Creative Studio Manager

We are Experience Makers - trusted by the world’s leading brands and organisations to create and deliver outstanding brand experiences and live events globally. Founded in 1983, we have over 40 years’ experience working with our clients to deliver against objectives and challenge industry conventions. In the last year alone, as a Group, we delivered over 144 live events in more than 22 cities globally for the likes of World Rugby, Carlsberg, Formula One, The FA, Formula E, P&G (Procter & Gamble), Aston Martin Racing, Jaguar Land Rover, Dr Martens, Diageo, Westlife, Take That, and the Olympics.

We are a team of 120+ experts specialising in three distinct business pillars: Sport, Brands, and Entertainment. In each line of business, we provide clients with the creative ideas, project management rigour, and production expertise to deliver world-class experiences and music concerts across the globe. The Group includes four agencies: TBA plc, Velocity Experience, VHE, and Top Banana.

Our expertise for each line of business includes:

• Sport – Our expertise across sports and motor sport includes working with some of the world’s largest organisations and rights holders to consult on and deliver premium hospitality, guest management programmes, sponsorship activations, racing, fan zones, touring kits, and opening ceremonies.
• Brands – Our team understands that creativity has no boundaries. We are forever striving to provide clients with the brightest ideas to help solve business problems. Our Brands team works closely with leading global brands to deliver both B2B and B2C experiences including conferences, product launches, award ceremonies, exhibitions, and parties.
• Entertainment – Our entertainment arm brings the best global talent and spectacular large-scale production values into the corporate world. Our team has conquered some of the most technically challenging briefs to produce spectacular live shows and touring music concerts.

Group benefits include:

• Private medical insurance
• Life cover
• Eye test
• Annual flu jab
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)
• Hybrid working
• Work From Anywhere for two weeks

The role:

We are currently seeking a fun and organised individual with a clear understanding of how a live experience agency’s Creative department can run to organise internal and external resources. The Creative Studio Manager must be an excellent communicator who can coordinate across multiple stakeholders within the business to ensure the right resources are assigned to the right projects at the right time. This is a role to define, as all planning processes are not fixed in stone, so we are looking for someone to grow into the role, creating their own ‘best processes’ and paving the way for slick studio management. Ideally, we are looking for someone from a 2D/artworking background who can apply their talents to studio management, as this typically accounts for around 80% of total working time.

Key responsibilities of the role include:

• Studio planning: work with Account Directors, Project Managers, and Production to plan and track creative resources against client pitches and live jobs.
• Talent booking: act as custodian of the ‘book of talent’ to contact and secure the right and best talent for pitches and live projects, working alongside the internal creative team.
• Coordinating and communicating costs: plan, agree, and communicate talent booking and costs with Account Directors and Project Managers to ensure internal commercial alignment for all creative resources.
• Reporting any over- and under-running time on pitches and live projects to Account Directors and Project Managers to ensure resources are aligned to spending. Reporting on overall freelance spending against individual projects to help the business build an accurate picture of freelance versus internal costs.
• Software and creative system inductions: along with an overall business induction, ensure freelancers are given access to the correct systems and folders to work alongside internal creative teams. Ensure freelancers (where needed) are given access to software licences to complete their tasks.

Essential skills/qualifications:

• Highly organised
• Understanding of how a creative team works
• A secondary skill (such as artworking)
• Team player: able to work collaboratively across the different roles and brands and happy to jump in and support where required
• Ideally an overall understanding of the following packages: InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Sketchup, CAD/Vectorworks, 3D visualisation tools