SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 195,000 - 275,000 / annual
Smartly.io, an AI-powered advertising technology platform, is seeking a VP of Strategic Communications & Commercial Marketing to lead a transformational 18-month mandate. Reporting to the CMO, this executive will oversee global communications, brand PR, analyst relations, corporate events, and customer and field marketing teams—transitioning the function from traditional communications into a modern, operationally rigorous, revenue-aligned Center of Excellence model.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:
Strategic Communications & Executive Visibility: Own Smartly's global corporate and brand communications strategy across earned media, executive communications, thought leadership, and analyst engagement. Build and manage a strategic speaking program for executives, securing high-value opportunities at major industry events and conferences. Develop and maintain a clear, differentiated corporate narrative connecting company strategy, product innovation, and customer impact.
Event Operations & Revenue Generation: Reorient the Global Events team from administrative coordinators into commercial powerhouses focused on pipeline generation. Transition internal administrative event coordination (Board meetings, executive dinners, all-hands) out of marketing to Executive Assistants and Workplace Experience teams. Implement a "buy over build" creative strategy, outsourcing event design to specialized agencies while freeing internal teams to focus on operations and pipeline generation.
Comms Operations & AI-Augmented Workflows: Establish a specialized Comms Ops capability to run underlying technology, automation engines, and predictive analytics. Build AI-augmented content pipelines to automate asset repurposing, translations, and variation generation—reducing manual content-updating burdens by 50–75% while maintaining human oversight. In-house routine PR execution using advanced AI tools, reducing external PR agency retainer spend by 20–35%.
Customer Advocacy & Case Study Automation: Overhaul the customer advocacy lifecycle, replacing manual processes with an automated, standardized case study pipeline. Establish automated consent workflows and streamlined brief development to rapidly deploy localized customer success stories to sales, reducing cycle time from weeks to days.
Cross-Functional Governance & Team Protection: Implement strict SLAs and enforce a mandatory 12-week minimum lead time for joint partnership campaigns. Act as a gatekeeper to protect the team from reactive, high-stress initiatives that compromise work quality.
Workload Sustainability & Psychological Safety: Actively manage team workloads to address engagement data around workload manageability and mental wellbeing. Establish behavioral standards for managers, eliminate blame culture, and ensure teams executing high-stakes campaigns are structurally supported.
18-MONTH STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES:
- Scale event-influenced pipeline from $10M baseline to $12M–$13M with 98%+ customer retention
- Increase annual third-party validations (publications, analyst commentary, reviews) from 10 to 15 quarterly
- Support scaling from 430–440 Sales Accepted Leads (SALs) to 600 weighted SALs while optimizing SAL acquisition costs by 5%
- Drive 10% year-on-year increase in SAL-to-SQL conversion
- Achieve 8+ point score in internal understanding of company mission and brand principles
- Increase global brand awareness and familiarity by 5% while establishing employee advocacy programs
- Collaboratively launch and scale customer/agency partner academy
REQUIREMENTS:
- 10+ years of progressive leadership experience in Corporate Communications, PR, Brand Marketing, or Comms Operations
- Proven track record scaling communications and branding departments in mid-sized B2B SaaS or digital media organizations (500–2,000 employees)
- Extensive experience managing large global PR agency retainers, contract execution, and outsourced creative operations
- Successful experience establishing Hub-and-Spoke Center of Excellence models or transitioning traditional communications teams into automated, Comms Ops frameworks
- Bachelor's degree in Communications, Journalism, Marketing, or analytical business field
- MBA or advanced training in Agile process frameworks is a strong plus
- Mastery of strategic storytelling, corporate positioning, and executive communications
- Exceptional capability in large-scale event budget planning, real-time registration tracking, and automated ROI analytics
- Hands-on understanding of API integrations, AI-augmented design tools, automated translation engines, and Comms Ops technologies
- Strong leadership backbone to implement team boundaries, enforce briefs, and maintain operational discipline
- Proven commitment to workload balancing, capacity planning, and maintaining psychological safety standards
