Senior Art Director

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Job Title: Senior Art Director

Reports to: Head of Brand

Location: Bristol with hybrid working

Salary: £60k - £65k

Direct reports: Five

Salary and benefits

Competitive depending on experience plus generous bonus, private medical cover, 38 days annual leave, excellent pension, 12x salary life assurance, career breaks, income protection, 3x volunteering days a year and much more.

Flexible working

All of our roles are open to part-time, job-share and other types of flexibility. We will discuss what is important to you, and balancing this with business requirements, during the recruitment process.

Who we are

SunLife is a market leader in its core products with ambition to further diversify product and customer offerings to attract and retain new customers in the over 50s sector. Our vision is to offer customers simple, straightforward, affordable products and utilising effective, innovative marketing across multiple channels is one of the keys to our success. With 120 colleagues based in our vibrant central Bristol office, we have a thriving culture, a creative approach to our work and we're fast-moving, passionate, and dedicated.

Role Purpose:

The Senior Art Director is a new role at SunLife - and a great opportunity for a senior creative with strong commercial awareness to lead our in-house creative team and drive forward the brand's creative expression. This role will be instrumental in setting our creative ambition, championing innovative ideas, and ensuring the highest quality of creative output. The ideal candidate will possess a blend of strategic thinking, artistic talent, and excellent managerial skills to optimise team resources and processes and set creative standards.

Reporting to the Head of Brand you will work together to reinvigorate the SunLife brand, identifying opportunities to drive brand awareness and consideration via impactful and effective communications. A key part of this will be your approach to stakeholder management, creative team leadership, prioritisation of activity and improving processes in order to utilise the creative resource in the most effective and impactful way.

Alongside leading the creative team you'll also spend time directly creating work - utilising your skills as an accomplished designer / art director.

You'll work on mailings, press ads, inserts, online advertising, posters, brochures, presentations, content marketing and more and will need both financial services and - particularly - direct marketing experience in order to excel in this senior role.Read More...

Key accountabilities:

1. You'll lead our in-house creative team and develop and maintain a consistent creative vision for SunLife's brand whilst inspiring new creative ideas and approaches.
2. You'll use your design skills to create and execute a range of marketing campaigns, working alongside the marketing team, a copywriter and other agency partners.
3. You'll champion the SunLife brand, ensuring brand guidelines are embedded.
4. You'll oversee the triage and distribution of work within the creative team, implementing and refining processes for project management, prioritising tasks and managing dependencies to ensuring your team's internal resources are used effectively to deliver briefs on time and on budget.
5. You'll be a conduit between the Sunlife marketing department and on-site creative team to understand and translate creative requirements.
6. You'll make sure relevant quality standards and workflow plans are in place to maximise use of resource.

How you'll be successful (measures)

1. You'll inspire and mentor a creative team, fostering a collaborative and innovative work environment.
2. Establish and communicate a clear creative vision and strategy, ensuring all team members understand and are aligned with our goals.
3. Your design and art direction expertise will shine through by way of engaging, effective direct marketing and adherence to brand guidelines.
4. You'll effectively draw on available resources and manage workflow to ensure briefs are delivered on time and budget and resource is used to capacity with skills aligned to the most appropriate brief.
5. You'll foster a collaborative and positive team culture that encourages creativity, open communication and a solution focused approach.
6. You'll become proficient in financial services regulatory requirements relating to clear, concise and balanced communications and ensure your team are too.
7. Stay updated on industry trends and emerging technologies, integrating relevant insights into creative strategies and outputs.
8. Encourage experimentation and exploration of new ideas within the creative team.

Stakeholders:

• Marketing Managers
• External agency partners
• Chief Marketing Officer
• Department Managers

Team

• Two Copywriters
• One Designer
• Two Creative Artworkers

Skills & experience required:

• Exceptional creative vision and ability to translate concepts into actionable strategies.
• Strong project management skills, with the ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously.
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written, with the ability to present ideas clearly and persuasively.
• A motivating leadership approach, enabling you to review and critique creative work and provide constructive feedback to enhance the team's performance and output quality.
• Marketing know-how, with an ability to apply your marketing experience to drive effective creative outputs across your team.
• Highly proficient in all the typical Adobe CC packages including InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Adobe XD. Knowledge of any other software such as Figma, Adobe Premiere or AfterEffects etc. would be a bonus.
• Adaptable and flexible to respond to changing business needs.
• Preferably experience of working in a regulated environment such as Financial Services

Environment

SunLife is a small business with around 120 people in our Bristol office. But don't let that mislead you when it comes to our ambition! We're part of Phoenix Group, a FTSE 100 company with c12 million customers and c£270bn of assets under administration.

So when you work for SunLife, you become part of a close-knit, agile enterprise - with the expertise, benefits and financial backing of one of the UK's leading businesses.

We want to hire the whole version of you

We are committed to ensuring that everyone feels accepted, and we welcome applicants from all backgrounds. If your experience looks different from what we've advertised and you believe that you can bring value to the role, we'd love to hear from you.

If you require any adjustments to the recruitment process, please let us know so we can help you to be at your best.