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- Director of Marketing
The San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) seeks a Director of Marketing to lead the strategy, execution, and optimization of integrated marketing initiatives that support student recruitment, performance attendance, institutional visibility, advancement, and other organizational priorities.
The Director is a hands-on marketing leader who translates institutional priorities into measurable campaigns, combining strategic planning with direct execution and oversight of SFCM’s web and social media functions. Working closely with editorial, creative, and institutional partners, the Director ensures marketing efforts are coordinated, audience-focused, and effective.
Principal Duties and Responsibilities
Integrated Marketing Strategy & Campaigns
- Develop and execute integrated marketing strategies supporting SFCM’s priorities, including student recruitment, performance attendance, institutional awareness, and community engagement.
- Translate institutional goals into actionable marketing plans, identifying target audiences, messaging, channels, budgets, creative requirements, and timelines.
- Lead coordinated marketing initiatives across paid, owned, and digital channels in partnership with Admissions, Advancement, and artistic and academic leadership.
- Own the institutional marketing calendar, coordinating campaign timelines, priorities, and resources across departments.
- Lead, mentor, and support marketing staff, establishing clear priorities, accountability, and opportunities for professional development.
Paid Media & Advertising
- Personally plan, execute, and optimize paid advertising campaigns across Google Ads, YouTube, Meta, digital display, print, and other relevant channels.
- Manage media buying, audience targeting, budget pacing, creative testing, campaign trafficking, and performance measurement.
- Manage advertising vendors, media partners, and external agencies, negotiating placements and evaluating performance.
Email & Direct Marketing
- Lead institutional email marketing across recruitment, performances, advancement, and audience engagement.
- Plan, build, execute, and optimize email campaigns, including audience segmentation, list strategy, testing, scheduling, and performance analysis.
Digital Experience & Social Media
- Oversee SFCM’s website and social media functions, managing staff and establishing priorities aligned with institutional marketing objectives.
- Lead website marketing strategy, including content priorities, landing pages, user journeys, SEO, calls to action, and conversion optimization.
- Direct social media strategy, establishing priorities for audience growth, content development, platform engagement, and performance measurement.
- Collaborate with editorial, design, and content teams to ensure coordinated messaging, creative assets, and campaign execution across digital channels.
Marketing Analytics & Audience Insights
- Establish KPIs and analyze performance across advertising, email, web, social, and other marketing channels.
- Translate campaign and audience data into actionable recommendations that improve conversions, engagement, and marketing effectiveness.
- Conduct or oversee audience research, including surveys, focus groups, and message testing, to inform marketing strategies.
- Provide regular performance reporting and recommendations to the AVP and institutional leadership.
The incumbent will perform other duties as needed.
- 7+ years of experience in marketing, including managing staff or leading marketing teams.
- Demonstrated ability to develop marketing strategies and personally execute campaigns from planning through measurement.
- Hands-on experience managing paid search and social advertising, particularly Google Ads and Meta Ads Manager, including targeting, budgets, testing, optimization, and performance reporting.
- Strong experience with email marketing, audience segmentation, testing, and analytics.
- Strong analytical skills and experience with digital marketing measurement, web analytics, conversion optimization, and audience journeys.
- Experience managing external agencies, vendors, freelancers, or cross-functional teams.
- Strong project management skills with the ability to manage multiple campaigns and institutional priorities simultaneously.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills and the ability to communicate strategy and results to colleagues at multiple levels of an organization.
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education and relevant professional experience.
- Experience in music, performing arts, higher education, nonprofit organizations, cultural institutions, or other mission-driven environments preferred.
Salary and Benefits
This is a full-time exempt position, and the starting annual salary is between $110,000 and $130,000, depending on experience. Employee benefits include paid vacation, sick leave, personal days, and holidays; health, long-term disability, and life insurance; and a voluntary 403(b) retirement plan.
How to Apply
We prefer to receive applications through our website. This position will be posted until filled.
SFCM seeks employees who bring both the qualifications needed for the position and a genuine interest in the Conservatory’s mission. Please submit a résumé and a cover letter describing your interest in SFCM and how your experience would contribute to our work.
Application materials should accurately reflect your qualifications, experience, and interest in SFCM. You are responsible for reviewing and approving all materials submitted on your behalf. Assistance from others or the use of AI tools does not relieve you of this responsibility. SFCM reserves the right to reject applications containing material misrepresentations or submitted without meaningful applicant involvement. Reasonable accommodations are available upon request.
About Us
SFCM’s mission is to transform our students: artistically, intellectually, professionally and individually. Through the study of music at the highest level, our students learn to seek achievement in every endeavor, to convert challenges into opportunities, to understand the nature of excellence, and to pursue their dreams with vigor and determination. We believe that inspiring the imagination, cultivating the artist, honing the intellect, and developing the professional are the keys to launching innovative graduates who excel in any field. SFCM is located in the heart of one of the world’s most innovative and diverse cities, and is home to a vibrant academic community of students and faculty who achieve excellence in their fields.
Equal Opportunity Employer
SFCM is a fully committed equal employment opportunity institution and welcomes applications from all qualified persons. SFCM will not discriminate against applicants for employment and employees because of race, color, religion, marital status, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, medical condition (including cancer and genetic characteristics), status as a Vietnam-era veteran or special disabled veteran, age, citizenship, or any other consideration made unlawful by federal, state and local laws.
Apply Here: https://www.click2apply.net/1gJrlQhAX16jOHP51CMVGd
PI288281539
- Macklemore Says Nine Arenas Rejected Palestine Benefit Shows
Good Morning,
Macklemore says nine U.S. arenas, including Madison Square Garden, offered dates and then withdrew them once they learned his shows would benefit Palestinian relief (The Wrap). MSG Entertainment says he is “not an arena level act.” The other eight didn’t respond.
Seven legal-pad pages of Martin Luther King’s handwritten draft for the March on Washington turned up in a desk drawer of his aide Edward Clayton, and Christie’s expects more than $10 million at a January 22 sale (The New York Times). The words “I have a dream” aren’t in it; he added them from the podium.
The Times ended its contract with romance columnist Olivia Waite after she reposted a critique of its coverage of rape allegations against Trump. She says the Book Review’s editor cited her Bluesky posts, which she says it admitted monitoring (Smart Bitches, Trashy Books).
Hollywood is having a strong box-office year, yet the share of film budgets spent in the U.S. has fallen from 74% to 42% since 1999, while Disney and Netflix cut staff (El País).
Canada’s budget proposes a tax credit on up to $45,000 of artists’ income, but never defines who counts as an artist; that waits for a 2027 update (CBC).
All of our stories below.
- Google, Meta And TikTok Sue To Block California Law Aimed Against Platform Addiction
The law prohibits social media platforms from offering children things like personalized feeds and autoplay for videos. It also requires the deletion of children’s accounts with those features. – KQED
- Many Of DC’s Memorials Are In Darkness As Park Service Maintenance Lapses
The lapse in upkeep and repairs at some of the most prominent memorials in Washington and at the more than 400 national park properties across the country comes as the Trump administration has reduced the agency’s staff by roughly 25 percent and withheld millions of dollars in funding. – Washington Post
- When AI Transfers Into The Physical World
“With a world model, you give it a visual state of the world, an image, and it will then predict the next visual state of the world.” These 3D generations can be used as digital training grounds. “They’re simulations, but they look and feel real.” – Wired
- Restoration Of London’s Parliament Buildings Could Take 61 Years And Cost £40B
The Commons public accounts committee this week warned it was “crunch time” for the ailing building’s restoration, which could cost up to £40bn and take 61 years. – BBC
- Macklemore Says Major Arenas Are Refusing To Book His Concerts
“After weeks of reaching out, nine major American arenas have turned us down,” he wrote. Macklemore went on to name the specific venues that have allegedly turned him and his team away, despite having availability in the coming months. – The Wrap
- When Writers Lose Confidence In Free Speech
If democracy is the political system that allows the fullest human flourishing, the novel is the literary form that most fully cultivates our understanding of human possibility and tragedy and endurance. – The Atlantic
- Everything You Need To Know About Life You Can Learn From “Sound Of Music”
I would argue that everything you need to know about life can be found in “The Sound of Music.” Quite an expansive claim, but I have good credentials for making it. As a child actress, I played the bookish Brigitta von Trapp for three years in a touring production of the musical. – Washington Post
- A Long-Lost, Supposed Destroyed, Handwritten Draft Of MLK’s ‘I Have A Dream’ Speech Has Emerged
“Like the typed version, it does not include the words ‘I have a dream,’ part of the ringing second half of the speech that King famously improvised.” – The New York Times
- Can Authors Ever Use Enough Tools To ‘Prove’ They Didn’t Use AI?
Especially since a lot of LLMs are trained on those authors’ words already? Well, that’s the hope – that’s there’s a way to prove a negative. – Wired
- A Not Worthwhile Canadian Initiative
In the new Canadian federal government budget, a non-refundable tax credit worth up to $45,000 of net income is proposed for artists, to be called the Canada Creative Credit.
Some tax policy jargon: a tax credit is not the same as a tax deduction. For a tax credit, calculate your income tax owing based on revenues minus eligible expenses. Once you have figured out that amount, subtract the credit. Non-refundable means the credit can reduce the amount you owe all the way down to zero, but no further – you can’t use it to get a payment from the government.
The budget says it will likely take the form of a non-refundable tax credit that would “provide tax recognition on up to $45,000 of annual qualifying net business income derived from original and creative artistic works.”
What’s wrong with this? I’d say two things.
First, an old, common-place principle of equity in taxation is that a dollar is a dollar is a dollar, regardless of how you earned it. Two people who each earned, on net, sixty thousand dollars last year, and have identical family circumstances, should pay the same amount in income tax, and it shouldn’t matter if one works as a mortgage loans person in the local credit union and the other works as a furniture maker. This budget proposal would say the novelist who, after expenses, earned sixty thousand dollars last year should pay less in income tax than the credit union employee or the furniture maker. It is not fair.
Second, suppose we said “ah, but there is something special about the arts to our national well-being, beyond what the artist earns in the market, and as a consequence we should subsidize the arts.” This is generally expressed in pretty vague terms, but for the sake of argument let’s accept it. Then the next questions are: What art in particular? Are there certain genres of art that matter more to the commonweal? Does it matter if the art is, respectfully, any good?
But that’s the question no one wants to answer any more. From “culture passes” that tell young people “just go buy something creative with it”, to “guaranteed income for artist programs,” that just say “you call yourself an artist, and that’s good enough for us,” the very idea of saying that the disbursement of public funds to the arts ought to involve the judgment of some group of people who know something about art, and should be selective, is long past. Any content will do, whatever. I don’t see what public good that serves.
Cross-posted at https://michaelrushton.substack.com/
- Wait, Why Is A 77-Year-Old Judge In Virginia In Charge Of The Titanic?
Maritime law means Judge Smith oversees “the remains of a ship that was built in Belfast, sailed from England, was heading to New York City and sank off the coast of Canada in international waters more than 1,000 miles from Norfolk.” – The New York Times
- Sometimes It Takes A Film A Little While To Find Its Way To Audiences
After a friend-funded release, the actors of Pyre “have met teary-eyed people at multiple screenings – many wanting to touch their feet and hug them, many who said the film reminded them of their own parents and grandparents who are waiting in villages.” – BBC
- Who Betrayed The Photographer Who Secretly Captured Nazi-Occupied Paris?
“It is a story of betrayal, set against the turmoil of wartime France under German occupation. At the center of the suspicion is a couple.” – Le Monde English
- Making A TV Show At Negative 39 Degrees Isn’t Exactly Simple
“Wherever possible, materials were sent by sea during the annual short thaw to avoid expensive airfreight. For example, building materials and boxed water — which, Arnaquq-Baril says, was chosen over plastic bottles to leave ‘less toxic garbage in the Arctic’ — were shipped by sealift.” – Los Angeles Times (Yahoo)
- Eurovision Becomes Asiavision Later This Week
“Bloc voting, where countries award high scores to their neighbours, is a long-running tradition in Europe. Blecher says it is too early to know whether Asia will follow suit.” – The Guardian (UK)
- Canada Has New Tax Relief For The Arts And Artists
It’s not 100 percent clear who, exactly, will benefit. “There’s little to no way to know whether, for example, a violin teacher or a filmmaker is more likely to be approved.” – CBC
- The Void Of Jobs Confronting Hollywood’s Workforce
“Shoots are moving away from Hollywood and, increasingly, from the United States altogether. The share of film production budgets spent in the U.S. has fallen from 74% to 42% .” – El País English
- These Ballet Dancers Fell In Love And Then, As Is The Way With Ballet, Founded A Company
“They realized that they wanted to create their own model, in which artists — who often cobble together a living over multiple part-time jobs and punishing rehearsal schedules — could earn a salary that reflected the labor they were putting in. … East Coast Contemporary Ballet was born.” – Hartford Courant
- Apple Apparently Sees Classical Music, Too, In Black And White
No more pinkish treble clef on a red background: “Unlike last time, when people hated on the Music app’s black-and-white design, there doesn’t seem to be such passionate pronouncements of displeasure for the Classical app logo’s makeover.” – Engadget
- Are U.S. Arenas Refusing To Let Macklemore Play?
The rap artist wrote that after Ed Sheeran removed him from the Sheeran tour, his team reached out to arenas with available dates. “But once they found out these were my benefit shows for Palestine, … those dates were suddenly off the table.” – The New York Times
- Sebastian Lelio, Director Of Gloria, Fantastic Woman, And Disobedience, Has Died At 52
The Chilean director’s final film was last year’s The Wave. He said, “Making a film is like a gift you leave somewhere – you then hide and see what happens.” – The Guardian (UK)
- Pamela Abdy, Ousted At WB, Gets Real About Her Rage At The Hollywood Bro Machine
She said, as she accepted the Vanguard Award, she felt rage for all of her female collaborators over the years, “rage for me and even more rage for the entire generation of women who deserve to have their potential recognized and elevated.” – The Hollywood Reporter
- What’s Up With Your Ethics, New York Times?
In short: “The New York Times has terminated their contract with author Olivia Waite, their romance columnist, after she reposted Mark Jacob’s repost of Marisa Kabas’ criticism of the Times’ coverage of new rape allegations about Trump.” – Smart Bitches, Trashy Books
- Phoenix Symphony Returns Days After Laying Off Musicians
Good Morning,
The Phoenix Symphony laid off all 66 of its musicians on November 2, saying it could no longer cover its costs. Local donors have now pledged enough to lift the suspension; the orchestra plays again November 12 while an 11-member commission reworks its finances (Arizona Republic).
Pan Macmillan, his British publisher, is pulling Russell Brand’s books after his rape and sexual assault conviction. Skyhorse, which put out his How to Become a Christian in 7 Days under Tucker Carlson’s new imprint, says it has no plans to withdraw it (The New York Times).
The K-pop group NewJeans signed with Ador, a label owned by BTS’s company Hybe, at ages 14 to 17. Their contracts dropped child-protection language, including the right to education, and gave Ador their likeness in perpetuity, including as AI chatbots or clones (The Guardian).
A ransomware attack on November 4 took down Queens Public Library’s network. All 66 branches are open, with books checked out by hand; whether patron data was taken is unknown (Lit Hub).
About 100 Oregon school districts have cut to four-day weeks, and arts groups are filling the Fridays. Arts in Education of the Gorge drew 60 of Mosier Community School’s 205 students to its first Friday (Oregon ArtsWatch).
All of our stories below.
- The Artist Taking Broken Things And Making Them Beautiful
“Toporkoff has found that she prefers working with mouth-blown glass because of its depth of color and texture and natural imperfections like bubbles and ripples. She sources the glass from Saint-Just Glassworks in the Loire region of France.” – The New York Times
- Dustin Hoffman Took Up Acting For A Very Normal College Student Reason
“My friend said, ‘Take acting, it’s like gym. Nobody flunks. You know, the worst you can get in gym is a C.’” – Today Show
- The ‘Blue Wave’ On Tuesday Swept A Fair Number Of Artists To Power
“Next year’s massive reconfiguration of power … brings with it a number of elected officials with creative backgrounds, some of whom even incorporated music, dance and art into their campaigns and promises to constituents.” – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
- A Ransomware Attack Takes Down The Queens Public Library
“Unfortunately, it’s part of the world that we live in right now. So the Queens Public Library is a victim of the type of world that we’re living in, where people are launching cyber attacks against various types of entities, large corporations, and now Queens Public Library.” – LitHub
- Why John Luther Adams Moved To An Arid Spot In Australia
“Adams, 73, is attracted to extremes. The more awe-inspiring, the better. It’s what has nourished his singular sound, which doesn’t so much represent as become the natural world.” – The New York Times
- If The News Doesn’t Have Cute Animals Or Political Threats, How Does It Get Eyeballs Online?
Arts reporters, take note: “The best-performing videos were ones with behind-the-scenes footage from investigations or collaborations. Putting reporters on camera — in the field or at their desks — worked.” – Nieman Lab
- Now That Russell Brand Has (Finally) Been Convicted Of Rape And Assault, Some Publishers Are Pulling His Books
However: “Tony Lyons, the publisher at Skyhorse, which published Brand’s How to Become a Christian in 7 Days under its new Tucker Carlson Books imprint this year, said in an email that the company ‘had no plans to withdraw Russell Brand’s books.’” – The New York Times
- True Crime Podcasts Are Known For Exploiting Victims. Can A Famous Survivor Host Make A Difference?
Elizabeth Smart: “I want this to be an empowering experience for them. I want them to feel pride in sharing their story.” – Slate
- The Creator Of Ireland’s First Micro-Series On How ‘The Black Leprechaun’ Works
Éyum Priscilla: The comedy “is a story about embracing every part of who you are and finding the confidence to claim your place in the country you’ve always called home.” – Irish Times