Senior Creative - 12 Month FTC in Manchester

The Senior Creative plays a pivotal role in delivering industry-leading creative across JD’s campaign, digital, and social touchpoints. Sitting between Creative and Lead Creative, the Senior Creative drives concept development, elevates craft, and contributes strongly to the creative culture of the studio. This role balances hands-on creative delivery with increased responsibility for shaping ideas, influencing direction, and developing junior talent. While all Senior Creatives contribute across channels, individuals may have a specialism (e.g., social-first creative) that they champion within the team.

Key Areas Of Responsibility

• Ideation & Creative Direction: Lead the creation of compelling, culture-informed concepts for campaigns and content. Translate briefs into clear, visualised creative routes and storytelling frameworks. Deliver creative thinking that works across channels including social, digital, retail, OOH, video and motion. Present ideas confidently to stakeholders, partners, and internal teams.
• Craft & Execution: Produce high-quality creative assets with strong attention to detail and brand consistency. Collaborate with photography, design, video, motion, retouch and production teams to bring concepts to life. Ensure creative outputs meet platform, format, and performance requirements across all key channels.
• Collaboration & Cross-Functional Partnership: Work closely with Marketing, Social, Paid Media and Studio Operations to deliver integrated creative solutions. Contribute to shoot direction (campaign or social), ensuring the creative vision is carried through to final assets. Support positive, collaborative ways of working across the studio.
• Culture, Trends & Creative Innovation: Actively monitor cultural shifts, fashion, youth culture, platform behaviours, and emerging formats. Proactively bring fresh perspectives, trends and innovative approaches to the wider creative team. Help ensure JD remains at the forefront of sports fashion and digital creativity.

Social Specialism

Senior Creatives may hold a specialism in social-first creative. In this case they additionally:

• Champion platform-first thinking across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and emerging channels.
• Bring a deep understanding of youth culture, creators, trends, and user behaviours.
• Lead social-first shoots, talent engagement and editorial framing.
• Use performance insights (in partnership with Paid Media) to iterate and improve content.

This is a strength area, not a separate role or silo.

People Responsibilities

As a Senior Creative, you contribute actively to team development and culture. This includes:

• Coaching and mentoring Creatives and junior team members, providing constructive feedback and guidance.
• Supporting capability development, sharing knowledge, elevating standards, and encouraging innovation.
• Potentially line managing, where appropriate based on team structure and workload (including objective-setting, 1:1s, and personal development plans).
• Embodying JD Studio values and setting a positive creative example for others.

Skills/Experience/Knowledge needed

• Proven experience developing and delivering creative concepts in a relevant studio, brand or agency environment.
• Strong conceptual and visual communication skills, with a portfolio showcasing impactful work.
• Excellent understanding of digital, social, photography, video and motion workflows.
• Ability to present ideas clearly and persuasively to a variety of stakeholders.
• Highly organised, adaptable to change and able to manage multiple projects simultaneously.
• Deep interest in fashion, culture, retail and contemporary creative trends.
• Proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite and/or Figma.
• Experience supporting or mentoring others in a creative environment.

For Social Specialists

• Strong track record in social-led creative work.
• Understanding of creators, trends, platform behaviour and emerging formats.
• Experience leading social-first content creation.