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VML is a global creative company that combines brand experience, customer experience, and commerce to create connected brands that drive growth. Guided by a Human First philosophy, VML is known for its innovative work for brands and consistently ranks among the world’s leading creative companies, including the WARC Creative 100. VML’s global network spans 55+ markets with principal offices in Buenos Aires, Kansas City, London, New York, São Paulo, Shanghai and Singapore.

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Job Summary

The Associate Director, Martech Technology Strategy is a client-facing role responsible for supporting and advancing Mazda North America Operations’ enterprise Martech roadmap under the direction of senior Technology Strategy leadership. This role sits within Technology Strategy and helps connect Mazda’s business goals to the technology, data, platform, governance, and operating model decisions needed to drive measurable growth.

This role helps manage the integrated Martech picture across CDP, CRM, personalization, content operations, taxonomy, media activation, analytics, and data engineering. They translate strategic direction into clear use cases, requirements, workstream plans, governance inputs, and decision support that cross-functional teams and partners can build, operate, and measure.

The role supports Mazda’s audience, segmentation, and taxonomy governance agenda, including the use of Claravine as the operational system of record for naming, metadata, campaign classification, and audience definitions across the Martech ecosystem.

At the Associate Director level, this person is expected to be a strong day-to-day strategy partner to Mazda stakeholders and internal delivery teams, helping shape recommendations, clarify trade-offs, and prepare decisions for senior client and agency leadership.

This role requires a minimum of four days per week in-office presence, with travel to Mazda and key partner locations as needed.

Key Responsibilities

Technology strategy and roadmap ownership

Support the end-to-end Mazda Martech roadmap across CDP, CRM, personalization, content operations, taxonomy, analytics, media activation, and data engineering.
Translate Mazda’s business priorities and customer experience goals into workstream plans, requirements, roadmap inputs, and fundable use case detail.
Develop analysis and recommendation materials to support build, buy, partner, defer, or stop decisions across the Martech ecosystem.
Identify risks, dependencies, trade-offs, and decision points early, and escalate them with clear context and recommended paths forward.

CDP strategy, segmentation, and audience orchestration

Support strategy and ongoing optimization for Mazda’s Adobe Experience Platform and Real-Time CDP program.
Define audience frameworks, lifecycle segmentation, suppression logic, activation requirements, and measurement expectations.
Ensure audience definitions are consistent across CRM, paid media, personalization, analytics, and reporting.
Partner with data engineering and platform teams to validate feasibility, data readiness, identity logic, and activation dependencies.

Enterprise taxonomy and governance

Support Mazda’s enterprise taxonomy program, with Claravine serving as the system of record for naming, metadata, campaign classification, and audience definitions.
Help define and maintain governance standards across Claravine, Adobe Experience Platform, Real-Time CDP, AJO, AEM, CJA, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, media platforms, WPP Open, Domo, and reporting tools.
Establish naming conventions, metadata standards, decision rights, approval processes, versioning, and change management for taxonomy and audience governance.