Job Description
Senior Customer Success Manager
About the Role
Freestar’s publishers need partners who can grow with them — and the Senior CSM role exists for someone who brings that depth. You own a portfolio of Freestar’s more complex, higher-stakes publisher relationships, operating with a level of autonomy and strategic influence that goes beyond day-to-day account management.
You’ve been in this industry long enough to have developed real pattern recognition. You know what good monetization looks like across different publisher types, you can spot a floor pricing problem before it shows up in the numbers, and you’ve had enough difficult client conversations to navigate them without breaking a sweat. You don’t need a playbook for every situation — and when one is missing, you help build it.
This role sits at the intersection of trusted advisor and yield expert. Your publishers should feel like they have a genuine advocate inside Freestar, and your peers should feel like they have a resource they can learn from.
What You’ll Do
Publisher Partnership
- Own a portfolio of Freestar’s more complex publisher accounts, serving as their primary strategic point of contact
- Lead executive business reviews with a clear point of view — not just a performance recap, but a forward-looking perspective on where the relationship should go
- Build deep, multi-threaded relationships within publisher organizations, spanning revenue, ad ops, product, and editorial
- Anticipate risks and opportunities before they’re surfaced by the publisher, and come to every conversation prepared with a recommendation
Yield & Optimization
- Take ownership of performance analysis end-to-end — identifying trends, forming hypotheses, designing tests, and tracking outcomes across your portfolio
- Drive more sophisticated optimization work: auction dynamics, floor pricing strategy, identity and audience approaches, format diversification, and the interplay between user experience and revenue
- Serve as a technical resource for both your publishers and your peers — able to go deep on programmatic mechanics and explain them clearly to any audience
- Collaborate with yield, demand, and product teams on bespoke solutions for accounts with unique needs or meaningful scale
Strategic Growth
- Identify and develop expansion opportunities that are genuinely additive — new products, formats, or services that make sense for each publisher’s specific situation
- Contribute meaningfully to renewal conversations, bringing a clear account narrative and commercial instincts to the table
- Flag patterns you’re seeing across your portfolio that could inform product development, demand strategy, or CS process improvements
Team Contribution
- Mentor and support junior CSMs, sharing your experience and helping elevate the team’s collective standard
- Help build and refine playbooks, QBR templates, and best practices based on what you’re learning in your accounts
- Contribute to onboarding and training as a subject matter resource
What We’re Looking For
- 5–8 years of experience in customer success, account management, or a publisher-facing role within ad tech or programmatic advertising
- Proven track record managing complex, high-value accounts with multiple stakeholders
- Deep, working knowledge of the programmatic ecosystem — header bidding, floor pricing, auction mechanics, yield optimization, GAM, and identity solutions
- Strong analytical instincts: you’re comfortable owning performance analysis independently and turning data into a clear narrative
- Executive presence and communication skills — able to hold a room at the VP or C-suite level without leaning on a script
- A coaching mindset — you share what you know and make the people around you better
- Self-directed and proactive; you manage a complex book without needing to be prompted
Bonus points for:
- Experience on the publisher side — you’ve sat in the seat your partners are sitting in
- Familiarity with identity and audience solutions (UID2, RampID, first-party data strategies)
- Experience with CMP/consent frameworks and their downstream monetization impact
- Comfort with CS and CRM platforms and using data to manage a book systematically
