Creative Director (UK)
In business for over 30 years, Allied has built upon its roots in film advertising and publicity to become a global leader in entertainment, culture, and lifestyle marketing. Allied’s award‑winning team of specialists, over 400 strong across 23 global offices, create campaigns that drive conversion for some of the world’s biggest brands in film, TV, sports, gaming, live entertainment, cultural institutions, hospitality, and consumer brands. Our teams provide best‑in‑class marketing solutions across a range of services including integrated paid, owned, and earned media, creative solutions, and strategic consulting.
About the role
Allied Global Marketing is looking for a London‑based Creative Director to lead campaign creative and digital experience work across entertainment, culture, tourism, and live experience clients. This role is for a senior creative leader who understands how to make audiences care, act and book, and who can turn brands, destinations, events and experiences into creative that feels urgent, emotional, culturally relevant, easy to understand and commercially effective.
Creative Leadership
- Lead Creative Platforms: Develop and oversee creative concepts, messaging systems and campaign ideas that help entertainment, culture and experience‑led brands stay fresh, relevant and visible.
- Sell the Experience: Translate atmosphere, emotion, energy and audience motivation into creative that helps people understand why something is worth their time, attention and money.
- Build Audience‑Specific Creative: Shape work for different audience groups, including fans, younger audiences, tourists, families, groups, special‑occasion bookers, cultural experience‑seekers, corporate audiences and repeat customers.
- Balance Brand and Performance: Create work that protects brand quality while also supporting measurable outcomes, including sales, bookings, direct response, conversion, engagement and audience growth.
Campaign, Content, & Asset Development
- Oversee Integrated Asset Systems: Lead creative across paid social, digital display, OOH, print, video, CRM, landing pages and owned channels, ensuring work is cohesive, adaptable and effective.
- Support High‑Volume Creative Needs: Guide adaptation, resizing, versioning, copy variations, testing requirements, campaign refreshes and fast‑turnaround requests without letting quality drop.
- Create Seasonal and Occasion‑Led Campaigns: Develop creative that gives audiences timely reasons to act, including holidays, gifting, birthdays, anniversaries, summer, Christmas, city visits, group occasions and cultural moments.
- Partner With Media and Strategy: Work closely with media and strategy teams so creative is built around audience motivation, channel behaviour, testing needs and commercial priorities.
Website and Digital Experience
- Lead Website Creative Direction: Ensure digital experiences reflect the quality, emotion and promise of the brand while remaining clear, accessible, mobile‑first and commercially effective.
- Improve Digital Clarity: Help turn product details, visitor information, pricing, planning content and experience messaging into simple, persuasive content.
- Think Conversion‑First: Understand how copy, design, hierarchy, CTAs, landing pages and reassurance points affect consideration and purchase behaviour.
- Connect Content to Search and Discovery: Work with SEO, AEO, analytics and web teams to develop content that helps audiences find, understand and act across search, AI answers, social discovery and planning journeys.
Team Leadership
- Set the Creative Standard: Provide clear direction, constructive feedback and hands‑on judgement across concepting, design, copy, production and final delivery.
- Build Efficient Ways of Working: Help structure creative workflows that support fast‑moving requests, campaign refreshes, versioning, approvals, QA and recurring asset needs.
- Represent Creative With Clients: Present creative work clearly and confidently, explaining the idea, audience insight, channel role and commercial rationale.
Global Collaboration
- Work Across Allied Markets: Collaborate with Allied teams in London, the US and other markets to ensure work benefits from global creative support while remaining locally fluent.
- Build Flexible Creative Systems: Develop campaign and design systems that can flex by market, language, audience, media channel and cultural context without losing the core idea.
- Bring UK Cultural Fluency: Understand London and UK audiences, entertainment habits, tourism behaviour, premium leisure spending and how people choose cultural experiences, events and nights out.
AI and Creative Innovation
- Use AI Practically: Bring hands‑on fluency with AI tools for research, concept development, visual exploration, copy variation, prototyping, content versioning and workflow efficiency.
- Keep Taste and Judgement Central: Use AI to move faster and explore more directions while maintaining originality, brand sensitivity, craft and human creative judgement.
- Improve Production Efficiency: Help the team use AI and smarter workflows to support ongoing creative refreshes, localisation, testing and asset adaptation.
What You Bring
- Senior Creative Experience: Significant experience as a Creative Director, Associate Creative Director, Design Director or senior integrated creative lead.
- Relevant Portfolio: A portfolio with strong examples across entertainment, culture, tourism, attractions, music, theatre, immersive experiences, events, lifestyle, hospitality, premium leisure or location‑based entertainment.
- Commercial Creative Mindset: Experience developing creative that supports sales, bookings, direct response, consideration, conversion or measurable audience growth.
- Integrated Campaign Expertise: Proven ability to lead creative across paid media, OOH, digital, social, print, video, CRM, landing pages and owned channels.
- Website and Landing Page Experience: Experience shaping website creative, campaign landing pages, content hierarchy, UX‑informed copy/design or conversion‑focused digital experiences.
- Local London Perspective: Strong understanding of UK audiences, London culture, entertainment, tourism, visitor behaviour and the competitive landscape for premium leisure and cultural experiences.
- Team Leadership: Experience leading art directors, designers, copywriters, proofers, producers and freelancers, ideally with some local on‑ground team management.
- Global Collaboration: Experience working with distributed teams across markets and time zones, especially with US‑based creative, strategy or account teams.
- AI Fluency: Practical experience using AI tools as part of the creative process, with a clear point of view on responsible, effective use.
Ideal Candidate Profile
The strongest candidate is someone who has helped make an entertainment, cultural, leisure or experience‑led product feel desirable, clear and commercially successful over time. They understand that the challenge is not just making something look beautiful, but making it feel immediate, relevant, easy to understand and worth acting on. They should be able to answer questions such as:
- Why should someone care now?
- How do we keep a campaign fresh over time?
- How do we make a premium experience feel worth it?
- How do we make a complex offer simple and compelling?
- How does creative change by audience, channel and stage of consideration?
- How should the website support the same story the campaign is telling?
Location
London-based, hybrid
Level
Creative Director
Team
London creative team, with collaboration across US and global Allied teams
Portfolio Required
Online portfolio or selected work samples required
Preferred Background
Entertainment, culture, tourism, attractions, music, theatre, immersive experiences, events, hospitality, premium leisure or location‑based entertainment
Equal Opportunity Employer Statement
Allied Global Marketing is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status or any other status protected under federal, state or local law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.
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