience leading or closely managing external agencies is a plus
• Experience in (international) media agency
• Excellent communication skills in English (Dutch is a plus)

What we offer

Surprisingly much! From our international headquarters in the Netherlands you have an impact on what happens in our stores across Europe. We welcome more than 15 million customers every week in more than 3,000 stores in 14 European countries. We have great growth ambitions. For Action and for you. Because our growth means that you can always take new steps. A different position, an interesting innovation project, new skills: you can continue to develop as a professional. And all this in a culture where our shared values are truly lived: customer focus, teamwork, simplicity, discipline, cost conscious and respect.

Did you know that you can also count on us for:

• A market-based salary based on a 38-hour work week
• An annual bonus based on company and personal performance
• 24 days of holiday and the option to buy 5 extra days (based on 38 hours per week)
• A temporary contract with the intention of offering you a permanent contract in the long term
• Flexible working hours and the possibility of working up to 40% from home, of course in coordination with your team and manager
• 15% staff discount on your purchases at Action 
• A good pension scheme and travel expenses allowance (Zwaagdijk-Oost is traffic jam-free and only 30 minutes by car from Amsterdam)

How we contribute to society

If you only know Action from the stores, a world will open up for you when you come and work with us. We work hard to make a positive impact on society and the environment. Did you know, for example, that we support thousands of children worldwide who grow up in an SOS Children's Village? That our team reflects the diversity of our customers, including 150 different nationalities? That we purchase 100% of our wood products and 100% of our cotton sustainably? And that all our stores, DC’s and offices only use energy-efficient LED lighting? Yes, that is also Action. Curious about what other initiatives we’re facilitating? There’s a lot more we are proud of and we would love for you to be part of it.

Interested?

We're proud to be an inclusive employer, and we warmly invite anyone who sees themselves in the vacancy to apply. So take action and respond to this vacancy now!

What happens next:

• Response to your application within 14 days (and usually earlier)
• First interview with a manager and a colleague
• Second interview with more colleagues
• Welcome to Action

Throughout the process, your recruiter is your permanent point of contact and is available to answer any questions you may have.