The Vice President, Content Strategy & Distribution, owns content strategy, creative direction, and content operations across a portfolio of collegiate athletic properties, with a particular focus on leading and growing Learfield’s content capabilities across the Big Ten.
This is a senior leadership role responsible for setting the vision and strategy for how content is created, distributed, and monetized across the portfolio. The VP will lead a team of content professionals embedded within collegiate athletic departments and serve as a trusted strategic partner to school leadership, revenue teams, brand partners, and internal stakeholders.
The role sits at the intersection of content, college sports, media, and business, with responsibility for creating content that both strengthens the connection between schools and their audiences and creates meaningful commercial opportunities.
The ideal candidate is a proven content leader who understands how to build great stories, develop high-performing teams, and translate audience engagement into business results. They should be equally comfortable developing a long-term content strategy with an athletic department leader, reviewing performance data with a team, collaborating with a national brand, and helping a creator improve a piece of content. This role will be based in Dallas, Texas or New York City.
Essential Duties & Responsibilities:
- Lead the overall content vision and strategy across a portfolio of collegiate athletic properties, with a particular focus on Big Ten schools.
- Partner with NIL, athlete marketing, and school teams to develop student-athlete content strategies, helping schools and brands responsibly incorporate athletes and creators into programming and commercial opportunities.
- Lead, develop, and mentor a distributed team of content leaders, producers, creators, and social specialists embedded within partner athletic departments.
- Build strong relationships with athletic department leadership, school social teams, creators, coaches, athletes, and other key stakeholders to serve as the senior content partner.
- Develop clear content strategies for each property based on its brand, audience, priorities, and commercial objectives.
- Build and execute strategies designed to grow audience engagement, content inventory, social performance, and revenue.
- Partner closely with sales and revenue teams to develop high-value branded content opportunities that align the objectives of schools, athletes, and brand partners.
- Identify new content products, formats, franchises, and revenue opportunities that can scale across multiple properties.
- Establish content KPIs and measurement frameworks and use audience and performance data to continually improve content strategy and investment.
- Evaluate performance across schools, platforms, campaigns, and content franchises and translate insights into clear, actionable recommendations.
- Establish best practices for short-form video, social content, branded content, original programming, and emerging content formats.
- Ensure content reflects the unique voice, culture, and identity of each school while maintaining a high standard of quality across the portfolio.
- Create scalable processes and tools with colleagues that allow successful strategies, formats, insights, and programs to be replicated across the portfolio that can be tailored to school’s individual voice/tone.
- Work closely with branded content, production, sales, distribution, marketing, and other internal teams to create integrated content strategies and maximize opportunities across the business.
- Help schools increase the value of their owned and social platforms through stronger programming, organic distribution, audience development, and content optimization.
- Stay ahead of trends across college sports, social media, digital video, streaming, and the broader media landscape and identify opportunities to bring new ideas and capabilities to partner schools.
- Provide strategic direction, coaching, and mentorship to property content teams and serve as a senior resource for content strategy, creative development, and execution.
- Establish and maintain standards for storytelling, voice, tone, quality, and brand alignment.
- Lead competitive and industry research to identify emerging opportunities, platforms, formats, and best practices.
- Help shape and evolve Learfield’s broader content and owned media strategy, including opportunities to build scalable content platforms and products that extend beyond individual school properties.
- Support senior leadership with strategic planning, business reviews, board presentations, and other company-wide initiatives.
- Partner with senior leadership on budget and resource allocation to support team needs and growth opportunities
- Serve as a connector across the organization, bringing together the right people and resources to solve on-going challenges and unlock opportunities.
- Build and maintain trusted relationships across stakeholders, with the judgment and communication skills to navigate complex issues or competing priorities
Minimum Qualifications:
- 15+ years of experience in content, media, sports, entertainment, branded content, or a related field.
- Significant experience leading content teams and developing content strategies for major brands, media platforms, sports properties, or entertainment organizations.
- Strong leadership, mentorship, and team-building skills, with a track record of developing high-performing, distributed teams across multiple properties, markets, or organizations.
- Experience with analytics platform such as Zoomph, project management systems such as AirTable, and experience working in Meta Business suite, TikTok Analytics, and YouTube Studio preferred.
- Deep understanding of college athletics, the college sports media landscape, with understanding of the culture, audiences and business dynamics with meaningful experience working with or around Power Four programs and particularly Big Ten institutions.
- Strong understanding of social platforms, digital video, streaming, and emerging media formats.
- Demonstrated ability to develop content strategies that drive both audience growth and commercial results.
- Experience developing branded content and working closely with sales teams, advertisers, and commercial partners.
- Experience working directly with senior executives, clients, athletic department leadership, and other high-level stakeholders.
- Strong understanding of how content, audience, and commercial strategy intersect.
- Demonstrated ability to use audience and performance data to inform content strategy, investment, and optimization.
- Exceptional communication, writing, and presentation skills.
- Ability to operate at both the strategic and executional level, moving comfortably between setting the broader vision and helping teams solve day-to-day challenges.
- Proven ability to build trusted relationships and operate effectively in a complex, multi-stakeholder environment.
- Willingness and ability to travel overnight regularly to partner schools, industry events, and key meetings.
- Other related duties as assigned
Pay Transparency:
The approximate national base pay range for this position is $165,000 to $200,000. Please note that this is a good faith estimate for the position at the time of posting. Individuals may also be eligible for an annual discretionary bonus and/or sales compensation based on individual and company performance. Placement on the range may vary based on factors including but not limited to job-related knowledge, skills, and experience, and geographic location. The pay rate will comply with all minimum federal, state, and local wage/salary requirements.
Learfield offers a full spectrum of benefits for eligible employees including Medical, Dental, Vision, Health Savings Account, Life Insurance and Other Insurance Plans, Flexible Paid Time Off (minimum 10+ days annually), including Parental Leave, 20 Paid Holidays, 401(k) + Match, and Short/Long Term Disability. Leave benefits are consistent with state and local laws, including the Colorado Health Families and Workplaces Act.
Learfield is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We provide equal employment opportunities to applicants and employees without regard to race; color; sex; gender identity; sexual orientation; religious practices and observances; national origin; pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions; status as a protected veteran or spouse/family member of a protected veteran; or disability.
