Creative Excellence Manager

The role

Bringing together our creative community and managing crucial relationships across the creative community at DDB, our creative excellence team brings the creative excellence community together, promoting collaboration to raise the bar on our creative product. The team ensures all creative excellence initiatives are running smoothly and efficiently and that the best work is developed and championed, no matter what office, client or medium.

A key part of the role is the shepherding of Bullseye, DDB’s creative council process.

Responsibilities include feeding into award show strategy & relationships, tracking talent for jury nominations and mapping significant campaign launches, working with comms colleagues to profile our biggest campaigns. Key award shows include: Cannes Lions, One Show, D&AD, Clios, LIAs as well as smaller and regional shows, as defined as part of the annual strategy.

Key stakeholders include: Global CCO, Global Chief Creative Operations Officer, Office CCOs & ECD, awards coordinators, creative teams and comms/PR teams in key regional offices as well as award shows.

Please note the successful candidate must be fluent in Portuguese and/or Spanish. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds who meet this language requirement.

Responsibilities Include:

Bullseye System Leadership

• Work closely with offices to support and manage the Bullseye Creative Council process.
• Manage and attend selected Bullseye meetings, collaborating with the Bullseye PM.
• Preparing agenda and assets for each meeting, document and share feedback post-meeting
• Communicate Bullseye targets for each office, and monitor progress against them.
• Identify top creative ideas to Cannes, working closely with local and global teams to allocate resources.

Creative Community Management

• Create and maintain strong relationships with each of your assigned offices.
• Regularly catch-up and check-in with office CCOs and award coordinators to support their work.
• Oversee the revision of creative ideas as per bullseye feedback, case study development, categories and submissions
• Project manage ad hoc cross-office creative excellence initiatives which might include training, meet-ups, comms, content or creative briefs etc.
• Plan and lead bi-weekly ‘awards coordinators’ meeting sharing news, training and cultivating space for global team to share their work and support with everything creative excellence.

Awards, Submission Strategy and Support

• Be a centre of knowledge for key award shows: support local teams throughout the selected awards’ submission process, manage network-wide deadline extension requests, offer guidance and expertise.
• Be a global contact for awards shows & festivals – Cannes, D&AD, One Show etc, including global tracking entries through the submission phases, fielding queries and ensuring company credits are correct and approved.
• Feed into the awards data bank with details of all entries, shortlists, wins for your region

Jury

• Be the global lead on jury nominations & jury strategy - including briefings, communication team liaison & support during judging, gathering & reporting jury feedback. Plus, creative meetups at Cannes and other shows where appropriate
• Track talent across to identify those most worthy of creative opportunities, including jury nominations.
• Organising awards show attendance.

Communication

• Lead and manage the awards microsite for jurors / offices so that our key projects are showcased
• Be the key liaison with the comms team, to ensure our best work is showcased
• Managing young talent initiative & DEI initiatives

A Bit About You:

Skills & behaviours

• Relationship-builder, striving for team and individual success
• Excellent & proactive communicator
• Emotionally mature, ability to manage and negotiate complex relationships
• Quick problem-solver, ability to foresee and head off issues independently
• Strong collaborative spirit, diligent and consultative team-player
• Solid presenter/public speaker, able to simplify complex information
• Able to manage creative leaders and manage upwards effectively
• Responsible and proactive, delivers to deadlines and adept at expectation management
• Wrangler of people, able to work with people of different disciplines and levels
• Diplomatic and able to give and receive critical feedback
• Highly organised, ability to prioritise and manage multiple projects
• Comfortable dealing with a large amount of information
• Able to create, manage new processes and systems
• Exceptional attention to detail, able to quality control others’ work

Background

• 5+ years experience in creativity & project management
• Ability to travel for creative councils
• Fluent Portuguese and/or Spanish speaker
• Good written & verbal English
• Strong excel, powerpoint, keynote skills

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