How to Apply to Adcouncil

Key Takeaways

The Ad Council is a New York-headquartered nonprofit founded February 26, 1942 as the War Advertising Council, currently led by President and CEO Lisa Sherman (since 2014), employing roughly 190 to 200 staff and operating as remote-first across the continental United States with HQ at 815 Second Avenue, NYC and a small Washington, DC presence.
The operating model is donor-driven public service advertising: agencies donate creative, brands and platforms donate strategic and production support, and approximately 33,000 media outlets donate roughly $1.8 billion in airtime and ad inventory annually, making the Ad Council one of the world's largest recipients of donated media.
The active campaign portfolio includes about two dozen efforts across mental health (Sound It Out), gun violence prevention, early detection and preventive health, road safety, wildfire prevention (Smokey Bear, since 1944), and community and opportunity, alongside heritage campaigns including McGruff the Crime Dog, the Crash Test Dummies, Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk, A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste, Love Has No Labels, and the It's Up To You COVID-19 vaccine confidence campaign.
Applications flow through Greenhouse at job-boards.greenhouse.io/adcouncil (linked from adcouncil.org/careers and the Join Our Team hub); the live board is small (typically a handful of openings) and includes a General Application channel for future-fit candidates.
Hiring loops typically include a recruiter screen, a hiring manager conversation, three to five cross-functional panel interviews, a portfolio or case presentation for senior roles, and a final culture/mission fit conversation with executive leadership; total time runs roughly four to eight weeks for most roles.
Resumes should foreground mission alignment, quantify campaign outcomes in behavior-change and earned-media terms, name agency and media partners explicitly, and translate commercial-agency or in-house brand experience into public-service language; clean Greenhouse-parseable formatting and a tight one to two page length matter.
Compensation is meaningfully below commercial advertising agency benchmarks: indicative NYC nonprofit ranges are roughly $60K to $85K for coordinators and managers, $90K to $130K for senior managers and directors, $140K to $200K+ for VPs, and higher for SVP/C-suite, with strong benefits, generous PTO, retirement match, and remote flexibility partially offsetting the gap.
Cultural fit favors low-ego, high-collaboration, partnership-fluent, behavior-change-literate professionals with a real connection to public service; candidates who treat the Ad Council as a smaller WPP or Omnicom shop, or as a brief mission detour before chasing brand-side comp, are screened out early.
The most reliable bridges into the Ad Council are mid-career hires from holding-company agency pro bono accounts, in-house brand purpose teams, public-affairs or political communications shops, foundation or NGO comms, and the Raquel Zarin Summer Internship Program for students; agency and brand alumni are heavily represented across the staff.

About Adcouncil

The Ad Council is a U.S. nonprofit founded on February 26, 1942 as The War Advertising Council, originally chartered by the federal government to harness the persuasive power of the American advertising industry for the World War II war effort, producing iconic morale and home-front campaigns including 'Loose Lips Sink Ships' and the introduction of Smokey Bear in 1944. After the war the organization renamed itself The Advertising Council in 1945 and pivoted to a permanent, peacetime mission of producing public service advertising on the most pressing social issues facing the country, while preserving the founding partnership model in which advertising agencies donate creative work, brands and platforms donate strategic and production support, and broadcast, print, digital, out-of-home, and streaming media donate the airtime and ad inventory needed to run the campaigns at scale. That model still defines the organization today: the Ad Council itself does not buy media, and the donated media value flowing to its campaigns is roughly $1.8 billion annually across a network of approximately 33,000 media outlets, which makes it one of the largest single recipients of donated media in the world. The campaign portfolio reads as a partial history of American public service advertising, including Smokey Bear ('Only You Can Prevent Wildfires'), McGruff the Crime Dog ('Take a Bite Out of Crime', launched 1979), the Crash Test Dummies seat-belt campaign ('You Could Learn a Lot from a Dummy', launched 1985 with NHTSA), 'Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk' (launched 1983 and credited as one of the most-recognized PSAs in U.S. history), 'A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste' for the United Negro College Fund, the long-running 'Love Has No Labels' diversity and inclusion campaign, the high-profile 'It's Up To You' COVID-19 vaccine confidence effort launched in February 2021 with the four living former U.S. presidents, and the 'Sound It Out' youth mental health campaign for parents of tweens and teens. Lisa Sherman has served as President and CEO since 2014 and is the public face of the modern Ad Council. The organization employs roughly 190 to 200 staff members across a small DC office and its headquarters at 815 Second Avenue in New York City, operates as a remote-first employer with employees permitted to work anywhere in the continental United States, and currently fields about two dozen active campaigns spanning community and opportunity, early detection and preventive health, gun violence prevention, mental health, and safety. The work is mission-driven, partnership-driven, and unusual inside the broader marketing industry: campaigns are built with leading creative agencies that donate their best work, distributed through media partners that donate the airtime, and steered by a small in-house team of campaign directors, strategists, researchers, communications staff, and operations professionals who function more like an embedded client than a traditional agency.

Application Process

1
Start at adcouncil
Start at adcouncil.org/careers (which routes to the 'Join Our Team' hub at adcouncil.org/About-Us/join-our-team) and click through to the live job board; all current openings are hosted on Greenhouse at job-boards.greenhouse.io/adcouncil, where you will see the small set of active roles (typically a handful at any given time) plus a 'General Application' option for candidates who want to be considered for future openings.
2
Submit a resume and a tailored cover letter through the Greenhouse application f
Submit a resume and a tailored cover letter through the Greenhouse application form for the specific requisition; cover letters are taken seriously here because the work is mission-driven and the hiring team explicitly screens for candidates who can articulate why they want to leave commercial work for public service advertising rather than treating the Ad Council as a generic agency or comms job.
3
Expect a 30 to 45 minute recruiter or talent screen within roughly one to three
Expect a 30 to 45 minute recruiter or talent screen within roughly one to three weeks of applying for shortlisted candidates, covering your background, motivation for nonprofit work, salary expectations against the posted range, remote-work setup, and basic logistics including U.S. work authorization and ability to be based anywhere in the continental United States.
4
A hiring manager interview follows, almost always with the campaign director, de
A hiring manager interview follows, almost always with the campaign director, department head, or functional lead the role reports into; for campaign roles this person will probe how you think about social-issue strategy, partnership management with agencies and media, measurement of behavior-change outcomes, and how you have handled mission-sensitive creative work previously.
5
Panel or team interviews typically include three to five additional conversation
Panel or team interviews typically include three to five additional conversations across cross-functional partners including campaigns, strategy and insights, creative studio and distribution, marketing and communications, development, and sometimes board or external partner-facing leaders; expect at least one case-style or portfolio review where you walk through prior work and explain decisions, trade-offs, and outcomes in detail.
6
Senior and director-level candidates are commonly asked to prepare a short prese
Senior and director-level candidates are commonly asked to prepare a short presentation, written strategic point of view, or campaign critique as part of the loop, and to meet with Lisa Sherman or another C-suite leader for final-round culture and mission fit; references are checked thoroughly and the team weighs reference signal heavily because the operating model depends on trusted relationships with agencies, media partners, and nonprofit and government clients.
7
End-to-end timelines run roughly four to eight weeks from application to offer f
End-to-end timelines run roughly four to eight weeks from application to offer for most roles and longer for senior leadership searches; offers include salary within the posted range, a competitive nonprofit benefits package (medical, dental, vision, generous PTO, retirement match, professional development), and confirmation of remote-work status, with onboarding handled centrally from the New York headquarters.

Resume Tips for Adcouncil

recommended

Lead with mission-aligned framing in your summary or top section: the Ad Council

Lead with mission-aligned framing in your summary or top section: the Ad Council is a nonprofit hiring people who want to do social-impact work, so a one to two line opener that names the social issues you care about and the kind of public-service or behavior-change work you have done lands far better than a generic 'results-driven marketing professional' summary that reads as commercial-agency boilerplate.

recommended

Quantify campaign outcomes in behavior-change and earned-media terms rather than

Quantify campaign outcomes in behavior-change and earned-media terms rather than just commercial KPIs: PSAs aired or impressions delivered, donated media value secured, partnership coalitions assembled (number and tier of agency, media, brand, government, and nonprofit partners), survey-measured shifts in awareness, attitudes, or self-reported behavior, web traffic to a resource hub, and earned press coverage are all first-class signals here, alongside the standard reach, engagement, and conversion metrics.

recommended

Surface social-impact, public-affairs, government, or nonprofit experience promi

Surface social-impact, public-affairs, government, or nonprofit experience prominently even if it is volunteer or pro bono: cause-marketing campaigns, agency pro bono accounts, government or political communications work, foundation or NGO comms, public-health campaigns, and university or association advocacy work all map directly to what the campaigns and marketing teams do day to day.

recommended

If you come from a commercial advertising agency or in-house brand background, t

If you come from a commercial advertising agency or in-house brand background, translate your experience explicitly into Ad Council terms: account management becomes 'campaign and partnership management', creative production becomes 'creative direction with donated agency partners', and brand strategy becomes 'social-issue strategy and audience insight'; agency or brand alumni from holding-company shops (Omnicom, IPG, Publicis, WPP), independents, and brand marketing teams at Fortune 500 advertisers are well-represented inside the Ad Council and a clear bridge in your resume helps reviewers see the fit.

recommended

Name the agencies, media partners, brands, and platforms you have worked with by

Name the agencies, media partners, brands, and platforms you have worked with by name (and the campaigns they were tied to) because the Ad Council operates as a connector across that exact ecosystem; recognizable partner names and campaign references help interviewers map your network and credibility.

recommended

Mirror the role's vocabulary verbatim where it is honest to do so: 'public servi

Mirror the role's vocabulary verbatim where it is honest to do so: 'public service advertising', 'PSA', 'donated media', 'social impact', 'behavior change', 'campaign strategy', 'partnership management', 'creative producer', 'integrated marketing', 'earned media', 'influencer marketing', 'community engagement', and the specific issue areas in the posting (mental health, gun violence prevention, early detection, vaccine confidence, road safety, wildfire prevention, etc.) since Greenhouse keyword filtering and human reviewers both look for fit signals.

recommended

Keep formatting clean and ATS-parseable for Greenhouse: single-column layout, st

Keep formatting clean and ATS-parseable for Greenhouse: single-column layout, standard section headers (Summary, Experience, Education, Skills, Volunteer/Board), no text in images, no headers/footers with embedded data, PDF or DOCX, and a tight one to two page length for individual contributors and director-level roles; avoid heavy infographic resumes that look impressive in portfolio reviews but fail keyword extraction.

recommended

Include a short Volunteer / Board / Pro Bono section if you have one; service on

Include a short Volunteer / Board / Pro Bono section if you have one; service on a nonprofit board, a meaningful volunteer commitment, or pro bono creative work signals the mission orientation the Ad Council screens for and frequently comes up in interviews as a culture-fit anchor.

Interview Culture

Interviews at the Ad Council reflect the organization's hybrid identity as part nonprofit, part advertising agency, and part public-affairs operator, and the cultural standards are noticeably different from a commercial agency loop. Interviewers are typically working campaign directors, strategists, marketers, creatives, development professionals, and operations leaders rather than dedicated career interviewers, and they treat the conversation as a real two-way fit assessment because the donated-media model and the partner-facing nature of the work means a single bad hire can damage long-standing relationships with agencies, media owners, brand sponsors, and nonprofit or government clients. Expect the first substantive question in almost every loop to be some version of 'why the Ad Council, and why now', and expect interviewers to listen carefully for whether you can articulate a real connection to public service, behavior change, or one of the campaign issue areas (mental health, gun violence prevention, early detection and preventive health, road safety, wildfire prevention, community and opportunity) rather than treating the role as a resume stepping stone or a soft landing from a stressful agency job. Mission fit is a load-bearing screen, not a closing pleasantry. Behavioral questions follow a STAR-style structure and tend to focus on partnership and stakeholder dynamics: how you have managed competing creative inputs from a donated agency partner, how you have navigated a sensitive social-issue brief where research and gut instinct disagreed, how you have handled a media partner pulling back on committed inventory, how you have worked across a coalition of nonprofit and government clients with conflicting priorities, and how you have responded to public criticism of a campaign. Craft questions are highly portfolio-driven for campaign, creative, strategy, and marketing roles: be ready to walk through two or three pieces of work end to end, including the brief, the audience, the insight, the creative idea, the partner ecosystem, the distribution plan, the measurement framework, and what you would do differently in hindsight. Strategy and research candidates should expect questions about behavior-change theory, segmentation, message testing, and translating academic or government research into campaign creative. Development candidates should expect deep questions about funder cultivation, corporate partnerships, and the donated-media flywheel. Operations, finance, IT, and people-team candidates face standard functional interviews tuned to a small nonprofit environment where wearing multiple hats and operating with limited headcount is the norm. Across every loop, the culture screens hard for low ego, high collaboration, public-service orientation, and the ability to make donated agency and media partners feel like co-owners rather than vendors; candidates who present themselves as the smartest person in the room or who treat the Ad Council as a smaller version of an Omnicom or WPP shop tend to read poorly. Lisa Sherman's tenure has reinforced an inclusive, employee-friendly, remote-first culture, and candidates should also expect explicit conversations about working independently from home anywhere in the continental U.S., balancing focused individual work with deep cross-functional collaboration, and accepting that compensation will be meaningfully below commercial-agency benchmarks in exchange for mission, longevity, and the chance to put genuinely consequential work into the world.

What Adcouncil Looks For

Genuine, articulable mission orientation toward public service advertising and behavior change, ideally tied to one or more of the active issue areas (mental health, gun violence prevention, early detection and preventive health, road safety, wildfire prevention, community and opportunity, diversity and inclusion).
Strong craft in your discipline (campaign management, strategy, creative direction, marketing communications, influencer and partnership marketing, development, research, operations, finance, IT, people, or legal) at a level that holds up next to top commercial agencies and brands, because donated agency partners expect a peer client.
Partnership and stakeholder fluency: comfort working across a coalition of advertising agencies, media owners, brand sponsors, platforms, government agencies, and nonprofit clients, with the diplomatic instincts to keep those relationships healthy through creative disagreements, news-cycle pressure, and inevitable resource constraints.
Translation skills between commercial advertising vocabulary and nonprofit/public-service vocabulary; candidates who can move fluently between 'brand strategy' and 'social-issue strategy', or between 'media plan' and 'donated media flywheel', tend to be effective immediately.
Behavior-change literacy and respect for evidence: comfort with audience research, message testing, behavioral science, and post-campaign measurement, and willingness to let data and lived experience override creative instinct when the social stakes warrant it.
Low-ego, collaborative working style suited to a small (~190 to 200 person) remote-first nonprofit where individual contributors carry meaningful scope, hand-offs are tight, and credit is shared with donated partners rather than claimed individually.
Lived or professional connection to underserved or directly affected communities for issue-area roles, because the campaigns are increasingly built with and for those communities rather than at them, and authenticity is screened for in interviews and portfolio review.
A clear-eyed acceptance of the comp trade-off: candidates who join the Ad Council to escape commercial agency burnout, to do work they can be proud of, and to stay for the long arc of a campaign tend to thrive; candidates who expect agency-level compensation or use the Ad Council as a short bridge to a higher-paying brand role tend to wash out of the loop early.

Frequently Asked Questions

What ATS does the Ad Council use, and how do I actually apply?

The Ad Council hosts its applications on Greenhouse at job-boards.greenhouse.io/adcouncil, linked from adcouncil.org/careers and the 'Join Our Team' hub at adcouncil.org/About-Us/join-our-team. The active board is intentionally small, usually a handful of openings at a time, and there is also a General Application option for candidates who want to be considered for future roles. Submit a resume and a tailored cover letter directly through the Greenhouse form for the specific requisition; cover letters are taken seriously here because mission alignment is screened explicitly, and applying through LinkedIn aggregators or sending unsolicited emails to staff is far less effective than the official Greenhouse path.

Where is the Ad Council headquartered and is it remote-friendly?

The headquarters is at 815 Second Avenue in New York City, with a smaller presence in Washington, DC for federal partner-facing work. The organization is officially remote-first and allows employees to work anywhere in the continental United States, which means most roles are open to candidates outside the New York metro. Some roles still benefit from proximity to NYC for in-person partner meetings, board events, and leadership convenings, and the job description will usually say so; otherwise, plan for a fully remote setup with periodic travel to New York or to partner offices.

How big is the Ad Council and what kind of teams does it have?

The Ad Council employs roughly 190 to 200 staff members, which is small relative to the scale of its work and the size of its donated-media footprint. Functional teams include Campaigns (one team per major social-issue campaign, led by a campaign director), Creative Studio and Distribution, Strategy and Insights/Research, Marketing and Communications, Development and Partnerships, Digital and Innovation, Finance, People and Culture, Legal, Operations, and IT. The Raquel Zarin Summer Internship Program is the primary student pipeline, and most professional hires come in mid-career from advertising agencies, in-house brand teams, public-affairs and political comms shops, foundations, and government communications backgrounds.

What is realistic compensation at the Ad Council compared to a commercial ad agency or brand role?

Compensation is meaningfully below commercial advertising agency and Fortune 500 brand benchmarks, which is the central trade-off candidates need to make peace with before applying. Indicative NYC-nonprofit ranges typically run roughly $60K to $85K for coordinator and manager roles, $90K to $130K for senior managers and directors, $140K to $200K+ for vice presidents, and higher for SVP and C-suite leadership. Posted ranges on Greenhouse are usually honored. Benefits are strong for a nonprofit (medical, dental, vision, generous PTO, retirement match, professional development, fully remote flexibility), but candidates expecting holding-company-agency cash and bonus structures will be disappointed; the value proposition is the work itself, the brand of the campaigns, and the long-arc career.

Why do offers from the Ad Council sometimes get rejected for ad agencies or in-house brand roles?

The most common reason is comp. A senior manager or director-level candidate weighing an Ad Council offer against a holding-company agency or in-house brand role frequently sees a $30K to $80K base salary gap plus a meaningful bonus and equity gap, and that gap can be hard to absorb in a high cost-of-living NYC market. The Ad Council understands this and screens for candidates whose financial situation, life stage, or values make the trade acceptable. Candidates who decline offers usually do so for compensation, sometimes for title or scope, and occasionally because a final-round conversation surfaced an issue-area or partner dynamic they did not want to take on. Candidates who accept tend to optimize for mission, work quality, and longevity.

Do I need an advertising or agency background to work there?

It helps a great deal for campaign, strategy, creative, and marketing roles, but it is not a hard requirement everywhere. The strongest pipelines are mid-career hires from holding-company agency pro bono accounts (where they have already worked on cause campaigns), in-house brand purpose and social-impact teams, public-affairs and political communications agencies, and foundation or NGO communications shops. Backgrounds in public health, government communications, journalism, behavior science, and lived-experience advocacy work are increasingly represented, especially on issue-area campaign teams. Operations, finance, IT, legal, and people-team roles draw from a broader nonprofit and small-organization talent pool. Across all paths, the consistent signal is mission orientation plus craft.

What is the internship pipeline like?

The Ad Council runs the Raquel Zarin Summer Internship Program, a paid summer program for current undergraduate and graduate students that places interns across campaigns, creative, marketing, strategy, and operations functions. Applications typically open in the fall or early winter for the following summer cohort and close before the program begins in June; check adcouncil.org/About-Us/join-our-team for current dates. The internship is competitive, draws from across the country given the remote-first model, and is one of the more reliable entry points into a full-time campaign coordinator or marketing role after graduation. Outside of the formal program, entry-level openings are infrequent and tend to favor candidates with at least one prior agency, brand, or nonprofit internship.

Which famous campaigns has the Ad Council actually produced?

The list is long and includes some of the most-recognized public service advertising in U.S. history: Smokey Bear (since 1944, in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service and the National Association of State Foresters, the longest-running PSA campaign in American history), McGruff the Crime Dog ('Take a Bite Out of Crime', launched 1979), the Crash Test Dummies seat-belt campaign (launched 1985 with NHTSA), 'Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk' (launched 1983), 'A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste' for the United Negro College Fund, 'Love Has No Labels', the It's Up To You COVID-19 vaccine confidence campaign launched in February 2021 with the four living former U.S. presidents, and the Sound It Out youth mental health campaign for parents. Recent efforts include gun violence prevention work and ongoing campaigns across early detection and preventive health.

How does the donated media model actually work, and why does it matter for candidates?

The Ad Council does not buy media. Advertising agencies donate creative work, brands and platforms donate strategic and production support, and roughly 33,000 broadcast, print, digital, out-of-home, and streaming media outlets donate the airtime and ad inventory needed to run campaigns at scale, generating approximately $1.8 billion in donated media value annually. The implication for candidates is that almost every job at the Ad Council is partnership-shaped: campaign directors are managing donated agency creative teams, marketing and distribution staff are courting and stewarding media partners, development staff are cultivating funder and corporate partner relationships, and even back-office functions support a model in which the organization's leverage comes from convening rather than spending. Candidates who are not energized by partnership work will struggle here regardless of craft level.

How long does the hiring process take and what should I expect from interviews?

Plan on roughly four to eight weeks from application to offer for most roles, with senior leadership searches running longer. The standard loop includes a 30 to 45 minute recruiter or talent screen, a hiring manager conversation, three to five cross-functional panel interviews with peers and partner-facing leads, a portfolio or short presentation/case for senior and director-level roles, and a final culture and mission fit conversation with an executive (sometimes including Lisa Sherman for senior hires). References are checked thoroughly. Expect explicit, repeated screening for mission alignment, partnership orientation, behavior-change literacy, and comfort with the comp trade-off; candidates who treat the Ad Council as a smaller commercial agency, who cannot articulate a real reason to be there, or who present as high-ego in panel rounds tend to be filtered out early.

Open Positions

Adcouncil currently has 3 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 3 open positions at Adcouncil

Related Resources

Career Guides for Adcouncil Roles

Similar Companies

Sources

Ad Council — About Us — The Advertising Council, Inc.
Ad Council — Join Our Team (Careers) — The Advertising Council, Inc.
Ad Council Careers — Greenhouse Job Board — Greenhouse Software / The Advertising Council, Inc.
Ad Council — Wikipedia — Wikipedia
Smokey Bear — Official Campaign Site — USDA Forest Service / National Association of State Foresters / Ad Council
It's Up To You — COVID-19 Vaccine Education Initiative — COVID Collaborative / Ad Council
Sound It Out — Youth Mental Health Campaign — Pivotal Ventures / Ad Council
Lisa Sherman — President & CEO, The Ad Council — The Advertising Council, Inc.