Sr. Creative Strategist | Growth Marketing Team

WHY DEPT®?

We are pioneers at heart. What this means, is that we are always leaning forward, thinking of what we can create tomorrow that does not exist today. We were born digital and we are a new model of agency, with a deep skillset in tech and marketing. That’s why we hire curious, self-driven, talented people who never stop innovating.

Our culture is big enough to cope and small enough to care. Meaning, that with people across 20+ countries, we’re big enough to provide you with the best tools, global opportunities, and benefits that help you thrive. While acting small by investing in you, your growth, your team, and giving you the autonomy to solve our clients' problems, no matter where you are in the world. 

This is a hybrid role with the expectation that you will need to go into the office 3 days week. You must be located within 50 miles of our Chicago, IL office located at: One South Wacker, 1 S Wacker Dr #2250, Chicago, IL 60606. Please note, that we do not currently offer relocation support of any kind at this time.

ABOUT YOU

As Sr. Creative Strategist, you will serve as a leader in driving digital advertising performance through strategic creative planning, innovation, testing, and optimization. You will be responsible for ensuring adherence to brand guidelines and ad platform guidance while proactively proposing and executing creative tests that help evolve best practices tailored to the brands you work with. You’ll serve as a liaison between Media and Design teams, building strong rapport on both sides through process and documentation to ensure a constant creative feedback loop. Additionally, you will act as the client’s advocate, ensuring that their objectives are effectively communicated and executed across large, multi-functional teams.

The ideal candidate has 3+ years of experience in growth marketing with a specific focus on creative strategy and testing. The candidate should have a proven track record in delivering strategic creative recommendations, loves using data to tell a story, and has a strong understanding of testing methodologies. Direct experience managing Display/GDN/UAC ad creative is strongly preferred. This individual will report directly to DEPT’s Director of Creative Strategy.

You will need to be quick on your feet, able to adapt to an ever-changing, fast-paced, growing environment, and handle critical tasks that enable growth for our clients.

YOU'LL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR:

Leadership: Leading creative strategy for a large-scale global account; working directly with media and design teams to execute strategic creative tests. Managing and mentoring a growing team of 3-4 individuals, fostering strong relationships, and providing guidance to help them succeed. Acting as a client advocate, ensuring their goals are clearly communicated and achieved through collaboration with internal teams.

Client Services: Building and maintaining strong client relationships through regular status updates, strategy presentations, and transparent communication. Proactively identifying opportunities to drive client success and advocating for their needs within the agency. Preparing and delivering compelling presentations that use data to tell a story and influence senior leadership decisions.

Planning: Crafting creative briefs and working directly with account and creative teams to oversee execution from a strategy perspective. Developing and maintaining a creative roadmap that will support critical client goals.

Innovation: Leveraging your own expertise and research as well as various agency resources to proactively recommend new strategic creative directions that could unlock growth opportunities. Evangelizing DEPT’s vision of scalable iterations in creative testing in order to improve advertising performance for our clients.

Creative Testing & Insights: Tracking the progress of creative testing efforts and reporting on trends. Preparing and presenting creative audits to clients through creative performance analysis, competitive research, and persona development. Developing and maintaining strategic creative testing roadmaps, forming strong testing hypotheses, and prioritizing tests based on anticipated impact and past testing results.

Project Management: Prioritizing creative production requests based on several factors (urgency, expected impact, client expectations, client opportunity, etc.). Creating an effective feedback loop between teams so that performance signals are consistently infused into new creative production. This necessitates organized documentation and dissemination of all creative performance and tests.

Thought Leadership: Producing thought leadership for DEPT Marketing purposes: blog