Associate Creative Director

Role Overview

Associate Creative Director at Burjline Builders. This role leads the Creative Department and oversees the development and delivery of high-quality creative work across multiple platforms.

Role Purpose

To drive creative excellence, lead creative team members, manage resources and workflows, and ensure creative projects are delivered within agreed scope, timelines, budgets, and quality standards.

Key Responsibilities

Creative Direction & Strategy

• Lead and provide creative direction across major projects, campaigns, pitches, and client presentations.
• Establish and maintain high creative standards across digital, print, video, social, experiential, and other platforms.
• Ensure consistent creative messaging and visual identity across different channels.
• Present and defend creative concepts and recommendations to clients and internal stakeholders.
• Manage client feedback and revisions while maintaining overall creative direction and strategic objectives.
• Balance creative ambition with commercial requirements, project budgets, timelines, and available resources.
• Stay updated on creative trends, technologies, platforms, consumer behavior, and industry developments.

Team Leadership & Development

• Lead, mentor, and develop creative team members, including designers, copywriters, art directors, and other creative professionals.
• Identify team capability gaps, development requirements, succession needs, and recruitment requirements.
• Provide regular feedback, coaching, performance reviews, and development support to the Creative team.

Resource & Workflow Management

• Allocate creative resources based on project scope, deadlines, priorities, and team capacity.
• Monitor workload, utilization, overtime, freelance requirements, and external creative resources.
• Establish and maintain an effective creative workflow covering briefing, concept development, internal review, client presentation, revisions, approval, and production handover.
• Ensure projects have clear briefs, deliverables, timelines, and resource requirements before creative development begins.
• Identify potential project overruns, resource constraints, and scope changes and escalate them at an early stage.

Quality Assurance & Production

• Review and approve creative work before client submission to ensure it meets required creative, strategic, and execution standards.
• Ensure creative integrity and quality are maintained throughout the production process.
• Brief and manage freelancers, photographers, illustrators, animators, and other external creative partners when required.

Stakeholder & Client Management

• Work closely with Account Management, Strategy, Production, Operations, and Technology teams to ensure effective project delivery.

Business Development

• Contribute to tenders, pitches, and business-winning opportunities.
• Support the achievement of a strong conversion rate from submitted tenders to awarded projects.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Advertising, Graphic Design, Communication Arts, Fine Arts, Marketing, or a related creative discipline.
• Minimum 3-5 years of experience as a Creative Group Head or equivalent senior creative leadership role.
• Experience as a Creative Director is highly desirable.
• Strong experience in creative leadership, campaign development, pitches, and client presentations.
• Strong portfolio demonstrating multi-platform campaigns, creative direction, and business-winning work.
• Experience in retail brands, digital activations, promotional campaigns, content marketing, or events is an advantage.

Skills & Competencies

• Strong understanding of branding, marketing strategy, consumer behavior, and the creative development process.
• Advanced knowledge of Adobe Creative Suite, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign; After Effects is an advantage.
• Strong conceptual, visual storytelling, art direction, or copywriting capabilities.
• Proven ability to lead, mentor, and develop creative teams.
• Strong project, resource, budget, and deadline management skills.
• Excellent presentation, communication, negotiation, and stakeholder-management skills.
• Strong problem-solving and decision-making abilities.
• Ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously in a fast-paced agency environment.
• Strong commercial awareness and understanding of creative project budgets and business objectives.
• Highly creative, motivated, organized, and detail-oriented.