Creative Director
The Good Ideas Group is looking for a Creative Director to elevate our offering in this key facet of the business.
About the Good Ideas Group
We are a 22-strong creative agency specialising in telling healthcare stories for blue-chip pharma, third sector and health service clients. We love knowing that our work, when we do it right, is improving the lives of people we’ll never meet. We create campaigns and content across all media for pharmaceutical and health-focused clients of all sizes, according to our three guiding behaviours:
- Be Good
- Make it Better
- Ask Questions
We are divided into three core functions: Design/Branding, Video and Digital. This role will be contained within the Design/Branding team, although our integrated nature means the successful applicant will collaborate across all divisions.
About this role
The Good Ideas Group has carved a successful niche providing white level creative services to healthcare communications (PR) agencies and direct-to-industry services in a more traditional agency model. We are now actively focused on increasing the full-service to-industry share of our work, requiring us to increase our capacity for strategic creative thinking.
This hire is central to our ambition to become a more mature agency, and a more brand-literate business over 2023. Our design and branding team currently comprises one Art Director, one Design Lead, three Graphic Designers and one Project Manager, with account management on top. Creative direction is provided in the main from the Good Ideas Group’s Managing Director.
The current team functions well in its current lane, and is full of positive, personable people; however it is limited from literal and professional growth by a number of factors including:
- Decreasing access to the Managing Director for creative direction, as the MD is required to spend more time on other business aspects
- Remote location of the current team lead, who lives in Canada (rest of team are UK based)
- A design-centric mindset, driven by the design-focused careers of the team’s members, which can lead to missed opportunities to service briefs
The Good Ideas Group is hiring a dedicated Creative Director to address these issues, by increasing our bandwidth in strategic creativity and providing a means for the wider team to learn by example and broaden their own approaches to the creative process.
Our process:
A shortlist of applicants will be invited to an interview, face to face in Farringdon if possible, remote if necessary for sixty minutes with Tim Gomersall, MD of the Good Ideas Group. A shorter list of applicants will be invited to a short chemistry session with the existing team, which we envision as a two-way Q&A. Selection will be made after that point.
Salary:
60k and (possibly significantly) upwards depending on:
- your experience and
- the level of team leadership you’re interested to provide in adjunct to the Creative Director role
We have set a low baseline because we don’t want to discourage relatively young-in-the-role CDs from applying. GIG is a business where talent and initiative count more than years-on-the-clock.
Neither do we wish to discourage more experienced applicants, so please don’t imagine that’s the ceiling as well as the floor.
What we’re looking for:
- A proven track record of at least 3 years of effective creative direction in an agency/consultancy environment and a portfolio to discuss in-interview
- Note that we are open to Creative Directors with either artistic- or writing-based career histories.
- A strategy-first mindset, placing the creative brief at the centre of all considerations
- A fluency in the principles of branding and design, and at-least-some-literacy in creativity for video and digital media
- An ability to sell our vision to clients coherently and compellingly.
- A willingness to coach and guide people as well as critique work on-the-table
- A generosity of spirit within the creative process to suit the culture of the company, where everyone is equally empowered to develop / propose good ideas
- An appreciation that briefs are there to be respected and challenged, so that everyone is getting the best possible outcome
- A passion for work that makes a difference over work that will make you famous; our work is rarely (although sometimes) a matter for mass-consumption by the public
- A sense of humour and patience
- A full time employee (5 days) able to work from our Farringdon Office at least three days a week with the rest at home.
What we don’t need:
- Healthcare experience (though it certainly won’t count against you)
- Ego
