Spectrum Brands: Finding the Operator to Scale an In-House Media Agency

1. The Challenge

Spectrum Brands, the $3B+ consumer products company behind IAMS, Eukanuba, Nature's Miracle, Spectracide, Black Flag and Hot Shot, made a deliberate decision about its media: own it rather than rent it. Instead of routing its digital investment through external agencies, the company built an internal media agency within Commercial Operations, designed to plan, buy and optimize faster and with more accountability than any outside partner.

The model worked. The next phase was scale. That meant moving a growing share of investment into upper-funnel brand media, building the measurement infrastructure to prove what that investment returned, and running a single media function across Global Pet Care and Home & Garden, two businesses with different consumers, retailers and media needs.

The role at the center of that plan carried full-funnel accountability: retail media networks, programmatic, streaming video and social. It also carried a structural responsibility. The media function exists to make allocation recommendations that serve the whole business, which places its leader between brand marketing and eCommerce sales as the neutral commercial voice. And it was a player/coach seat. The leader would set strategy and also step into the work when the work demanded it.

Senior media leaders were never scarce. Leaders who had learned media at the working level on the agency side, then owned budget and strategy on the brand side, and could still look at a live campaign and judge whether it was built correctly, were. The role required all three in one person.

2. Profile Needed

The non-negotiable was agency execution depth. Not account management and not strategic oversight, but genuine working-level experience: buying media, operating DSPs, managing bids, audience targeting and CPMs. The expectation was not that a Senior Director would be hands-on keyboard every day. It was that they had done the work at some point and kept enough depth to direct a team, evaluate its output and spot capability gaps in real time. An internal agency built to out-execute external agencies cannot be led by someone who has only ever briefed them.

Close behind was full-funnel platform fluency. On retail media: Amazon Ads and DSP, Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, Chewy and Instacart. On brand and digital media: The Trade Desk, streaming and OTT, display and video. On social: Meta, TikTok and Pinterest. Above the platforms, the ability to build a full-funnel plan, allocate rationally across funnel stages and connect investment to margin, revenue and ROAS rather than campaign metrics alone.

The human requirements carried equal weight. The leader had to be calm, data-led and equally credible with marketing and sales, able to hold a rational position when stakeholders with different objectives pushed back. They needed the presence to present investment strategy to the most senior leaders in the business, and the appetite to commit to a multi-year build rather than a steady-state management seat.

3. The Search Process

LS International mapped the market from the center outward. The first wave covered St. Louis and Missouri, both brand-side media functions and the region's network and independent agencies. The second extended into Chicago and the wider Midwest. The third went national, into the media functions of large household, personal care and pet care CPG companies, retail media specialist agencies and retailer-side media networks. More than 150 executives were approached across the search.

Screening was built around the non-negotiables from the first contact. Every candidate completed a structured intake covering platform history, team scale, in-house build experience and long-term commitment before a conversation was scheduled. The phone screen tested execution depth directly, by asking for specifics: which platforms, which levers, and who actually ran the buy. Candidates who cleared it went through a full video interview on planning, measurement and stakeholder navigation, and every advancing candidate met a second LS International partner before presentation. LS International conducted 85 interviews over the course of the assignment.

Each presented candidate came with a written assessment mapped to the role's requirements, with risks stated plainly. The client process ran through the hiring manager, then eCommerce sales leadership, then brand marketing leadership from both business units, with each round testing a different dimension of the role: operational media judgment, commercial partnership and brand fluency. LS International prepared candidates for each stage and debriefed them after it.

4. Key Learnings

The agency-to-brand career arc is rarer than the market assumes. Most media careers stay on one side. Agency leaders bring channel breadth and pattern recognition across many clients, but rarely own a P&L or build an internal team. Brand-side leaders bring commercial judgment and organizational navigation, but often rely on agencies for execution. The leader who has genuinely operated on both sides at a senior level is thin nationally and thinner in any single market.

Retail media titles overstate hands-on depth. Strategic fluency in Amazon, Walmart Connect and Chewy was common. Evidence of personally structuring campaigns, setting bids and owning the investment was not. The most useful test was not how a candidate would allocate a budget but how their team would deploy it with no agency behind them. Planning answers are plentiful. Deployment answers are not.

The strongest evidence of execution often sat off the main line of the CV. Global titles at large CPG companies describe strategy and frameworks, and can hide whether someone has ever run the work themselves. Early-career platform roles and founder chapters, where one person built the creative, loaded the campaigns and optimized them end to end, were more reliable signals of execution instinct than the headline role.

Ownership moved candidates more than title. Senior media leaders inside large organizations were drawn by proximity to the work, the speed of a leaner operating model and a function they could shape. The in-house build was the proposition, and it landed hardest with candidates who wanted to get back into the work rather than further above it.

5. The Outcome

Keith joins Spectrum Brands from Colgate-Palmolive, where he was Global Director of Digital Commerce Marketing. His career runs through the platforms the role depends on. He started in social media while the channel was still forming, then spent nearly a decade at Hill's Pet Nutrition, moving from consumer-facing digital into global digital strategy. Between those roles he founded and ran his own direct-to-consumer brand, personally building creative and running campaigns across Google, Meta, Amazon, The Trade Desk and Pinterest. At Colgate he has worked at the convergence of retail and national media, using data collaboration and clean rooms to connect exposure to purchase and retention. He brings pet care category depth, hands-on retail media expertise and enterprise-scale media leadership to the role.

The appointment sets Spectrum Brands up to take its internal agency into the next phase: scaling brand media alongside retail media, building measurement that ties every dollar to a business outcome, and running media allocation as a commercial discipline across both businesses.

Contact us today to learn how we can help you achieve your executive search objectives.

State 1: Spectrum Brands had built a working in-house media agency and needed a leader with both agency execution depth and brand-side ownership to scale it.

State 2: Keith, formerly of Colgate-Palmolive, was appointed Senior Director, Digital Media & Commercial Operations, bringing pet care category depth, hands-on retail media expertise and enterprise media leadership.

Time Frame: 4.5 Months