Media Agency Recruiters for Planning, Buying, Analytics and Ad Ops
We staff the people who decide where a client’s money runs, who buys it, who proves it worked, and who keeps the ad server honest.
Media recruiters for agencies fill the seats behind a media plan, from planners and buyers to investment, analytics and ad operations leads. KORE1 runs those searches nationally, in a market where 44.4% of media buying agency jobs sit in Manhattan.
Last updated: October 12, 2026
That last number is the whole problem, so start there. A media agency is not like a creative shop with a studio in every big city. The buying business has one center of gravity, and it’s a single county in New York.
So when an agency in Chicago or Irvine opens a director seat, it’s usually recruiting from people who learned the job at a Manhattan holding company. Some of them want to leave New York. Most don’t, and they know exactly what their market pays. We work both halves of that, the people who’ll relocate and the ones who’ll only take a remote seat, and we know which is which before you spend a week on interviews.
- This desk
- Media agency hiring at the team level. Planning and strategy, buying and investment, analytics and measurement, ad operations and ad tech, plus the directors and group heads who run them.
- One seat at a time
- A single planner or buyer goes to media buyer and planner staffing, trafficking and ad server work to ad operations staffing, and creative-side hiring to advertising agency recruiters.
Media agency work runs through the KORE1 marketing recruiters, next to our digital marketing staffing desk, which covers the in-house paid media teams that now compete for the same buyers. The senior media and analytics searches sit with Samantha Litman, who has recruited inside media, advertising and entertainment for more than 25 years.
The Market List Every Media Recruiter Should Start From
A planner ranks markets by how much of the country each one delivers, then reads the running total down the page. Here’s the same list for the people who do that job, ranked by county.
Media buying agency jobs by county, 2024 annual average
-
1
New York CountyManhattan, NY
Jobs7,952
Share44.4%
44.4% -
2
Los Angeles CountyLos Angeles, CA
Jobs1,785
Share10.0%
54.4%Two counties, and you’re past half the country.
-
3
Cook CountyChicago, IL
Jobs1,021
Share5.7%
60.1% -
4
Orange CountyIrvine and Newport Beach, CA
Jobs380
Share2.1%
62.2% -
5
Miami-Dade CountyMiami, FL
Jobs317
Share1.8%
64.0% -
6
Hennepin CountyMinneapolis, MN
Jobs216
Share1.2%
65.2% -
7
San Diego CountySan Diego, CA
Jobs204
Share1.1%
66.4% -
8
Maricopa CountyPhoenix, AZ
Jobs137
Share0.8%
67.1%
Every other county in the country, including the 314 where the government withholds the count to protect individual employers, adds up to the remaining 32.9%.
Source: BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, 2024 annual averages, private ownership, NAICS 541830 media buying agencies. Share and running coverage are of the 17,894 U.S. total. The tick on each bar marks half.
Look at how fast that line climbs. Manhattan by itself nearly gets you to half. Los Angeles takes you over it, and after Chicago the list goes flat. Every county from fourth place down holds a couple of percent at most.
Compare that with the creative side. Advertising agencies, a separate federal industry code, keep 17.0% of their jobs in Manhattan, which is concentrated but not lopsided, and their payrolls show up in Dallas, Atlanta, Detroit and Phoenix in real numbers. Media buying never spread out like that. It got more concentrated. Manhattan’s share was 41.5% in 2019 and it’s 44.4% now, even though the number of media buying offices there actually fell, from 59 to 50.
What does that mean for a hiring manager? If your seat is in Manhattan, you’re bidding against every other shop on the same few blocks, and candidates can change jobs without changing subway lines. Anywhere else, the bench is thin. You’re usually importing the experience, so you either pay for a move or you make the seat remote and say so in the first line of the posting. One caveat. Federal industry codes go by each office’s main activity, and some holding-company media groups file their people under advertising agencies instead, so treat the list as the shape of the market rather than a headcount of every media job.
What Media Agency Recruiters Get Asked for After a Big Account Win
Before she joined KORE1, Samantha was brought in by a media agency that had just won a major entertainment account. The hiring that followed ran past 20 roles. Analytics was where it got interesting, because the same surge needed an SVP of Analytics and a senior analyst, and those are two completely different searches that happen to share a department name.
The senior analyst is a craft hire. Can this person pull a clean audience from the data you actually have, build the attribution read the client will believe, and explain it to a planner without a slide deck? The SVP is a different animal. That person has to sell measurement to the client’s CMO, defend a methodology in a quarterly business review, and run a team that may well be bigger than the average media buying agency in the country.
That last line isn’t a figure of speech. The average media buying agency in the federal count employs 11.2 people. A surge past 20 roles is a second agency arriving on Monday.
For pay, the range Samantha has seen in recent searches for a VP or director of analytics is $200,000 to $220,000, and our marketing and creative salary guide sets that range against the federal data. The shops in the market list average $130,345 a year per employee across everyone, assistants included, so a seat at that level is priced well above the room. It has to be. The people who can do it are also being recruited by brands building their own measurement teams, which our analytics recruiters see from the other side.
17,894
people working at U.S. media buying agencies in 2024
44.4%
of those jobs in one county, Manhattan
6.4
people in the average media buying shop outside Manhattan
92%
KORE1 twelve-month retention, from its own placement records
Sources: BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, 2024 annual averages, NAICS 541830. KORE1 placement records.
Why a Media Recruiter Treats Small Agencies Differently
Here’s the other half of the federal count, and it surprised us. Since 2019 the number of media buying offices nationally grew from 1,194 to 1,604. Manhattan lost nine. So all of that growth, and then some, happened somewhere else, in shops that average 6.4 people. Inside Manhattan the average is closer to 159.
Those are two different hiring problems. A 159-person shop has a director over every desk and can carry a junior while they learn the buying platform. A six-person shop can’t. Every hire there has to plan and buy, or buy and report, from the first week, and a candidate who has only ever done one slice of the job inside a big holding company can struggle with that load. It isn’t about talent. It’s about how many hats.
So for a smaller agency we screen for range first. Has this person ever owned a client’s whole plan, start to finish, including the post-buy that says what actually ran? Have they pitched? Do they know what happens when the media budget gets cut by a third in the middle of the quarter, because somebody on your six-person team is going to get that call. We’d rather send you three people who have done all of it than eight who are brilliant at a part.
Timing is the other piece. A new account with a launch date is exactly when contract-to-hire earns its keep, and Samantha is seeing more media clients ask for it. You can staff the first flight, see who’s still standing when the second one plans, and convert the people you want. Most leadership seats still go direct hire. And if a search has gone quiet, the usual cause is a list of requirements that grew while the role sat open, which we wrote about in when job requirements get too specific.
The Four Desks Our Media Agency Recruiters Staff
A media agency splits the work into four desks. Smaller shops fold two of them into one person, and that’s fine, as long as the posting admits it.
Planning
Strategy and media planning
Planners, supervisors and strategy directors who decide the channel mix and defend it to the client.
Buying
Buying and investment
Local and national buyers, programmatic traders and investment leads who negotiate the rates and place the orders.
Analytics
Analytics and measurement
Analysts, data scientists and analytics heads who build the audiences and prove what the money did.
Operations
Ad ops and ad tech
Traffickers, ad ops managers and platform leads who keep tags, pacing and billing reconciled every week.
Several of these seats have their own page, because people search for them one at a time. The planner and buyer page covers what each half owns and what it costs, and ad ops hiring covers the trafficking side. Client leadership at a media shop looks a lot like it does at a creative one, so agency account director staffing applies here too. If the platform engineering behind your buying stack is the open seat, that’s our media and entertainment IT staffing desk.
Most of our media searches land in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the top three on the list, and KORE1’s own home market of Orange County is number four, where 18 media buying offices paid an average of $162,431 per employee. However the seat is filled, we measure ourselves the same way afterward, and KORE1’s twelve-month retention sits at 92%.
Common Questions
What does a media agency recruiter actually do?
A media agency recruiter fills the seats that plan, buy, measure and serve a client’s paid media, from planners and programmatic traders to analytics heads and ad ops managers. KORE1 recruits for independent media agencies, holding-company shops and the brands building in-house media teams.
Where are most media agency jobs in the U.S.?
44.4% of U.S. media buying agency jobs are in one county, Manhattan, according to 2024 federal wage records. Los Angeles County adds another 10.0% and Chicago’s Cook County 5.7%. After those three, no county holds more than about 2%, which is why most media hires outside New York involve a relocation or a remote seat.
What does a VP or director of analytics cost at a media agency?
$200,000 to $220,000 is the range Samantha Litman has seen in recent searches for a VP or director of analytics. For context, media buying agencies averaged $130,345 per employee in 2024 across every level, so a leadership analytics seat sits well above the room.
Is a media buying agency the same thing as an ad agency?
Not in the federal count, and not in hiring. Media buying agencies are their own industry code, and they’re far more concentrated, with 44.4% of jobs in Manhattan against 17.0% for advertising agencies. The candidate pools overlap at the top, in strategy and client leadership, and barely at all on the buying and ad ops desks.
Can you staff a whole team after a new account win?
Yes, and the order matters more than the speed. Lead with the seats the client will meet first, usually the account and planning leads, then the buyers and analysts who make the first flight run. Contract-to-hire works well for the middle of that wave, while the permanent shape of the team settles.
Do media people from big holding companies do well at small agencies?
Sometimes. It depends on how much of the job they’ve owned. Outside Manhattan the average media buying shop has 6.4 people, so a hire there plans, buys and reports from week one. A candidate who has only run one slice of a large account can find that load hard, so we screen for whole-plan ownership first.
Tell Us Which Desk Needs People
Send us the desk, the accounts it carries and the market it sits in. We’ll tell you where those people are working right now and what it takes to move them.
Let’s Talk →Rather start on LinkedIn? Message Samantha Litman
