Associate Creative Director in London

Footballco is the world's leading football media company, built for the next generation of fans. Our mission is to give fans more of the game by building football communities that entertain, inform, and inspire action. We cover everything in football from news and analysis, original reporting, and social media content, to web stores, video, podcasts, newsletters, and live scores. With over 1 billion video views per month, 100 million social followers globally, and a reach of 800 million across web, social, and video platforms, Footballco is the world’s largest football media company and one of the largest digital media companies in sport globally.

About the Role

Please include a link/attachment to your portfolio when applying. We are looking for a football-loving Associate Creative Director who has extensive experience and a standout portfolio to join and lead our branded content team. As the Associate Creative Director, you will be one of the department’s leaders responsible for our overall output and delivering award-winning work, as well as guiding and elevating those around you to reach new heights.

You will be responsible for coming up with innovative, big ideas that give our clients exactly what they want, but also what they’d never expect - all whilst balancing the commercial needs of the business and the demands of our content-loving audience. As a creative leader, you will be confident when it comes to all aspects of the creative process and seeing a campaign through from ideation to execution, presentation and production. Associate Creative Director will oversee a wide variety of projects, pitches and proactive pieces, whilst coordinating the efforts of multiple teams, and ensuring our creative department is delivering work of the highest standard.

What you'll be doing:

• Conceive and execute ambitious 360 campaigns and branded content pieces that will delight our clients and Footballco’s unrivalled global audience.
• Co-lead our in-house creative department, helping oversee and creatively directing all briefs that pass through the team.
• Work alongside our ECD, CD, Head Of Production and Head Of Design to craft and deliver outstanding pieces of work that set a new industry standard and align with our creative vision.
• Partner closely with our strategy team to build authentic creative ideas from unique audience insights that only Footballco is uniquely able to uncover.
• Work with our global sales team to identify the best opportunities in local market, formulate the best responses, and prioritise our pitch responses.
• Be part of the senior leadership team and responsible for making high level business decisions for the better of the creative department.
• Direct campaigns and productions to a high standard and confidently communicate your creative vision to clients, production and post-production teams.
• Assume ultimate responsibility for the quality and accuracy of the end product of all creative team members.
• Ensure ideas can happen relative to budgets, timing, and capabilities.

What you have:

• A creative portfolio full of diverse thinking and award-winning work across a variety of different media platforms.
• Extensive experience (8-10 years) working as a creative in top creative agencies - football media, editorial, or branded content experience is a plus.
• A passion for football and a thorough understanding of culture and how the two collide across music, gaming and fashion.
• Your finger on the pulse when it comes to both the creative industry and the global game, including grassroots, youth, women’s and youth.
• A great eye for detail and a passion for craft, and have worked as an art director or copywriter or hybrid creative.
• The ability to analyse content trends and audience insights, and be able to translate those into new branded content opportunities.
• An interest in innovation and technology, plus experience working across digital campaigns that includes producing work for a variety of social platforms.
• Excellent communication/presentation skills and an ability to inspire internal and external stakeholders with your storytelling and ideas.
• Fantastic leadership and organisation skills combined with a can-do attitude and the willingness to help shape the creative culture within the agency.

Our Culture

We are a team of 400+ passionate people based in eighteen offices all over the world. We are writers, producers, developers, strategists, sellers, creatives, project managers, number crunchers, people-people and more. Not all of us love football the sport, but we all pride ourselves on leading football the industry. Our company culture plays a huge part in that. Having something that connects us outside of the work we do, is as important to us as the quality of the content we create. So much so, we have four internal squads (Sports, Social, Wellness & Smile) each responsible for bringing us together and making life at Footballco as great as it can be.

Footballco is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to, and will not be discriminated against based on age, race, gender, colour, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability or any other protected category.