The Creative Director I’m working with on this role is one of the few who has first hand experience delivering conceptual creative thinking in both pure play and 360/integrated environments – agency and clientside. He’s been a bit of a mentor to me too over the last few years and I rate him highly.
His ethos is simple: integration is not simply about media breadth, it’s about being able to make the right choice.
In his still relatively new role as ECD of this independent through-the-line agency, he’s been changing the creative structure to ensure ideas come from anywhere, not just the traditional art director/copywriter team. In fact, this type of structure has almost gone internally, as the creative ‘team’ is often a mix of designer, technologist, planning, copywriter and art director, all working together on specific clients or projects, from beginning to end – not just at a specific point in the process time frame.
We’re wanting to build on this ethos and success and create a new role – that of Digital Creative/Concept Lead – and pair it with Producer to create effectively a joint head of digital.
We see this role being undertaken by someone who is digitally native, who is perhaps a midweight digital designer or art director (with some hands on implementation and technical skills), looking to deliver more rich content/concept creative thinking, in an environment that’s totally embracing 360 creative neutrality. Like I said earlier, this role, although digital in terms of experience, is about being able to make the right choice about where to deliver the solution.
Maybe the person coming on board will have a pure play background, and is looking for more freedom creatively, and is thinking they can achieve this by growing their career in an integrated agency. Maybe they’re at the stage in their career in an integrated agency where they’re ready to help define an offering by stamping their authority and values on it.
Either way we’re looking for sense of entrepreneurial spirit and a sense of adventure in the person coming on board, as this role will become integral to how my client defines themselves over the coming months and years.
A role like this attracts a lot of interest and questions. Too many to answer here in fact. That said, this will be a very fluid hire and so the experience that wins the day as it were can’t be clearly defined. If I had to though I’d say I want to see passionate, creative and genuinely channel neutral candidates, who have a digital background (design/art direction) and a definite point of view. In addition a brilliant portfolio of conceptual work that demonstrates consumer experience and content, as well as digital design, will go down well too! But it’s as much about ‘what next?’ for these guys, as it is about ‘what have you done?’.
Interested candidates should call me or email me in the first instance for more information, so that I can talk through the agency concerned and the longer term opportunity (which is a big draw with the role). Call me on 07710 419 702 or email me at tim@timothycreative.com. I look forward to hearing from you.
Tim Mitchell.
