Associate Creative Director

Associate Creative Director, Copy (Virtue Americas)

**Please note this position is Canada based. All non-Canadian Applicants will be rejected**

Position Summary: 

Virtue is looking for a Canada based Associate Creative Director to join us at Virtue Americas. We want someone who’s ready to throw themselves into a creative leadership role, maybe for the first time.

You should be the type of senior creative who is well-aware of the conventional work of our industry because you’ve made some of it or seen enough of it. You should be driven to break those conventions as you rise in responsibility and decision-making ability. 

As an Associate Creative Director, you’ll be alternating between A) running projects with a creative partner, being the makers, doers, thinkers, and executors, top to bottom, and B) overseeing projects with a junior or mid-level team as the beating heart of the project. It’s tough to switch between the two modes of working. You’ll need to be good at it or become good at it through practice. 

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At this point in your career, you should be well-versed in strategic and brand thinking. Why creative works or why it makes sense for the brand should be as much a part of your conversations as whether the idea is strong. 

 As an ACD at Virtue, coming up with great ideas is part of the job. The other part is to find ways to inspire others to rally behind those great ideas.

What you’ll need to do: 

• Own, build, organise, execute, and present creative proposals from start to finish
• Turn a basic, bland client briefs into earned media ideas, always keeping newsworthiness and earned media at the heart of your ideas
• Challenge yourself and your partner to think of brand behaviours rather than going straight to advertising communications ideas
• Think about creative brilliance at the start of every project, working with other departments while protecting the integrity of the work until the end
• Work on a number of projects simultaneously, making sure none of them backslide over the course of creative development.
• Push yourself, your team, or the teams you’re overseeing to come up with lots and lots of ideas, knowing that most of them will either miss the mark strategically, creatively, or feasibly. From this process, beautiful gems can be unearthed.
• When overseeing a creative team, hone your curation skills to identify and bring forward only the strongest ideas
• Develop creative presentations, run pitches (with exec support), be magnificent in front of clients, handle shoots, all the usual stuff
• Be a sounding board and supportive creative leader for the junior teams under your direction for projects. Give guidance to your direct report(s) on general life and work skills.
• Make sure you are aware of the work out there in the industry right now. Not just the bad stuff, but the ‘good’ stuff too.
• Spend time getting familiar with work in Central and South America. You will be working on projects outside of the USA. You may even work on global projects.
• Work with the Business Development team from time to time to handle creds meetings, client engagement opportunities, etc.

What you’ll need to bring with you: 

• Solid work at creative shops
• Maybe a weird detour in your career history
• Knowledge of how to simultaneously frighten, calm, and convince clients
• Some experience with branded content, beyond just ads
• Tenacity and stubbornness when the situation calls for it
• The headspace to think through creative ideas in an organised / constructed way 
• Opinions on strategy and brand, and a readiness to push back when something doesn’t make sense or isn’t believable 
• A demonstrated history of participating in culture
• Contemporary taste in design, copy, art direction, music, etc. All the magical stuff we work with to make our work.
• Scrappiness and resourcefulness
• Willingness to jump in and redirect a project that’s about to lose its creative integrity
• Ability to handle projects and figure it out even when the brief is incomplete / not all the answers are known to us
• Excited to rally people around a great idea to get it made, even if nobody officially said you are ‘in charge’
• An openness to being honest; with clients, with colleagues, with yourself