This executive role is for a leading marketing, branding and digital agency with offices in Beirut, Dubai, and Riyadh, boasting a rich portfolio that spans across continents and industries.
As Executive Creative Director, you will report directly to the CEO and own the creative vision, standards, and operations across all regions and disciplines. You will lead the creative team by example, pairing ambitious creative thinking with a deep understanding of each client's business, audience, and objectives. This is a managerial and strategic role: you will set the direction, build the structure and talent to deliver it, and ensure that creative solutions address meaningful business challenges and achieve measurable results, while remaining the final creative authority on the agency's most important work.
Responsibilities:
- Creative Vision Leadership: Lead the agency's overall creative vision, philosophy, and standards, and ensure they are understood and applied across every region, team, and client. Lead by example through the quality of your work, your judgment, and the way you collaborate and make decisions.
- Creative Team Leadership: Lead and manage creative directors, art directors, animators, and designers. Set clear expectations, provide timely feedback, develop talent, address performance concerns, and build accountability and succession across the team.
- Creative Operations: Oversee end-to-end creative operations, including workflows, resourcing, capacity planning, production processes, and tools, to ensure the department runs efficiently and consistently across regions.
- Quality & Consistency: Act as the final creative approver on key deliverables, ensuring work meets the highest standards of craft, strategic thinking, and brand alignment, while maintaining consistency across teams and markets.
- Strategy & Business Alignment: Understand client and agency businesses, including objectives, audiences, markets, and commercial priorities. Partner with the CEO and senior leaders to turn business needs into distinctive creative strategies, align creative direction with agency strategy, growth targets, and market position, and evaluate work against brand and business outcomes. Contribute to long-term planning and agency-wide decisions.
- Client & Pitch Leadership: Lead the creative side of major pitches and new business opportunities. Serve as senior creative counsel to key clients, building trusted relationships at the leadership level and stepping into critical presentations when needed.
- Talent & Culture: Co-lead with the CD and ACDs on hiring, retention, and succession planning for the creative department. Reinforce and strengthen the agency's existing culture through everyday leadership and decisions, while building collaboration, experimentation, accountability, and high standards. Provide strong mentorship and professional development at every level.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with account management, strategy, production, and finance leaders to ensure creative work is delivered on time, on brief, and on budget.
- Innovation & Trends: Keep the agency at the forefront of design, technology, and industry developments, including AI and emerging tools, and guide their thoughtful adoption into creative workflows.
- Governance & Risk: Establish creative policies, review processes, and brand safeguards. Manage escalations and resolve conflicts across teams, projects, and client relationships.
Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in graphic design, visual arts, advertising, or a related field. A relevant master’s degree or MBA is a plus.
- An experienced leader with 15+ years in the creative industry, including 5+ years in a Creative Director or senior leadership role overseeing multiple teams or regions.
- A strong and diverse portfolio of work showcasing communications, campaigns, branding, packaging and social media with clients across Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and GCC.
- An exceptional people manager with a track record of managing, mentoring, and developing Creative Directors and large, multidisciplinary teams, building trust and accountability, and improving team performance.
- Backed by a strong body of award-worthy work across a diverse range of clients, channels, and styles.
- Skilled in creative operations, with experience building workflows, managing capacity, and improving efficiency at scale.
- A confident communicator able to present to senior audiences and explain the strategic and business rationale behind creative ideas.
- A commercially minded strategic thinker who understands business and connects creative work to measurable client and agency outcomes.
- Familiar with the Adobe Creative Suite, Canva, and AI tools, with the knowledge to evaluate and guide their use across the team, even if you're not hands-on daily.
- Comfortable making decisions, resolving conflict, and navigating complexity in a fast-paced agency environment.
