Roku’s social operation requires an immediate tactical clean-up, and they are deploying a Fractional VP of Social Media to execute it. This is not a role where you sit around crafting long-term brand poetry or managing aesthetic mood boards; this is a high-friction marketing and executive turnaround mandate. You are a mercenary being dropped into the San Jose headquarters to execute an unpopular restructuring, audit failing agency retainers, and build a mathematically sound acquisition pipeline before a permanent VP steps in to take the credit for the Q3 hardware launches.
The Fractional Executive Shift & Streaming Wars
The era of bloated tech marketing budgets is dead. Facing fierce hardware and platform competition from Apple and Amazon, streaming giants are increasingly deploying fractional executives—high-level fixers hired to execute painful restructurings without the long-term overhead, equity dilution, or severance liabilities of a permanent W2 hire. You are walking into a mandate to slash SaaS redundancies, consolidate the vendor stack, and prove immediate, quantifiable ROI before the crucial holiday sales push begins.
The Turnaround Mandate & Executive Friction
The streaming hardware wars are brutal, and top-of-funnel vanity metrics no longer justify headcount. Your objective is pure organizational triage. You must enter a rudderless social department, identify the operational bottlenecks, and force creative teams to prove their Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) to a highly skeptical CMO. You will absorb the political friction of consolidating enterprise software stacks and restructuring reporting lines so the eventual permanent hire inherits a lean, high-performing machine.
Restructuring Execution & Triage
- Organizational Housecleaning: Audit the internal talent architecture and FTE (Full-Time Equivalent) vs. Contractor ratios. You must ruthlessly identify gaps, flatten reporting lines, and execute structural shifts to make the team agile without halting daily publishing output.
- Vendor Warfare: Audit and slash enterprise software bloat. If external creative agencies and enterprise listening tools (e.g., Sprinklr, Khoros) aren’t mathematically proving their worth through strict SLAs, you terminate the contracts.
- The CAC Translation: Strip away the vanity engagement metrics. You must build cold, hard executive dashboards utilizing multi-touch attribution (MTA) models that translate TikTok views and creator partnerships into actual streaming subscriber acquisition data.
- Campaign Governance: Dictate the overarching narrative for major Q3/Q4 initiatives, ensuring strict brand safety guidelines while driving aggressive, measurable product visibility.
- The Handoff: Serve as the ultimate subject matter expert during the executive search, ensuring you hand over a sanitized, highly functional department to your permanent successor.
Executive Scar Tissue & Prerequisites
- The Mercenary Pedigree: 10+ years of dedicated social marketing survival, with at least 3 years executing at the VP or Senior Director level in the tech or streaming sector. You must possess the executive weight to command immediate respect from entrenched teams.
- Turnaround Fluency: Verifiable proof that you can parachute into a fractured corporate environment and execute data-backed operational shifts without causing a mass exodus of critical talent.
- Enterprise Stack Literacy: Deep, operational understanding of tier-one publishing and listening stacks. You must know exactly where bloated agency retainers and software redundancies are hidden within the budget.
- Analytical Ruthlessness: You must speak the language of the CFO. Proven ability to synthesize multi-channel data into direct business impact reports, completely abandoning vanity metrics in favor of true ROI and LTV (Life-Time Value).
Contract Economics & The Fractional Multiplier
You are trading long-term corporate security for high hourly compensation and absolute consulting autonomy.
- Base Compensation: $125.00 – $175.00 USD / Hour. A highly lucrative consulting rate that directly compensates you for absorbing the political fallout of a severe departmental restructuring.
- The Fractional Advantage: You bypass the long-term corporate gridlock. You execute the 6-to-9 month mandate, collect your billing, and exit cleanly before institutional fatigue sets in.
- The Case Study Equity: Fixing Roku’s social apparatus is a massive portfolio stamp. You are building an elite enterprise turnaround case study that will justify an even higher hourly rate for your next fractional deployment.
- Contractor Dynamics: Predictable bi-weekly billing cycles, but zero corporate safety net (no health insurance, no paid time off, and no 401(k) matching).
Campus Logistics & Deployment
- The Physical Authority Mandate
- Location: San Jose, CA. Status: 100% On-Site (Contract). You cannot negotiate a multi-million dollar software contract, execute a departmental restructuring, or align with the C-Suite over a Zoom call. This turnaround role demands daily, physical authority at the headquarters.
- Relocation Posture
- Zero relocation assistance. Roku is strictly hunting for a localized Silicon Valley executive consultant who can badge-in and start the audit immediately.
Green Flags
- Advantage: The Mercenary Premium: Earning up to $175 an hour directly compensates you for the political friction of cleaning house. You bypass the long-term corporate gridlock—execute the mandate, collect your billing, and exit cleanly.
- Advantage: Elite Case Study Equity: Parachuting into a publicly traded streaming giant and successfully restructuring their entire social apparatus is an undisputed portfolio anchor, justifying higher rates for future deployments.
Red Flags
- Warning Sign: The Institutional “Bad Cop”: You are being brought in specifically to execute unpopular decisions—slashing vendor contracts, flattening reporting lines, and demanding hard ROI. Expect severe internal resistance.
- Warning Sign: The Commute & Presence Tax: Forcing a fractional consultant to be 100% on-site in San Jose is a rigid mandate. You will lose unpaid hours to Silicon Valley traffic, entirely wiping out geographic autonomy.
- Warning Sign: Zero Severance or Safety Net: As a contractor, your hourly rate must cover your own health insurance, self-employment taxes, and downtime. When the turnaround is complete, your income drops to zero immediately.
