Media Planner Jobs

Media planners build the campaign blueprints behind every dollar an advertiser spends. They translate a brand's audience, budget, and KPIs into a channel mix — connected TV, paid social, programmatic display, search, OOH, and increasingly retail media — then handoff a buy-ready plan to a buyer or trader. The role lives at the intersection of strategy, data, and tactical execution, and it's the discipline closest to where most agency money still flows.

In 2026, media planning is being reshaped by three forces: cookie deprecation pushing investment toward first-party-data-rich channels, AI-assisted plan generation collapsing the lower-skill mix-modeling tasks, and the rise of integrated planner-buyer hybrid roles at independent agencies. The candidates winning offers right now combine traditional planning fundamentals with comfort in DSPs, measurement platforms (LiveRamp, InfoSum, MMM tools), and at least passing fluency in SQL or Excel modeling.

Most US planning roles sit at holdco agencies (GroupM, Publicis, Omnicom, IPG, Dentsu) and independent shops (Horizon, Mediahub, Camelot, RPA, Mekanism, Wpromote). In-house brand teams at Disney, NBCU, Paramount, Spotify, Roku, Netflix, and Amazon also hire planners directly, often paying 15-25% above agency bands. Below: every open media planning role we've verified this week.