The Executive Creative Director, (ECD) oversees a seasoned and vibrant team of Creative Directors and Associate Creative Directors. The ECD is both a manager and a practitioner who ensures the CD Team is healthy and focused, oversees key accounts/projects and helms strategic pitches. While approximately half of your job has a management focus, there is still a sizeable contribution to client work and pitch. As a result, you must be adept at managing your time and prioritizing the needs of clients and staff.
Blast Radius creates complex, experiential, consumer-facing applications that involve close collaboration among Business Strategists, Technologist and UE professionals (CDs, Interaction Architects, Usability Strategists, Content Strategists, Art Directors and Interface Developers). The ECD is a lightening rod for the intersection of these groups, providing coaching, support, and vision to ensure innovative ideas emerge.
The User Experience Team is a highly talented, multidisciplinary group that has been dubbed the ‘UN of UE’ for its eclectic, worldwide membership; over ten nationalities are represented within our ranks. This diversity brings a wonderful confluence of styles. Support for this vision is important and success in this role will be determined by your ability to negotiate deliverables, timelines, performance, and viewpoints.
As an ideal ECD candidate, you have at least 3-5 years of creative management experience and at least 8-10 years of experience as a Senior Creative Director. Fluency with experience, service, and/or product design, plus a solid grasp of distributed commerce, community and customer experience, is a must. International, big-brand expertise is equally important.
Responsibilities
Team Management
- Manage the professional growth of Creative Directors and Associate Creative Directors (career goals and paths, training, and mentoring) Advocate for A/CDs within UE and the company
- Recruit aggressively, retain intelligently, and prune decisively
- Approve/recommend A/CDs for projects
- Optimize team utilization and chargeability
Department Leadership
- Develop, refine, and manage process
- Set benchmarks and goals
- Develop, organize, and distribute tools
- Trap intellectual property to educate team and company
- Sell group’s experience and services to GMs and other departments
- Sponsor key UE-focused projects
- Partner with the ECDs in Vancouver, Amsterdam, NY and SF to ensure best practices are shared across the organization and that there is a common management approach within our team
Experience Design Stewardship
- Lead UE approach on pitch or key projects, as needed
- Represent A/CD group at key pitches
- Oversee select projects to ensure quality
- Set benchmarks
- Represent company at industry level
- Establish affiliations with leading schools worldwide
Required Skills / Experience
- Three-five years creative management experience
- Seven to ten years Senior CD experience, primarily in networked community and commerce
- Fluency in industry process, benchmarks, history, conventions and norms, and the emerging web 2.0
- Strong knowledge of, and opinions about, the intersection of commerce, culture, community, and technology
- Strong understanding of branding, marketing, advertising and PR
- Vivid storytelling/communication abilities
- Exceptional presentation skills
- Strong negotiation skills
- Strong understanding of experience design and its components: design and design systems, copywriting and content strategy, usability and interaction design and interface development
Attributes
- Authentic, intelligent, and opinionated
- Flexible, understanding, and empathetic
- Active rather than passive
- Calm under pressure
- Good degree of chutzpah
- Humourous