Digital Creative Director

Location London
Discipline: Advertising, Creative Agencies, Digital
Job type: Permanent
Salary: Up to £95k DOE plus benefits
Contact name: Steve

Contact email: steve@air-recruitment.com
Job ref: SS641
Published: over 2 years ago
Startdate: ASAP

Digital Creative Director, Central London / Remote – Up to £95k DOE plus benefits

This award-winning independent agency build category-defining service brands through design & technology. They act as the catalyst for service brands with the desire to be foremost, standard-setting, and first choice. With over 30 years of experience, they help blue-chip brands succeed. Are you the Digital Creative Director they need to oversee their talented and technical creative team?

This agency is looking for an inspiring Digital Creative leader to join their Brand experience team.


As a passionate creative thinker, this Digital Creative Director will lead the creative vision for your clients, bringing together brand strategy, business goals and user insight, to deliver beautifully crafted, category defining, brand experiences.

Their work is diverse in sector and nature and so they are looking for someone who is comfortable and excited at working across channels, someone who takes an integrated ecosystem view of brand experience. You will be working principally across, Digital service design, Digital product design and Digital communications, designing innovative solutions for Mobile, Web and Desktop Applications for customers and employees.


The Digital Creative Director’s role and responsibilities: 

Leadership and management

-        Contribute to the continued success and delivery of the agency and the team’s creative philosophy, objectives and strategies that will lead the creative output for clients

-        Guide, inspire and nurture your team and clients with relevant thinking that’s insightful, fresh and challenging

-        Show yourself as a confident and approachable leader, building the team through recruitment, discovering young talent and overseeing the induction of new creative team members

-        Manage your team’s professional development and run annual reviews as a line manager for Design Director (DD) and Senior Designers (SD). Including setting objectives, organizing training and development plans, and aligning them to the agency and creative team’s ambitions

-        Supervise, mentor, motivate, and manage the performance of the creative team to ensure the overall efficiency of the day-to-day progression

-        Work closely with the Delivery and Client Services (CS) teams to develop project approaches, build project teams, plan tasks accordingly, and ensure goals and deadlines are met

-        Assign, oversee, and review the written and designed outputs of the team and other creative tasks
within a project

-        Plan and resource creative work and team members on a weekly basis, ensuring the right designers, writers and creatives are involved in the right projects

-        Attend and contribute to management and leadership team meetings, creative showcases and team meetings – this will vary for each Creative Director (CD)

-        Work collaboratively with the other CDs and Executive Creative Director (ECD), Heads of Departments and Directors (D) to establish and maintain the agency’s vision across the creative team

-        Be a line manager to DD and SD


Creative direction and vision

-        Apply outstanding creativity with a strong artistic feel and produce quality craft with an unwavering eye for detail

-        Display an impressive conceptual and strategic outlook, thinking both literally and laterally to produce original ideas, push creative boundaries and challenge the status-quo

-        Willing to always try new ideas and experiment with new tools

-        Become the main point of contact for their clients’ creative vision, in line with the creative brief, clearly understanding their goals, needs, and expectations – ensuring the team delivers the best creative outputs aligned to their ambition

-        Create and guide the creative concepts by providing guidance in execution and overseeing the concept to completion

-        Continuously build and develop the creative excellence of your team

-        Communicate effectively with the design team you oversee on a project, leading the creative direction with inspiration, feedback, support, advice, insight and ideas

-        Consistently be receptive to and encourage the sharing of different perspectives and ideas from your team, while understanding when to be decisive and defend key design decisions

-        Generate ideas that redefine the brand experience, create business and brand transformation, and push the boundaries of where brand and digital ideas meet

-        Encourage and introduce varied creative inspiration and exploration, bringing in references from outside of the visual norm (think motion, music, sensory, experiential and language)

-        Initiate and champion collaboration across disciplines (UX, Strategy, Copy, Tech, Production and Client Services), encouraging integrated working teams to create and deliver outstanding creative solutions for our clients’ customers

-        Ensure the quality and coherence of creative solutions (both visuals and messaging), including interactive and motion designs, are to an exceptionally high standard

-        Sign-off on all creative work by CD before it’s handed over to another team (e.g. Development or Production) or to the clients

-        Demonstrate a continuous commitment to proactively developing ideas and opportunities for brands, clients and projects

-        Keep up to date with the latest developments in the creative industry, looking for new and innovative trends in branding, marketing, design and advertising, as well as technological advances to share with the creative team

-        Coordinate and lead idea generating sessions, spearheading new digital innovation, creative technologies and touchpoints

-        Lead, maintain and continuously improve the creative process and ways of working

-        Create and develop new techniques for promoting brand development and management philosophies – using digital delivery where appropriate

-        Lead the presentation of final design solutions, ensuring clients understand the approach, in order to obtain their approval and feedback accordingly

-        Work closely with Strategy, CX and UX teams to bring to life strategies, roadmaps, user journeys and personas

-        Contribute to creative briefs, statements of work and proposals, including planning and running creative workshops and immersions

-        Work with Sales, Marketing and Managing Partners to seek out and unlock new business opportunities

-        Speak at external events, contribute to press stories, thought pieces and insight articles

-        Help deliver any other key initiatives for the agency

-        Champion and help deliver the agency’s vision, brand proposition and experience

 
Operational and commercial

-        Demonstrate excellent organisational and time management skills, with the ability to multitask and manage multiple projects, meetings and workloads – either as a hands-on creative or by providing day-to-day creative oversight

-        Ensure the execution of all creative work stays within project budgets

-        Input accurately into costs and timing estimates and proposals where appropriate

-        Communicate clearly and regularly with the Delivery and CS teams throughout a project – providing clear progress and status updates to mitigate risks or delays for the design team

-        Develop and share ways to improve the efficiencies of the team (project and creative) with techniques, ways of working and processes

-        Recognise and implement the practice of delivering ideas and concepts efficiently and effectively, drawing on the strength of tried-and-tested techniques and approaches

-        Understand and work to their ‘ways of working’ framework, approach and delivery processes

-        Work with Managing Partners, CS and Delivery teams on developing account plans for your clients

Applications and software

Essential:

-        Proficient in of Adobe Creative programs (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign)

-        Proficient in of Sketch, Figma or Adobe XD

-        Show familiarity with prototyping tools such as InVision, Marvel and Principle

-        Demonstrate clear working knowledge and understanding of best practice
user experience and accessibility standards

-        Display strong working knowledge of word-processing (Microsoft Office) and presentation software including Keynote and Microsoft PowerPoint