Paid Media
Darkroom Names Ryan Smith Managing Director, Paid Media
Written by Darkroom leardership
3 min read
Oct 21, 2026
Ryan Smith is Darkroom's Managing Director, Paid Media, the most senior paid media role at the AI-native growth marketing agency. He joined on September 2, 2026, from REQ, where he was an executive vice president, and he previously led the team that took NBCUniversal's Peacock to market as its performance agency of record.
Here's the experience he brings, what he'll lead, and how it shapes Darkroom's paid media strategy for clients.
Who is Ryan Smith, Darkroom's Managing Director of Paid Media?
Ryan Smith is a performance media leader who started hands-on in the ad platforms and went on to run the teams behind enterprise campaigns. He began as a paid media practitioner, running large campaigns across paid search, paid social, display, retail media, influencer, and earned and owned media. His clients spanned DTC retail and e-commerce, B2B, financial services, and pharmaceuticals.
From 2019 to 2025, he led the team that took Peacock, NBCUniversal's streaming service, to market as the brand's performance agency of record.
He then built and scaled cross-channel strategy teams for enterprise clients at REQ, where he served as an executive vice president in Los Angeles. That team's scope covered advanced measurement frameworks, forecasting, audience architecture, and strategic planning.
Ryan’s leadership at Darkroom
Ryan holds Darkroom's most senior paid media role, leading the media directors, strategists, and paid social and paid search managers who run client accounts. He works alongside SVP of Strategy Will Margaritis on Darkroom's senior leadership team.
His four priorities:
Media strategy: planning across Meta, Google, TikTok, AppLovin, Snap, and Pinterest for consumer brands selling through DTC, Amazon, and retail.
Measurement: media mix modeling, multi-touch attribution, and in-platform data combined, so clients see the incremental return on every channel.
Media and creative together: budget decisions tied to performance creative testing, since ad platforms now choose audiences largely from the creative they receive.
Unified reporting: one dashboard that shows performance, health, and growth across every client account.
Why does paid media strategy need senior judgment in 2026?
Each ad costs more than it did a year ago, so the decisions automation can't make for you carry more weight. Meta reported ad impressions up 14% and average price per ad up 12% year over year in Q2 2026. Dentsu forecasts global ad spend of $1.06 trillion in 2026, up 5.0%, with digital taking 69% of the total.
Platforms now automate most targeting and bidding. Your edge sits in the inputs: the creative you feed the algorithm, how you prove incrementality, and how budget moves between channels.
That work needs a senior operator, and it's the work Ryan was hired to lead.
Read also: Why Paid Media Fails When You Optimize for Platform Metrics
The CEO's executive vision for Paid Media
Lucas DiPietrantonio, Co-Founder and CEO of Darkroom, frames the Paid Media hire around where growth budgets leak.
"Paid media is where most consumer brands spend the biggest share of their growth budget, and it's where waste hides best," said DiPietrantonio. "Ryan Smith brought Peacock to market and built the teams behind it. As Managing Director of Paid Media at Darkroom, he'll pair that experience with Shadow, our AI commerce layer, so every dollar our clients spend ties back to profit they can see."
Ryan puts the case in terms of judgment.
"The platforms have automated the buying. They haven't automated the judgment," said Smith. "Which creative to feed the algorithm, how far to trust its reporting, and when a cheaper conversion is really a more expensive customer: that is where an agency earns its seat now. It's the paid media team I'm building at Darkroom."
What should brands expect from Darkroom's paid media team?
Expect senior strategists on your account and a plan judged on contribution profit. In practice, that means:
Profit-based measurement: every dollar measured against contribution profit, with incrementality and attribution infrastructure showing what drives new revenue.
Creative built per platform: ads designed for each platform's native behavior and tested as part of the media plan.
One plan across channels: paid social, paid search, and retail media planned together, with Darkroom's marketplaces team on Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart.
Senior oversight: a Managing Director who sets the standards for every account in the department.
Read also: Darkroom appoints Julie Novak to lead Social Commerce and TikTok Shop
Talk to Darkroom's paid media team
Planning your 2027 paid media budget? Ryan's team can review your accounts, show you which channels add incremental profit, and build the plan around the answer.
