Senior Art Director

As a Senior Art Director, you are responsible for crafting innovating ideas and impactful designs, using visual styles to bring life to bold creative ideas, conceptual development and crafted storytelling across channels at a senior-level.

An M&C Senior Art Director must possess the following skills in order to succeed:

Conceptual Thinking:

• Not only do you bring brave, new and diverse thoughts to brainstorms, but you come up with strong integrated thinking.
• You understand the brand's overall strategy and you are able to develop work that answers to this.
• You may also need to facilitate brainstorms where you are able to build on other's ideas and come to solutions quicker.
• You listen and take on board diverse viewpoints and encourage different viewpoints in the team.

Execution:

• Your experience now means that you must be able to produce work faster and you should by now have mastered the art of composing the right visual look and feel, in the right visual style to communicate the concept.
• You are also well versed in the different production needs required to deliver on a job and can brief any external production house on the vision for your execution.

Presentation:

• You confidently present internally and externally to senior clients without the CD being there.
• You will need to be able to have a meaningful conversations with clients around the strategic direction of their brand and the brands' visual persona and present creative off the back of strategy and link the two seamlessly.

Production:

• You will now have a lot more autonomy in choosing suppliers (directors / photographers / illustrators / designers / animators / editors) and as such you stay appraised of the latest and best people to partner with, in order to have an opinion on who executes your work.
• You will be expected to harness the best from those suppliers and build relations with them for the ultimate good of the work.

People & Relationship Management:

• You hold close and respected relationships across all departments and people genuinely enjoy working with you.
• You may need to work with and get the best out of junior teams and be open to culturally diverse ideas that don't match your world view.
• You have seen the benefits of a strong working relationship with a copywriter and are able to wrestle ideas to their most impactful form with them.

Additional Role Dimensions:

• Business accountability: Be fully immersed and gain an understanding of the client business as well as the competitor activity. You no longer have to be told what the product is (unless it is new) because you are already deeply entrenched in the brand (product and philosophy)
• Internal relationships: Establish strong relationship with all internal stakeholders.
• Be an adaptable team player. You value your relationship with production and traffic as assets that help you deliver excellent work. You are able to have negotiations around deadlines and time management.
• External relationship: You have a strong relationship with production houses and are actively building your relationships with clients. These are important to you as they help you deliver work more effectively and of higher quality.
• Working environment: Demonstrate a collaborative attitude with care and passion across work and beyond. You are your CDs right hand, you can support them when they are not there and feedback any developments with accuracy. You are starting to play a mentor role for younger team members, stretching your director muscles in preparation for your next career move.

Experience Required:

• 5+ years’ experience as an Art Director in the Advertising industry.
• An in-depth understanding of the key departments, processes and structures within an Advertising Agency.
• Good knowledge of media landscape (traditional - TTL, ATL & BTL & digital)
• Expert technical knowledge of Adobe Creative Cloud: specifically, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator.
• Bonus would be a working knowledge of other platforms that help an art director bring ideas to life: Premiere Pro, After Effects, Dimension, Mid journey etc.
• Experienced in working with internal team and senior clients across multiple stakeholders.
• A proven award-winning portfolio.

Qualification Required:

• Art Direction tertiary qualification
• Graphic design tertiary qualification

Personal Qualities required:

At M&C you will need to:

• The courage to push boundaries and push for excellent work.
• Communicate effectively to clients and internal teams.
• Be assertive & have no tolerance attitude for the ordinary.
• Be solutions orientated across multiple stakeholders.
• Be open and have a keenness to work with diverse people.

Art Director Competencies:

Behavioural Competencies:

• Creative Thinker
• Strategic Thinker
• Can-do Attitude
• Proactive Problem-solver
• Independent
• Effective Communicator

Technical/Functional Competencies:

• Develop and produce creative concepts, campaigns, and functional key visuals that meet the client’s communications objectives and drive business results in response to creative briefs.
• Lead brainstorms.
• Excellent Presentation skills.
• Work well under pressure.
• Have a drive to compete at the highest industry levels not only for yourself but for your own portfolio of work.
• Be able to mine true insights and apply them to any given brief.

Leadership Competencies:

• Social intelligence
• Conflict management
• Self-management
• Collaborative
• Influence

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