Area Executive Creative Director (ECD), North America
Avanade
Location: Atlanta, Georgia, Chicago, Illinois, Houston, Texas, Seattle, Washington
Job Type: Full time
Posted
Area Executive Creative Director, North America
Inspire and bring ideas to life
What is Avanade Experiences?
Over Avanade's 20+ years, we've delivered the most intelligent, engaging, award-winning experiences on the Microsoft ecosystem. As technology and human expectations evolve, we see incredible opportunities for customers, products, and workplaces—where imagination is the only limit.
Avanade Experiences is our way to bring unconventional thinking, exceptional creativity, and our unparalleled engineering heritage to think big and make it real. Our vision of the future goes far beyond concepts to enable and deliver the impact our clients, their people, customers, and communities need.
We support each other with great work to push boundaries, connect technology with what matters to people first, and grow with our clients. If you feel this is a great fit for your path, we’d love to talk.
About the role
As Executive Creative Director, you set the tone and raise the ‘creative bar’ across North America. Your vision plays a critical part in the delivery of innovative projects for some of the world’s top brands. You’ll guide a talented team of creatives and technologists, working directly with, developing and managing creative directors, designers, copywriters, content strategists, UX architects, analysts, developers, and project managers.
You have a broad range of creative experience and are comfortable working with different technologies and platforms. You're adept at developing creative strategy and providing direction on multiple projects simultaneously while willing to dig into the work to help with project delivery where needed.
You’re an excellent communicator, able to sell complex ideas to different audiences, and are just as comfortable with business design thinking as you are with art direction. As ECD, you work with senior partners across the business helping to sell, manage and deliver exceptional creative work at the highest level.
You have a deep understanding of how creativity connects to business problems and drives profitable growth, and proven experience operating at board level to bring creative ideas to life.
Responsibilities
Specifically, we can depend on you to:
Sellbig, creative world-changing ideas, both internally and to clients
Use consumer behaviour and human-centred design to drive creativity
Build trust and equity with clients, partners and internal teams
Understand clients’ brands and how to solve their business problems
Provide creative leadership on the strategic accounts that need you most
Motivate, inspire, and lead a diverse group of creative professionals
Work through your Creative partners to ensure creative quality is of the highest bar
Design creative team structure, processes, working models in alignment with Avanade Experiences
Drive growth and development plan for the creative team
Hire senior creatives
Some travel required, to discuss in the interview
What you bring to the team
20+ years of relevant design experience.
10+ years’ experience managing people and teams.
A big idea person, strategic thinker, and culture builder
A bachelor's degree in design, graphic design, or similar field, or the required equivalent experience. A master's degree in a related discipline or an MBA is a plus.
Deep sales experiences leading sales, ideation, workshops, and pitches in front of C-suite clients
A strong portfolio that demonstrates expertise in design principles and solutions
Expertise in customer experience and user experience disciplines, such as UX, information architecture, research, usability, and content strategy
Strong leadership and presence; you project an expert level of knowledge and a high degree of creativity on how to use Microsoft and other technologies to deliver business value through the right experiences at the right time
Ability to quickly earn the trust and respect of sellers, partners, clients
Deep industry knowledge covering one or more of our primary industries
Ability to coach, motivate, grow, course-correct, and lead a team
Expert level written and verbal communication skills, including ability to comfortably present to the senior level of our clients (remote and public speaking)
Experience of B2B and B2C highly valued
Capable of communicating with technical developers to transfer creative ideation and design to deliverables
Compensation for roles at Avanade varies depending on a wide array of factors including but not limited to the specific office location, role, skill set and level of experience. As required by local law, Avanade provides a reasonable range of compensation for roles that may be hired in New York as set forth below and information on benefits offered is here.
Role Location: Range of Starting Pay for role
Seattle: 200,600 - $236,000