Associate Director, Creative 12 mth FTC (Full-Time / Part-Time)

Impression is a multi-award winning, high growth digital marketing agency based in Nottingham, London and Manchester. Our agency wouldn’t be what it is today without our incredible people. Our diverse team encompasses expertise across the digital landscape which enables us to accelerate change and results, driving business growth faster. Our collaborative, creative and inclusive culture helps build our reputation as a leading digital employer and we are committed to nurturing and developing people to their full potential.

We’re looking for an ambitious Associate Director, Creative to join the team and help us continue to deliver award-winning results for our clients. Impression were recently ranked fourth in UK’s Best Workplaces™ for Wellbeing (medium-sized companies), and we continuously strive to ensure the best possible work-life balance for our team.

As a successful candidate, you will be given a clear progression path. We want talent to grow with us and there is ample opportunity for you to progress to the next level. We are also very proud to have been listed on the “Flexa 100” Most Flexible Companies to work for and to be officially recognised as a Great Place to Work®.

As Impression’s Performance Creative Lead, you’ll be a strategic advisor and thought leader, guiding the production of high-performing, evidence-backed creative across all digital channels. You will leverage your expertise to develop creative work that solves our clients’ commercial challenges, managing accounts and inspiring the agency to evolve its ability to deliver creative that drives measurable business results.

You are a strategic thinker with a passion for using performance evidence to raise the standard of creative excellence, ensuring our clients stay ahead of the curve in a fast-evolving digital landscape. This role demands a unique blend of creative vision, technical proficiency in automation, and the ability to lead cross-departmental collaboration between creative and media teams.

In addition to managing client projects, the role will support the Commercial team and the wider agency with responsibilities including training, service innovation, marketing, and pitching. Your focus will be on the intersection of creative and data, publishing original content that demonstrates how innovative creative methodologies and automation drive industry-leading performance.

Responsibilities

• Strategic Creative Direction: Move beyond the initial brief to identify the core commercial and performance challenges that creative must solve to unlock client growth. Define clear creative principles and testing roadmaps, rooted in audience insight and performance evidence, that can be executed effectively across all digital formats.
• Performance Brand Guardianship: Act as a strategic consultant for senior clients, ensuring creative work is consistent yet optimised for high-intensity performance environments.
• Creative Automation Architecture: Design and oversee the implementation of large-scale automation workflows, integrating creative production with client tech stacks to deliver personalized content at scale.
• Commercial Narrative & Influence: Transform technical creative challenges into persuasive business stories, linking creative execution directly to the client’s bottom line to secure senior investment.
• Technical Methodology Innovation: Pioneer new, evidence-based testing frameworks and methodologies that unlock performance gains where standard industry tactics have plateaued.
• Cross-Functional Alignment: Lead the collaboration between Strategy, Paid Media, and Client teams, making trade-offs explicit to ensure creative decisions support both performance and delivery volume.
• Industry Authority: Represent the agency’s strategic expertise externally through opinionated thought leadership and industry engagement to build market reputation and inbound interest.

We are open to candidates who are either looking for a full time or part-time role.

Required Skills and Experience

• Expert proficiency in Adobe Creative Cloud (Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop) with extensive experience in creating high-converting assets for Paid Social, Display, and Video. Experience with a broader set of Creative technology (e.g. Figma, Smartly etc).
• Proven background in connecting audience research and performance marketing data to build multi-channel creative roadmaps that move beyond tactical fixes to solve commercial business problems.
• Extensive experience acting as a lead brand guardian for enterprise-level clients, with the ability to expand traditional brand identities into agile, digital-first performance frameworks.
• Experience designing and overseeing automated production workflows (e.g., DCO, modular video) and integrating creative production with data signals to drive agile, high-volume delivery at scale.
• Strong background in "executive-level" consultancy, with the ability to translate complex performance data and technical creative choices into persuasive narratives for C-suite stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to manage service operations, including capability auditing, resourcing planning, and the implementation of scalable workflows that balance creative quality with high delivery volumes.

Salary: £50,900 (Full-Time Equivalent), plus a £6,000 London Allowance where applicable. Please note: This role is available on a part-time basis; salary and allowances will be paid pro rata based on your contracted hours.

What makes us different?

• Flexible, hybrid working options - as per ways of working charter
• 4.5 day working week
• Private medical insurance with access to EAP
• Impression funded specialist therapy sessions, up to 6 sessions where Impression funds 50% of the cost
• Enhanced sick pay
• Access to OpenUp, a virtual therapy platform
• Enhanced parental leave
• 28 days annual leave, plus bank holiday
• Life leave - something unexpected happens in your life and you need some paid leave
• Pregnancy loss and parental bereavement leave
• Compassionate leave
• Eye-care vouchers
• Opportunity to save on and spread the cost of new tech through Techscheme
• Travel to work scheme
• Railcard salary sacrifice scheme
• Budget for books, tools and software
• A full social calendar
• Summer and Christmas party (off-site)
• Chance to attend national and international conferences
• Top Apple equipment to use at work
• Savings on bikes and accessories through Cycle Scheme
• Contributory pension scheme
• The usual agency stuff - office dogs, drinks fridge, ping pong and foosball, tea and coffee and office snacks

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

We’re listening and we’re learning. We’re committed to embracing diversity and promoting equal opportunities, both within our teams and through the services we provide. But we know we still have work to do. Improving fairness in our agency and our industry is something we’re passionate about, and we’re committed to having the conversations, making the changes and helping other businesses to do the same.

We pledge to promote equal opportunities and, as per the Equality Act 2010, will not tolerate discrimination on the grounds of: gender, gender identity, marital status, sexual orientation, race, colour, nationality, religion, age, disability, caring responsibilities or beliefs. We’ll also make every effort to represent different genders, ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds and sexualities at the events, panels and discussions we run.

Agencies

Strictly no recruitment agencies.