Associate Creative Director

GN1 Golin/Harris International; United States; Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 165,000; Full time

Job summary

Golin Ketchum in the United States is seeking an Associate Creative Director who thrives on scroll-stopping Instagram Reels and ideas built to break the internet. This role blends owned social work with big culture moments for beloved brands, requiring energy, voice, and storytelling finesse.

You’ll lead with tone, visual storytelling, and strategic insight, collaborating with PR and creative teams to craft attention-worthy content that travels beyond social channels and headlines that travel.

Qualifications

• 5-8 years’ experience in advertising, social, or digital media.
• Knowledge of earned media is a plus.
• Articulate writer with strong verbal and visual storytelling skills.
• Proven ability to develop bold, culture-driving ideas.

Responsibilities

• Build always-on social content and campaigns that feel alive and authentic.
• Develop bigger earned-first ideas and tentpole moments.
• Collaborate with PR to translate ideas into headlines.
• Work channel-agnostic while applying platform-specific craft.
• Communicate ideas with clarity, strategy, and passion.
• Identify and share timely cultural trends across the team.
• Build a portfolio showing both consistent work and bold swings.
• Proactively bring ideas beyond the brief.

Skills

Social media fluency

Creative thinking

Idea generation

Storytelling

Tools

Photoshop

InDesign

Illustrator

Job description

Agency: Golin Ketchum Job Function: Creative Job Subfunction: Creative Direction Job Description: Associate Creative Director

Golin Ketchum is looking for an Associate Creative Director who's just as obsessed with a scroll-stopping Instagram Reel as they are with an idea built to break the internet. This role has two jobs, not one. Some days you're deep in owned social — building out share-worthy content across a large portfolio of fun brands, writing captions with actual voice, and turning a brand's day-to-day social presence into something people choose to follow. Other days you're dreaming up the big, loud, culture-jacking tentpole moment that gets Buzzfeed, Complex, and Hypebeast calling us instead of the other way around. You're not choosing between "always-on" and "big swing." You're doing both, for some of the most beloved brands on shelf.

About Golin Ketchum

Golin Ketchum is the most awarded public relations agency of the decade. We create change that matters for our clients and our people. The kind of change that earns attention and shapes culture to build business. Formed in 2026 from the merger of two iconic PR agencies, Golin Ketchum combines fearless creative and strategic excellence, fueled by Omnicom’s industry-leading data and AI solutions, to uncover powerful insights and execute work that builds and protects the world’s greatest companies. With specialized expertise across consumer and brands, corporate affairs, healthcare, technology, and food, agriculture and nutrition, we deliver integrated, high-impact communications services at scale. At Golin Ketchum, culture matters. We are fiercely ambitious yet fundamentally kind and collaborate obsessively with the best clients in the world.

Want to create change that matters with us? Here are the details:

What You’ll Do:

• Build always-on social content and campaigns that make the brands' social channels feel alive — not just a media plan with captions bolted on
• Develop the bigger earned-first ideas — tentpole moments, real-time opportunities, stunts — designed to travel beyond the brand's own channels
• Partner with the PR media team to turn your ideas into actual headlines, not just decks
• Work channel-agnostic, but know social platform craft cold — what a TikTok needs is not what a press release needs, and you should never confuse the two
• Communicate your ideas to the clients with clarity, strategic insight and passion
• Hunt for and share out with the rest of the team what’s breaking in culture BEFORE it breaks in culture
• Build a portfolio that proves you can do both the quiet, consistent work and the loud, ownable swing
• Proactive thinking. You’re always bringing ideas because you know not every opportunity lives within the brief
• You’ll know you're doing it right when the brand's Instagram comments are as good as the news coverage

What You Have:

• 5-8 years’ experience in advertising, social, or digital media.
• Knowledge of earned media is a plus.
• 109% internet fluency.
• You know the ins and outs of social media, speak the language of the internet, have gone down YouTube rabbit holes for multiple hours in a row, have uploaded multiple TikTok videos and have explored without fear the inner depths of Reddit.
• Art Director: You’re a wizard in Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator and have an understanding of visual storytelling.
• Writer: You’re a wizard at using words to communicate emotion and inciting people to hit that share button.
• You’re a genuinely nice person who brings energy every single day to your work and to the agency.

Golin Ketchum is proud to be an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. Golin Ketchum recruits qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, age, ethnic or national origin, protected veteran status, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or citizenship status.

130k-165k

Omnicom’s policy requires employees to work in the office for a minimum of three days a week, unless additional in-office days are directed by their agency or manager. Our objective is to increase this requirement over time, and many of our agencies as well as Omnicom’s corporate group already require five days of in-office attendance. Omnicom is committed to hiring and developing exceptional talent. We agree that talent is uniquely distributed, and we’re focused on developing inclusive teams that can bring the best solutions to everything we do. We strongly believe that celebrating what makes us different makes us better together.

Join us—we look forward to getting to know you.

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Link to Recruitment Privacy Notice: https://www.omc.com/privacy-notice

For US Job Seekers: It is the policy of Omnicom and any of its affiliates to provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, religion, color, ethnic origin, gender, gender identity, age, marital status, veteran status, sexual orientation, disability, or any other basis prohibited by applicable federal, state, or local law. EOE/AA/M/D/V/F. At Omnicom Group, careers are designed for growth. We’ve purposefully crafted a transformative talent experience built with accountability in action — focused on community, impact, and opportunity.