Creative Director

Job Description

Job Description

About On Board Experiential (OBE)  

OBE is a global marketing agency that brings brands to life through culture-shaping experiences. For more than 30 years, we've partnered with iconic brands — including Nike, the NFL, JPMorganChase, Meta, Sephora, Starbucks, and Converse — to build community, create cultural relevance, and drive measurable business impact. With offices in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and London, we activate globally. OBE is also a founding member of The ADD Collective, extending our reach and resources while staying true to our core capabilities. 

We've been recognized by Event Marketer as one of the best places to work in events — and we couldn't agree more. 

The most important part of our business is our people. They are hardworking, imaginative, and make genuinely remarkable things happen. But behind every great activation is a human who deserves rest, connection, and a life outside of work. That's why we invest in recovery days, company offsites, happy hours, and the kind of friendly-but-competitive fitness challenges that bond teams for life. 

We show up for each other — in open conversations that heal, inspire, and bring us closer. We want to hear about your lived experiences, your unconventional ideas, and the perspectives only you can bring. Being unapologetically yourself isn't just welcome here. It's part of the job. 

We are considering candidates for any of our office locations: San Francisco (Mill Valley) and Los Angeles

SUMMARY OF POSITION  

As Creative Director, you bring big, transformative ideas to the table and motivate cross-functional teams to realize grand visions. You examine all aspects of client problems and briefs to create thoughtful, viable and unexpected creative solutions. As an experienced creative that blends visionary strategic thinking and art direction, you work to inspire game-changing ideas in collaboration with our team of experts and articulate them into clear and powerful concepts. You're a true team player with expertise in experiential marketing strategy. Your leadership elevates the agency's creative output, resulting in award-winning work. You have the passion and creative chops to crank up brand impact for some of the world's leading companies.  

ESSENTIAL JOB FUNCTIONS  

CREATIVE LEADERSHIP:  

• Thoughtfully develop and present winning new business pitches that expand business relationships and agency opportunities.  

• Understand and work within project parameters, including client goals and requirements, internal goals, audience experience, technical constraints, budget and timeline to create industry-leading creative work.  

• Elevate the work. Lead Creative project teams by consistently clarifying team dynamics and next steps, monitoring progress, providing helpful critique, and infusing big ideas into the work, and thus consistently delivering inspired creative work that meets or exceeds client expectations. 

• Guide and contribute to strategic development of integrated experiential and virtual marketing campaigns throughout all phases of a project, overseeing planning, concept development, design and implementation. "Get your hands dirty" by producing and guiding fantastic work that solves our clients' business challenges in unique and innovative ways. 

• Be the conduit between upfront strategy development and design exploration and execution:
  • STRATEGY: Clarify and anchor the client brief, objectives and KPIs; conduct primary and secondary research on the brand, audience, and other key project elements, distill and curate ideas based on strategic insights, contribute best-in-class storytelling and copywriting, validate recommendations with clear strategic rationale, pivot and adjust with strategic excellence, etc. 
  • ART DIRECTION: Coordinate with diverse design talent to bring together the best possible aesthetics that are simultaneously on-brand and forward-looking.  

• Interface with internal teams, vendors, and clients for creative sell-in and review. 

• Remain current with industry trends and techniques, striving for best-in-class output across all facets of ideation, strategy, art direction and beyond. 
  • CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE: Stay up to date on current events, culturally relevant movements and happenings, DE&I best practices and terminology, and a vast range of subject matter that enhances the work, heightens your ability to collaborate with diverse talent, and creates an inclusive environment for expressing authentic and diverse perspectives.  
  • AUDIENCE-CENTRICITY: Foster deep understanding and empathy for the given brand's intended audience that enhances the work. 

CREATIVE PROCESS:  

• Act as the catalyst that mixes and translates ideas, pushes concepts, and finds the best way to push our overall creative and design output.  

• Conduct and participate in both internal and client brainstorming sessions, workshops, and idea rakes designed toward specific outputs and solutions that address client's strategic and tactical business needs.  

• Develop robust KPI plans per program that prove ROI for clients and further business relationships.  

• Coordinate with talent and resources, including vendors, photographers, printers, fabricators, freelancers, web and interactive contractors, to complete creative materials for each project that add value. 

• Recap and reflect on all creative pitches and projects in order to share key learnings and elevate the work.  

AGENCY PROCESS + IMPACT: 

• Collaborate with Account, Production and Technology team leads to ensure all client deliverables are being met on a timely basis with consistency and high quality. Stay aligned with your team to foster camaraderie and industry-leading work that is also profitable.  

• Contribute to guiding and streamlining best practices and standard processes to drive the agency's capabilities and collaboration practices forward.  

• Be a sponge for industry trends, sharing insights and inspiration with the agency at large. 

PEOPLE MANAGEMENT + GROWTH: 

• Encourage curiosity, strive to continually increase the creative skill level of the department.  

• Provide mentorship and direction to strategists, writers, designers, artists, and creative technologists, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, providing regular feedback to help them move forward along their growth path. 

• Manage creative team members or freelancers as necessary to ensure high quality work output, career satisfaction, growth and retention. 

• Work with CCO and Senior leaders in creative department and OBE Leadership team to help evolve the design team and agency offering. Consistently make informed recommendations on what is best for the team.  

• Contribute to hiring processes to help recruit, evaluate and secure boundary-pushing new talent who complement and elevate the full creative team. 

DESIRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:

EDUCATION/ EXPERIENCE 

• Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Communications, Design or related field. 

• Fluid work experience and technical capabilities with Mac OS and standard creative suite of programs including Adobe CC, and collaborative Keynote, Microsoft Office, and Google products.  

• A solid portfolio of 8+ years that includes unique, successful and relevant experiential marketing projects (at least 3 years at an experiential agency).  

• Work samples that include strategy, copywriting and/or design personally owned and delivered as part of your role in the project/program. 

• Demonstrated work, personal experience or interest in technology, lifestyle, sports and/or entertainment industries is a plus. 

ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS AND ABILITIES 

• Effective communicator and storyteller with the ability to find the best approach to verbally and visually communicate an idea AND articulately present it to other team members, clients and agency partners. 

• Excellent listener, able to get to the heart of what the client and/or team is telling you. Seeks to understand and integrate the most poignant ideas and insights into project work and agency processes.  

• Experience collaborating with teams of strategists, designers, artists, technologists, producers, account managers and content developers. 

• Strategic and visually compelling point-of-view demonstrated in all creative output.  

• Adept at multi-tasking, wi