Associate Creative Director

Role overview

Creative leadership and delivery

• Lead creative direction across major projects, campaigns, pitches, and client presentations.
• Maintain creative standards across digital, print, video, social, experiential, and other platforms.
• Lead, mentor, coach, and develop creative team members.
• Allocate resources and monitor workload, utilization, overtime, freelance needs, and external resources.
• Spot overruns, resource constraints, and scope changes early and escalate them.
• Manage end-to-end workflow from briefing and concepts through review, approval, and production handover.

Stakeholders and business development

• Ensure projects have clear briefs, deliverables, timelines, and resource requirements before development begins.
• Review and approve creative work before client submission.
• Coordinate delivery with Account Management, Strategy, Production, Operations, and Technology.
• Present and defend concepts; manage client feedback and revisions while maintaining creative direction.
• Brief and manage freelancers and external creative partners, maintaining quality during production.
• Contribute to tenders, pitches, and business-winning opportunities and support conversion of tenders into awarded projects.

Team and commercial management

• Identify team capability gaps, development and succession needs, and recruitment requirements.
• Provide feedback, coaching, performance reviews, and development support.
• Balance creative ambition with budgets, timelines, commercial requirements, and available resources.
• Stay current on creative trends, technologies, platforms, consumer behavior, and industry developments.
• Ensure consistent messaging and visual identity across channels.

Education and experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Advertising, Graphic Design, Communication Arts, Fine Arts, Marketing, or a related creative discipline.
• Minimum 3–5 years as a Creative Group Head or equivalent senior creative leader.
• Creative Director experience is highly desirable.
• Strong creative leadership, campaign development, pitch, and client presentation experience.
• Strong portfolio showing multi-platform campaigns, creative direction, and business-winning work.
• Retail brands, digital activations, promotional campaigns, content marketing, or events experience is an advantage.

Knowledge and capabilities

• Strong understanding of branding, marketing strategy, consumer behavior, and creative development.
• Advanced Adobe Creative Suite knowledge, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign; After Effects is an advantage.
• Strong conceptual, visual storytelling, art direction, or copywriting capability.
• Strong team leadership, project, resource, budget, and deadline management.
• Presentation, communication, negotiation, stakeholder management, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.
• Ability to manage multiple projects in a fast-paced agency environment and understand commercial objectives.