Creative Director

About the role

MSI Communications is hiring a Creative Director to lead the creative team at our Anchorage, Alaska headquarters. This is a senior leadership seat. You set the creative bar for a full-service agency, present the work to clients, run the department as a business, and build the people around you into stronger art directors than they were when you arrived. The role reports to the President of MSI and is built to grow into a VP of Creative Services.
We are looking for someone who was once a maker and is now a big thinker. You came up through design, art direction, or copy, you have the portfolio to prove it, and you have outgrown the need to touch every piece yourself. Your job is to make the ideas bigger, the team stronger, and our clients' growth faster.
About MSI Communications

MSI Communications is a full-service advertising, marketing, and public relations agency headquartered in Anchorage, Alaska. Strategy, creative, video production, media planning and buying, public relations, digital, and social all live in-house, which means the creative team works alongside a collaborative team building the story and the outcome together.
MSI's client roster runs from tourism and destination marketing, where the agency has some of the deepest experience in the state, to transportation, non-profits, healthcare, and consumer brands with deep Alaska roots.
MSI is a Mosaic Collaborative company, a collective of agencies that share services, talent, and a leadership bench. The Collaborative is growing quickly. For the right leader, that means a seat at the table as the group grows and the chance to shape creative beyond one agency's walls.
What you will do

Lead the work
Own the creative product across every MSI client and channel: brand campaigns, broadcast and video, digital, social, print, out-of-home, and web.
Set the bar and hold it. Run critique, push concepts past the first safe idea, and know when the work is ready.
Lead creative for new business: pitches, RFP responses, and the spec work that wins accounts.
Partner with strategy, account service, PR, media, and video so every idea is grounded in what the client needs and built to perform where it runs.
Present the work
Present to clients as the creative voice of the agency. Present the idea with conviction, take the feedback, and come back with work the client and the team both believe in.
Represent MSI creative in the Anchorage business community, in the industry, and in award competitions.
Run the department as a business
Scope creative work, estimate hours, and deliver on budget. Know what the work costs, what it bills, and the difference between the two.
Manage assignments, workload, and billable time across the team, and plan ahead for what is coming.
Choose and manage freelance, production, and vendor partners when the job calls for them.
Build the team
Mentor designers and art directors every day, in critique and in the work, and help each of them grow.
Build a recurring program for sharpening craft, concepting, and presentation skills across the department.
Lead by example. When a deadline demands it, work alongside the team, then get back out of the way.
Champion the department inside the agency and outside it.
Bring AI, web, and social into how the work gets made
Lead appropriate adoption of AI tools across concepting, design, copy, video, and production. Use them yourself, train the team, set the guardrails, and integrate them into the workflow so the agency moves faster without losing its craft.
Serve as creative lead on web projects, partnering with MSI's web team on site design, user experience, and digital campaigns.
Bring social-first creative instincts. Understand how an idea lives on each platform and build the team's capability there.
Who you are

You love game day. Pitches, presentations, and deadlines are the part you look forward to, not the part you survive.
You are steady under pressure. The harder it gets, the calmer you get, and the team borrows your calm.
You present with conviction and stand behind the work and the people who made it.
You are curious, not judgemental.
You lift people up, even when you provide tough critique. Tough love, with heart.
You coach the problem instead of taking it away from them, and you trust the team to get there.
You collaborate by default, with the creative team, with account service, media, and PR, and with agency leadership.
You bring energy, humor, and organization to the office. You keep the room light when the work gets heavy.
Big ideas and big-picture thinking matter more to you than which discipline you came up through. You do not have to do the work yourself to make the work better.
You understand how creative lives on social media and recognize its unique character.
You are adapting to AI, with proven ability to create custom work while gaining efficiencies.
Experience and qualifications

What we need to see
Ten or more years in agency creative, including at least three years leading a creative team as a Creative Director, Associate Creative Director, or Group Creative Director.
A portfolio of integrated campaign work across video or broadcast, digital, social, print, and out-of-home, with results you can speak to and a clear sense of which parts were yours.
Craft credibility on at least one side of the work: design and art direction, or copywriting and concepting.
A track record of presenting creative to senior clients and leading creative in competitive pitches.
Experience running the business side of a creative department: scoping and estimating, managing budgets and timelines, and directing vendors and freelancers.
Working fluency with generative AI tools in a creative workflow, and a point of view on where they help and where they do not.
MSI Communications is an equal opportunity employer. We make hiring decisions based on qualifications, merit, and business need, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.

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