Vice President of Marketing
Discover Puerto Rico is looking for a strategic marketing leader to partner with the Chief Marketing Officer in shaping how the world experiences Puerto Rico! This role will play a key part in advancing our brand, guiding marketing strategy, leveraging consumer insights, and delivering measurable results.
If you are energized by creative excellence, collaboration, and impact-driven leadership, this is an opportunity to help strengthen Puerto Rico's position as a world-class destination while showcasing the best of our island to global audiences.
The Vice President of Marketing is a strategic marketing leader responsible for advancing Discover Puerto Rico's brand leadership, marketing strategy, consumer understanding, creative excellence, and organizational leadership. This role helps translate the CMO's vision into integrated marketing programs that elevate Puerto Rico as a destination, strengthen audience connection, and drive measurable impact across channels, partners, and priority segments.
This role is ideal for a leader who is equally comfortable setting marketing direction and engaging directly in the work. The Vice President of Marketing rolls up their sleeves: building consumer insight, writing briefs, pressure-testing media plans, challenging creative work, and owning results while coaching Directors and coordinating with agencies. The most successful candidate will lead with strategic vision, creative judgment, cultural fluency, and hands-on accountability.
This role succeeds through collaboration. The Vice President of Marketing works across every function of the organization and a multi-agency roster, and must seek out and weigh multiple perspectives, build alignment across teams, and elevate others' ideas while keeping deliverables moving.
The Vice President of Marketing operates within the CMO's strategic direction and budget authority. While this role must bring strong operational discipline and financial stewardship to the work, the profile should first and foremost reflect a marketing leader with creativity, cultural connection, strategic potential, and leadership capability to help shape the organization's next chapter over time.
Direct Reports
- Marketing Directors and other marketing team leaders, as assigned by the CMO, with responsibility for strengthening leadership capacity across the department.
Core Responsibilities
Marketing Strategy, Brand Leadership & Consumer Understanding
- Champion the brand platform and strategic framework set by the CMO, ensuring all campaigns, content, and channels activate the strategy consistently, authentically, and with strong creative ambition.
- Translate audience insights, behavioral drivers, cultural cues, and travel motivations into marketing strategies that strengthen emotional connection, conversion, and destination preference.
- Provide organizational marketing leadership by aligning internal teams, agency partners, and cross-functional stakeholders around clear priorities, integrated plans, and shared measures of success.
Creative Excellence
- Bring strong creative judgment to campaign development, with the ability to challenge, elevate, and inspire world-class creative work rooted in Puerto Rican culture and Boricua voices.
- Balance data, performance insight, and emotional storytelling to ensure marketing work is both strategically grounded and creatively distinctive.
Media Analysis & Optimization
- Own the analysis and optimization of all paid media programs: work closely with agency buying teams on plan development, then personally interrogate performance data to identify what is working, what is not, and where the next dollar should go.
- Collaborate with the CMO and media agency partners on the annual paid media plan spanning leisure, MICE, and international programs, applying strong working knowledge of media buying fundamentals, including rate structures, placement strategy, flighting, and channel mix across CTV, digital, social, search, out-of-home, and traditional channels.
- Ensure all media investment leads to conversion: hold agencies accountable to full-funnel performance metrics, from awareness and resonance through referral, booking intent, and economic impact.
- Build and maintain the analysis behind media decisions directly: hands-on with dashboards, performance data, and reporting tools, not dependent on agencies or analysts to surface insights.
- Identify underperforming placements early and recommend optimizations or reallocations to the CMO with supporting data; translate agency reporting into clear, decision-ready recommendations.
- Lead the recurring agency performance cadence, including regular status meetings and formal performance reviews, ensuring key learnings are documented and implemented across programs.
- Stay current on evolving media measurement, including media mix modeling, incrementality testing, and emerging visibility metrics such as AI search presence (GEO / Share of Model).
Segment Brand Management
- Serve as the hands-on brand manager for an assigned audience segment within the organization's hyper-segmentation strategy, owning that segment's positioning, insights, journey mapping, and results end to end.
- Write and champion campaign briefs for the assigned segment, working directly with agencies and internal teams from brief through creative development, media activation, and post-campaign analysis.
- Track results against goals, report progress to the CMO, and apply learnings across the broader marketing program.
Marketing & Brand Leadership
- Manage the day-to-day operations of the marketing team: prioritize deliverables, remove blockers, and keep quarterly and annual targets on track across all marketing functions.
- Collaborate with the Directors of Digital Marketing, Communications, Creative Strategy, and Partnership Marketing to align owned, earned, and paid programs into one integrated plan.
- Develop and mentor the marketing team through ongoing coaching, clear expectations, and honest, timely feedback.
Agency & Partner Management
- Serve as the operational quarterback for the agency roster, coordinating scopes, timelines, and interdependencies across creative, media, digital, PR, and specialty partners.
- Support MSA and SOW administration in partnership with the CMO and legal/procurement, including tracking outstanding items and contract milestones.
- Work with international representation agencies and Brand USA to extend Puerto Rico's presence in key international markets.
- Cultivate relationships with the local tourism and hospitality industry, including hotels, attractions, cultural venues, and restaurants, and support key stakeholder events such as Industry Updates and educational seminars.
- Support and, when delegated, represent the CMO in board, committee, government, and stakeholder discussions by preparing and presenting clear performance narratives, budget rationale, and strategic recommendations.
Budget Stewardship & Financial Operations
- Serve as the marketing department's budget owner for day-to-day operations: manage the annual marketing budget across approved scenarios, ensuring every line item is current, reconciled, and aligned to the Annual Marketing Plan.
- Maintain visibility into committed, invoiced, and available spend by category, agency, and initiative, and provide the CMO with accurate pacing reports monthly or on demand.
- Execute budget reallocations at the direction of the CMO, ensuring all moves are documented, net-zero where required, and accurately reflected before circulation to Directors and agency partners.
- Oversee invoice review, SOW tracking, forecasting, accruals, fiscal year close, audit readiness, and compliance requirements tied to the responsible use of public funds.
Key Credentials
- A demonstrated, goal-driven commitment to supporting and celebrating the beauty of the island and the people of Puerto Rico, with authentic cultural respect as a non-negotiable foundation for the work.
- Four-year college degree in marketing, communications, business, finance, or a related field, or equivalent experience; advanced degree preferred.
- Five to seven years of progressive marketing experience, including at least three years managing marketing budgets with direct accountability for pacing, reconciliation, and reporting.
- More than four years of people leadership experience.
- A proven collaborator who actively seeks out multiple perspectives, builds consensus across teams and partners, and leads through influence as effectively as through authority.
- Demonstrated strength in media analysis and optimization: interpreting campaign performance data, evaluating agency media plans, and driving measurable improvement. Working knowledge of media buying fundamentals (rates, placements, channel mix) required; hands-on buying experience a plus.
- Brand management experience, with the ability to own an audience segment or product line end-to-end, from insight and brief through execution and results.
- A manager with a hands-on mindset: comfortable personally building analyses, writing briefs, and producing work products, while also empowering and guiding the work of others.
- Destination marketing organization or travel industry experience is strongly preferred; experience in a publicly funded or publicly accountable organization is a plus.
- Demonstrated experience managing multiple external agencies simultaneously and holding them accountable to metrics.
- Fluency with budget management and reporting tools, including advanced Excel; comfort with analytics platforms, dashboards, and marketing data providers.
- Advanced proficiency in MS Office Suite, and other business, marketing, and analytics, including project management
- Awareness of emerging marketing measurement and AI-driven discovery trends, including generative engine optimization
