Associate Creative Director

TAG HR; Ottawa; On-site; CAD 70,000 - 75,000; Full time

Job summary

Confidential Creative Agency in Ottawa is seeking an Associate Creative Director to own strategic creative direction and grow client relationships. You will work directly with a Creative Director invested in your growth and mentor junior team members.

The role emphasizes thinking beyond the deliverable, understanding business problems, audience, and strategy to drive impactful results.

Qualifications

• Must have a strong portfolio and be able to articulate and defend creative decisions.
• Experience presenting work to clients or stakeholders.
• Willingness to mentor or guide junior creatives and contribute to direction.

Responsibilities

• Own creative direction, client dialogue, and team development.
• Move beyond execution to strategic thinking and problem solving.
• Collaborate with the Creative Director to shape client work and outcomes.

Skills

Portfolio

Client presentations

Mentoring

Collaborative leadership

Job description

The Organization

This is a confidential search on behalf of a long-standing, highly respected creative agency in Ottawa. The team is stable, experienced, and collaborative. There is no revolving door here — people stay, and that says a lot about the culture they have built. The agency works across a broad range of sectors including healthcare, defence, government, associations, agriculture, B2B, and B2C environments.

The Role

Associate Creative Director
Location: Ottawa | In-office | $70,000 – $75,000 | 5–8 years experience

This is a growth role, not a maintenance role. They are looking for someone who is ready to move beyond pure execution and begin taking real ownership — of creative direction, client dialogue, and team development. You will work directly alongside an experienced Creative Director who is genuinely invested in your growth.

Day-to-day, execution will still be part of your reality. But the right person is someone who is starting to think beyond the deliverable — who is curious about why the work exists, who it's for, and whether it's actually solving the right problem.

The #1 Thing They Are Looking For

Strategic creative thinking — in development. They want someone who can begin connecting:

Client business problem -> audience -> strategy -> creative solution -> results

That means getting comfortable asking: What are we actually trying to accomplish? Who are we trying to reach? What isn't working, and why? How does the creative solve the business problem?

You won't need to have mastered all of this. But you need to be curious about it and moving in that direction.

What the Right Candidate Looks Like

On the must-have side: a strong portfolio, the ability to articulate and defend your creative decisions, some experience presenting work to clients or stakeholders, and a genuine willingness to contribute to direction — not just execute. You should be beginning to mentor or guide more junior creatives, even informally.

Strong preference for candidates with agency experience, digital marketing, advertising, video, and/or copywriting backgrounds. Industry background is flexible — strategic curiosity matters more than sector.

Leadership and Culture

This agency has deliberately built a low-ego, collaborative environment — and that is a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have. They are not looking for someone who needs to win every argument, chase awards, or have their name on everything. They want someone who steps up when leadership is needed and steps back when it isn't. Someone who can challenge an idea without making it personal, support a strategy they didn't personally create, and celebrate other people's wins.

If you need to be the loudest voice in the room, this is not the right fit. If you are calm, coachable, emotionally intelligent, and genuinely collaborative, read on.

The ACD will be building their client presence over time.

You need to be someone clients enjoy working with and someone the internal team genuinely trusts.

What They Are Not Looking For

Just as important as what they want: they are not interested in candidates whose primary or predominant experience is freelance or self-directed. Agency or corporate experience should form the core of your background. Freelance work can supplement, but it cannot be the foundation.