Executive Director, Audience and Growth

POLITICO’s events team is looking for a key leader to drive its dynamic business forward. The Executive Director of Audience and Growth will run the Europe Live Business overseeing business growth and budgets in our Brussels headquarters.

This role would provide strategic and analytical support to help operate and expand the portfolio across POLITICO’s best-in-class events suite including single sponsored events, day long, multi- sponsor summits, Pro events, POLITICO brand events and key global moments. The role also leads the audience team for all POLITICO Live events, ensuring a high-quality and high-quantity audience across in-person and online events, and reports to the Executive Producer, Events Europe.

What You'll Do:

Business growth

• Drive strategic planning projects and processes by developing and operating in the 3-year and 5-year strategic plans to grow the business, in close concert with the Executive Producer
• Manage POLITICO’s Pro events and summit strategy, including its commercial development and KPIs, in concert with the Executive Producer. This includes leading the strategic planning, and pricing and revenue strategy with the sales team, market research and innovation, ensuring sales documentation is released on time, as well as commercial performance monitoring.
• Operationalize and manage the department’s budget and hiring plan
• Identify and monitor key market and competitive trends
• Establish excellent working relationships with key cross-department stakeholders, peers, and their teams, including VIP Engagement, Marketing and Communications, Editorial, external consultants, and POLITICO’s executive team, among others

Audience Engagement & Recruitment

• Lead the audience recruitment strategy for POLITICO Live events, ensuring quantitative and qualitative KPIs are met.
• Collaborate closely with the VIP team, editorial, commercial teams, and senior leadership to curate influential, high-level event audiences.
• Optimize internal processes for audience engagement, ensuring efficiency across teams.
• Innovate on audience acquisition tools and platforms to maximize reach, impact, and efficiency.
• Own the cross-promotion strategy for POLITICO Live events, working with the marketing team to align with broader POLITICO product promotion.

Marketing & Content Strategy

• Ensure audience engagement campaigns are strategic, creative, and data driven.
• Train and mentor the team on content marketing best practices and copywriting.
• Maintain high attention to detail across all audience engagement campaigns.
• Push creative boundaries to match the dynamic pace of POLITICO’s growth and ambition.

White Label Events & Budget Management

• Oversee the audience recruitment and marketing execution for White Label events (Not produced by the Live Events team).
• Manage the budget allocated for event promotion, ensuring efficient resource allocation under the Executive Director’s supervision.

What You'll Need:

• At least 8 years of experience in high scale event planning and production through a business lens, ideally for a news or political organization or other media and/or branded content-creation industries; experience managing teams
• Proven experience managing strategy for commercial events, growing and maximizing revenue
• Impeccable judgment, problem-solving, and political savvy, with a firm understanding of the EU ecosystem to include vendors, venues, and VIP audiences, and in other key political markets as required
• Excellent organizational skills, project management, and consistent attention to detail
• Outstanding interpersonal, verbal, and written communication skills; ability to work in a dynamic and collaborative environment while adapting to shifting priorities and managing multiple events
• Ability to take and give feedback and consistently work to achieve better results; demonstrated problem solving skills and the ability to work well under pressure
• Experience in implementing strategic and large-scale initiatives and projects in a change-oriented, fast-paced environment while remaining a strategic thinker and problem solver with the ability to transform goals into actionable plans

We are driven by our values. We are relentless contributors, disruptors of the status quo, collaborators, talent cultivators and DEI stewards. Our culture is defined by grit, total integrity and a prioritization on innovation.

We value our people. Click here for more on what we offer and what it’s like to work for POLITICO.

Let’s keep in touch. You can view our list of open positions here and email us careers@politico.com. We hope to see your application soon!