About the Company
Our client is a global leader in digital audio publishing, with an extensive content portfolio reaching millions of listeners worldwide.
Operating at the intersection of publishing, entertainment, technology, and data, the organization partners with leading authors, creators, licensors, and distribution platforms to bring high-quality content to audiences around the world.
Our client is seeking a Director, Content Planning & Analysis to serve as a strategic finance partner across Content Acquisition, Production, Distribution, Marketing, and Finance.
This role will help shape how the organization evaluates and deploys capital across its content portfolio. The Director will build the financial models, KPIs, dashboards, and analytical frameworks used to evaluate investments before acquisition and measure performance over time.
The position will have significant visibility across the organization, partnering directly with executive leadership on content strategy, capital allocation, forecasting, and investment performance. This is an ideal opportunity for a highly analytical and commercially minded finance leader who enjoys building processes, working cross-functionally, and translating complex financial data into clear business decisions.
Key Responsibilities:
Content Investment & Financial Modeling
- Develop sophisticated financial models to evaluate content acquisitions, licensing opportunities, production investments, and long-term portfolio performance.
- Evaluate investments using metrics including IRR, MOIC, ROI, NPV, DCF, and payback period.
- Build pre-acquisition models to help guide investment decisions across titles, genres, licensors, authors, languages, and content categories.
- Develop and maintain revenue and sales curves across the content portfolio.
- Perform scenario analysis and financial forecasting around different content strategies.
- Evaluate production costs and identify opportunities to improve returns and optimize spending.
Content Planning & Strategy
- Partner closely with senior content leadership and acquisition teams to bring greater financial rigor to investment decisions.
- Develop standardized tools, frameworks, and decision-support models for evaluating new content opportunities.
- Monitor actual content performance against original forecasts and investment cases.
- Identify trends across genres, authors, licensors, languages, platforms, and other portfolio attributes.
- Help guide long-term content investment strategy and capital allocation.
Executive & Investor Reporting
- Support executive leadership with management reporting, strategic analysis, and forward-looking insights.
- Develop materials for Board and investor discussions, including historical performance, forecasts, KPIs, and key business drivers.
- Translate complex financial and operational data into clear recommendations for senior leadership.
- Partner with private equity sponsors as needed on investment analysis and decision support.
FP&A & Long-Term Planning
- Partner with the broader FP&A organization on budgeting, forecasting, and long-range planning.
- Provide financial insights around content acquisition, production, revenue, and profitability.
- Develop dashboards and reporting tools that improve visibility into business performance.
- Identify risks, opportunities, and key drivers impacting future financial results.
Cross-Functional Partnership
- Collaborate across Content Acquisition, Production, Marketing, Distribution, Business Intelligence, Legal, and Business Affairs.
- Partner with BI teams to improve the quality and usability of data supporting financial analysis.
- Support financial analysis related to licensing agreements, partnerships, and content contracts.
- Ensure financial considerations are embedded into strategic and operational decision-making.
Leadership
- Lead and mentor the Content Planning & Analysis function, currently consisting of one direct report.
- Build scalable processes, tools, and analytical capabilities as the organization grows.
- Partner closely with senior Finance leadership.
- Help strengthen financial acumen and data-driven decision-making across the organization.
Qualifications
- 5+ years of progressive experience in commercial finance, FP&A, investment analysis, or a related analytical finance function.
- Advanced financial modeling skills with experience performing complex investment analysis.
- Strong knowledge of IRR, NPV, DCF, MOIC, ROI, payback period, and related financial concepts.
- Experience supporting investment, acquisition, licensing, content, product, or similar capital allocation decisions.
- Experience within media, digital media, entertainment, AdTech, consumer internet, commerce, or another content-driven business strongly preferred.
- Experience in a private equity-backed, high-growth, or highly acquisitive environment preferred.
- Strong background in financial analysis, management reporting, budgeting, forecasting, and long-range planning.
- Ability to partner effectively with both finance and non-finance stakeholders.
- Strong executive communication skills with the ability to turn complex analysis into clear recommendations.
- Experience building new processes, dashboards, financial models, or analytical frameworks.
- Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, or a related discipline required; MBA or CPA is a plus.
