Global Creative Director

Unilever; London; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a forward-thinking company as a Global Creative Director, where you'll lead a talented team to elevate brand creativity across the consumer journey. This exciting role involves partnering with brand teams to craft groundbreaking ideas and ensuring high standards of creative execution. You will harness the power of social media and integrated retail while overseeing the rollout of innovative creative technologies. If you're passionate about driving meaningful impact and shaping the future of creativity, this is the perfect opportunity to make a difference in a dynamic environment.

Qualifications

• Proven track record in leading high-performing creative teams.
• Deep understanding of media landscape and consumer behavior.
• Passion for innovation and knowledge of new creative technologies.

Responsibilities

• Lead creative teams to drive meaningful brand differentiation.
• Foster relationships with external creative partners for fresh ideas.
• Leverage data and insights for impactful content creation.

Skills

Leadership of creative teams

Brand crafting

Understanding of media landscape

Innovation and creative technologies

Networking and talent scouting

Digital creative excellence

Collaboration with creators

Change leadership

Results-driven mindset

Tools

Generative AI technologies

Creative technology solutions

Job description

Job Title: Global Creative Director

Business Function: Growth and Marketing Office

Location: 100VE

Business & Role Context

The Growth and Marketing Office (GMO) drives value to Unilever for today and pioneers for tomorrow, delivering against the Growth Action Plan, in service to the Business Groups (BGs) strategies and priorities. GMO will drive transformational growth through disruptive marketing & innovation ideas, commercial adoption of digital and AI, and modern marketing capabilities.

The Global Creative Director is a new role that will shape the future of creativity at Unilever across the consumer journey. This role will partner with our brand teams to build ground-breaking, unmissable ideas and deliver high standards of creative execution that transcend channels, particularly recognising and effectively harnessing the power of social and integrated retail.

This role will lead Unilever’s pioneering approaches to effective creativity and content, ensuring our brands make a meaningful impact in the communities, conversations, and culture our consumers care about, and seamlessly drive to purchase at the right moments.

Alongside this, this role will oversee the rollout of scaled creative technologies within our Content Supply Chain, partnering with our business groups and data and tech teams, including generative AI innovations that will enable Unilever to drive industry-leading creative excellence and content efficiencies at scale. This role will closely partner with our CMI team to leverage data to identify needs, signals, and trends that drive impactful content creation and ongoing content optimisation.

Vital to this work are our creative partnerships and collaborations, and this role will construct the right agency model and lead relationships and joint business plans with the agencies and partners that will enable Unilever to reach the next levels in brand crafting and execution (spanning brand communications, collaborations, and creators). This role will co-design with content creators the code for creative excellence and scale it as part of a holistic content strategy.

JOB PURPOSE

Leading a small talented team, this role will partner with our brand teams to raise the bar on our creativity, driving meaningful differentiation of our brands.

RESPONSIBILITIES

This role will:

• Bring the outside in and translate a deep understanding of the evolving media and tech landscape and consumer behaviour into unmissable creativity fit for today’s world.
• Foster strong relationships with external creative partners to source fresh perspectives and cutting-edge ideas and embed productive ways-of-working that drive effective outcomes.
• Strengthen the role that insights and culture play in fostering creativity and always active activation.
• Understand how to balance and integrate brand-led and creator-led work as well as wider collaborations.
• Lead for Unilever on how Creative Technology can be leveraged to accelerate quality and speed of our creative execution in the Social and AI era.

Key Interfaces:

• Business Group Brand Directors
• Business Unit Digital leads
• External creative partners
• CMI
• UniOps & Procurement Leaders for building and delivering technology solutions.
• Growth Initiatives & Capabilities Team.

ALL ABOUT YOU

Experience / Skills:

• Proven track record of leading high-performing creative teams and delivering award-winning work that scales with impact. Able to demonstrate how to translate this knowledge to make Unilever an industry leader in brand creativity.
• Brand Crafter and Practitioner with prior experience leading (or close partnering) a brand/category is preferred for the role.
• Deep understanding of the evolving media landscape and consumer behaviour.
• Passion for innovation and knowledge of new creative technologies. Strong perspective on genAI developments – recent experience in working on genAI projects.
• Networker who is a creative talent scout that can leverage the experts inside and outside of Unilever to land pioneering change at scale.
• Master of Creative excellence in digital (in particular social and retail channels).
• Experience of working with creators and creativity with a social-by-design emphasis.
• Change leader, who can co-create/co-design and scale solutions that are pioneering in nature. Proven in driving effective global programmes that land with impact and scale.
• Strong collaborator, with the ability to listen to understand business needs and to work in service of the brands’ strategies and priorities.
• Results driven, to measure the success and impact of everything they do.

Leadership Behaviours:

• Consumer and Customer Love; creates better futures for our consumers every day. Brings the voice of the consumer and customer into everything we do, always. Invests time inside and outside to understand the needs of consumers and customers.
• Passion for High Performance; sets high standards for self and others. Prioritises delivering against GAP today and pioneers for the future. Uses data-driven insights for key decision making and measuring ROI. Develops strong relationships internally/externally to create joint business plans with impact.
• Agility; continuous learning mindset, using internal and external partnerships to be ahead of future trends. Quickly adapts and innovates to address changing business, market, and industry needs to drive competitive advantage.
• Personal Mastery; shows self-wellbeing and resilience. Operates with gravitas and self-assured intent. Courageous and bold where needed, setting high targets and standards for themselves and their teams. Creates psychological safety to empower teams.
• Talent Catalyst; Leveraging and growing talent from practitioners to experts across Unilever. Celebrates diversity of thought and creates an environment where everyone can thrive. Creates a culture of continuous learning and career development.
• Purposeful Impact: Cares deeply about delivering positive impact for the business, people, and planet.