Associate Creative Director
Description
As an Associate Creative Director (ACD), you will co-lead the Creative Department alongside the Creative Director, providing creative leadership for key agency clients.
Your responsibilities will include nurturing talent, stewarding the creative vision and ensuring smooth collaboration between the various creative disciplines and cross-functional partners. You will also co-direct internal initiatives, such as training sessions and workshops, to foster a culture of continuous innovation and craftsmanship.
You will be responsible for defining and executing creative strategies for multiple brands and clients, as well as driving strategic and operational excellence.
Responsibilities
- Co-own the overall creative strategy for selected key clients and other smaller clients
- Partner with the Creative Director to evolve our creative offering, methods, tools, and AI integration.
- Shape and communicate the long-term vision for the Creative Department, aligning on priorities and investment areas.
- Represent the agency’s vision, values, and leadership decisions within the creative team, ensuring alignment and effective implementation of changes.
- Act as deputy to the Creative Director in their absence, ensuring continuity of leadership, decision-making, and client relationships.
- Champion and support the strategic direction of agency leadership, translating it into actionable goals and inspiration for the creative teams.
- Lead and actively drive strategic and tactical discussions with clients and internal teams, ensuring projects are planned holistically and aligned with creative and business objectives.
- Manage a team of Art Directors and Designers; oversee staffing, resource planning, and capacity.
- Conduct performance reviews, set career development plans, and provide ongoing coaching and mentorship.
- Run regular calibration sessions and talent-review meetings to ensure consistent expectations, feedback and career-path standards across all teams.
- Create and maintain a culture of creativity and psychological safety, encouraging experimentation, treating mistakes as learning opportunities, and supporting open idea sharing.
- Promote an environment where creatives are encouraged and given opportunities to present their work directly to clients.
- Act as a strategic partner to key clients; lead or co-lead campaign development, creative waves, and client workshops in collaboration with the Creative Director.
- Build and maintain a deep understanding of client strategy, needs, and market environment.
- Collaborate with Strategy and Account teams on research, positioning, messaging, and POV development.
- Develop integrated creative solutions across all disciplines (Advertising, MedComms, and PR).
- Present concepts and campaign proposals to clients, clearly articulating the strategic rationale and creative vision.
- Proactively identify organic growth opportunities through ongoing insights and market analysis.
- Support and creatively lead new business pitches.
- Engage critical stakeholders at the right time and facilitate effective joint decision-making.
- Identify key decision points and milestones for joint sign-off with the Creative Director (e.g., project setup, concept selection, and approval).
- Ensure all creative outputs align with brand guidelines, strategic frameworks, and client positioning.
4. Operational & Budget Ownership
- Lead creative planning and project scoping, translating client briefs into clear project plans, timelines, and deliverables
- Own project resourcing, budgets, and deliverables across your teams, ensuring work is delivered on time, within budget, and to the highest quality standards.
- Drive team utilization targets by monitoring resource allocation and adjusting assignments to maximize productivity and efficiency.
- Track and report resource utilization and utilization rates during monthly reviews.
- Partner with Project Management, Finance, and PMO to streamline workflows, ensure financial accuracy, and maintain operational efficiency.
5. Quality Assurance & Innovation
- Own the overall quality of the creative product throughout the full lifecycle — from kickoff and briefing to internal/client presentations and final deliverables.
- Champion best practices by ensuring process adherence, setting clear creative review checkpoints, maintaining consistent standards across teams, and promoting cross-team knowledge sharing.
- Roll out processes and contribute to continuous improvements, templates, and AI-enabled tools to boost creative productivity.
- Lead the creative reviews focused on idea quality, strategic alignment, and storytelling impact – ensuring the work goes beyond polished design to deliver bold, effective, and brand-consistent concepts.
- Stay ahead of industry trends, emerging technologies, and competitive activity, translating insights into actionable improvements for client projects.
6. Internal Creative Leadership
- Take joint-ownership with the Creative Director for defining, evolving, and safeguarding the culture of the Creative Department - fostering collaboration, trust, transparency, and a shared sense of purpose.
- Work in close alignment with the Creative Director to ensure internal initiatives are co-created, communicated clearly, and embraced across the whole department.
- Lead initiatives that strengthen team cohesion, creative confidence, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
- Design and facilitate internal creative programs, including creative workshops on emerging trends and tools, skill-sharing sessions, cross-team pairing to build empathy and expand skill sets and recognition and celebration of outstanding creative contributions to reinforce positive culture.
- Report directly to the Creative Director Germany, maintaining close alignment on all strategic, creative, and operational priorities.
- Serve as deputy to the Creative Director, assuming leadership responsibilities in their absence to ensure continuity in decision-making, client relationships, and team direction.
- Provide structured updates at key campaign stages (brief, concept, final) and actively contribute to creative leadership meetings.
- Hold delegated authority to commit team resources and budgets up to agreed thresholds, with all major strategic and financial decisions taken jointly with the Creative Director.
- Collaborate closely with the Head of Copy to align art and copy workstreams, share best practices, and ensure fully integrated, non-siloed delivery.
Essential Requirements
- 8+ years of agency experience, with at least 2 years in a formal line-management role.
- Proven track record leading multiple brand client teams and delivering multi-channel campaigns.
- Excellent interpersonal, communication and stakeholder-management skills.
- Exceptional ability to present and defend creative work to senior clients and internal stakeholders.
- Demonstrated innovation mindset, with hands-on experience implementing new methods and technologies.
- Demonstrate strong commercial awareness by setting and managing project budgets, interpreting Profit & Loss statements, and optimizing resources to ensure both creative excellence and profitability.
- Deep expertise in across design tools (Adobe CC, Figma, AI-platforms), presentation graphics and digital production.
At Syneos Health, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace. If your past experience doesn’t align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. At times, we will consider transferable skills from previous roles. We also encourage you to join our Talent Network to stay connected to additional career opportunities.
Syneos Health Communications is powered by Syneos Health, a global professional services organisation designed to help the biopharmaceutical industry shorten the distance from lab to life®. We have a proven pedigree in health, with industry titans in every facet of healthcare. This eliminates guesswork and fuels our passion for total, life-changing solutions. At the heart of health, we're uniquely poised to predict what's next and respond to the market's demand for smarter and faster answers. We are able to help our customers make important decisions within their business due to our unique understanding of the complexities that come along with working in the healthcare industry. Syneos Health Communications is able to make the complex, simple.
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Syneos Health companies are affirmative action/equal opportunity employers (Minorities/Females/Veterans/Disabled)