Executive Creative Director in London

A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a bold, instinctive creative leader to step into the most senior creative role at one of the UK’s leading earned-media and social content agencies - reporting directly to the Managing Director and sitting on the Operating Board from day one.

The Opportunity

Please note: this role is specifically for creative leaders with a background in earned media and PR. We are not looking for candidates from a pure advertising or creative agency background. This is not a creative director role with a fancier title. This is a newly created position designed to take the agency’s creative offering into its next phase - and to ensure it stays ahead of the curve as the media and content landscape continues to evolve. The person who takes this role will own every piece of work that leaves the building, set the standard others are measured against, and fundamentally shift how the business thinks: social-first and earned-first, from brief to delivery.

The agency is an established, serious player in the earned-media and content space. With a creative team of around 35 people structured across social content pods, strong commercial foundations, and ambitious leadership, this hire is about accelerating growth across social and earned creative work - and defining what great looks like for the next several years. There is a genuine appetite to broaden the agency’s reach further into FMCG, food and drink, and wider consumer sectors, alongside its existing strengths in broad consumer, travel, finance, and healthcare. The ECD will play a central role in making that happen.

The Role

• Own the overall creative output of the agency - final signoff on everything
• Reset and hold the creative bar across all work, all teams, all clients
• Make the agency genuinely social-first in its thinking - built into how ideas are conceived, not bolted on at the end
• Lead, inspire and provide clear creative direction to four Creative Pod Leads (including two Heads of News and two Creative Directors)
• Establish a distinctive, recognisable creative signature for the agency
• Sit on the Operating Board alongside the MD, Operations Director and Chief Commercial Officer
• Help futureproof the agency creatively and shape how it evolves over the next several years
• Maximise opportunities across the wider partner network
• Be externally visible - through thought leadership, speaking opportunities, industry presence, and positioning the agency as a creative pioneer in earned and social media
• Operate above the detail - direction, standards and outcomes, not day-to-day execution

What Success Looks Like

• Six months: Creative thinking across the agency is demonstrably social-first - in how briefs are approached, not just how work is presented
• Twelve months: A new, clear creative signature is established and being consistently delivered for major brand clients

What This Role Is Not

The ECD is not a project manager, a campaign executor, or an ideas-only advisory position. Execution sits with the Creative Pod Leads and delivery teams by design. This role is about creative authority, direction and standards - shown through decisions and outcomes, not commentary.

About You

• A senior creative leader with instinctive, social-first thinking baked in
• Confident making calls and standing by them - creative authority earned through delivery, not commentary
• Emotionally intelligent - big characters are welcome, but you need to be able to listen as well as lead
• Knows how to read the room and influence at senior level - with C-suite stakeholders, partner agencies and clients alike
• Deep experience across B2C brands - particularly in broad consumer, travel, finance, healthcare, FMCG, or food and drink
• Knows how to raise the bar without becoming a bottleneck or slowing teams down
• Has shifted the creative direction of a business quickly - you don’t need decades in post, but you do need proof
• Brings cultural awareness, strong opinions, fresh instincts and genuine momentum
• Comfortable being externally visible - whether already well established in the market, or looking to build your industry profile further
• Open to either an evolutionary or more revolutionary creative approach - the agency is genuinely open on this

Why Apply?

If you’re the most creative person in every room you walk into, if you know instinctively where the industry is going next, and if you’re ready to stop waiting for the permission to shape something properly - this is the role. The agency has the foundation, the ambition, the team, and the leadership to back you. What it needs now is the creative vision to match.