Global Creative Director

Job Title: Global Creative Director

Business Function: Growth and Marketing Office

Location: 100VE

Business & Role Context

The Growth and Marketing Office (GMO) drives value to Unilever for today and pioneers for tomorrow, delivering against in the Growth Action Plan, in service to the Business Groups (BGs) strategies and priorities. GMO will drive transformational growth through disruptive marketing & innovation ideas, commercial adoption of digital and AI, and modern marketing capabilities.

The Global Creative Director is a new role that will shape the future of creativity at Unilever across the consumer journey. This role will partner with our brand teams to build ground-breaking, unmissable ideas and deliver high standards of creative execution that transcend channels, in particular recognising and effectively harnessing the power of social and integrated retail.

This role will lead on Unilever’s pioneering approaches to effective creativity and content, ensuring our brands make a meaningful impact in the communities, conversations and culture our consumers care about, and seamlessly drive to purchase at the right moments.

Alongside this, this role will oversee the roll out of scaled creative technologies within our Content Supply Chain, partnering with our business groups and data and tech teams, including generative AI innovations that will enable Unilever to drive industry leading creative excellence and content efficiencies at scale. This role will closely partner with our CMI team to leverage data to identify needs, signals and trends that drive impactful content creation and ongoing content optimisation.

Vital to this work are our creative partnerships and collaborations, and this role will construct the right agency model and lead relationships and joint business plans with the agencies and partners that will enable Unilever to reach the next levels in brand crafting and execution (spanning brand communications, collaborations and creators). This role will co-design with content creators the code for creative excellence, and scale it as part of a holistic content strategy.

JOB PURPOSE

Leading a small talented team, this role will partner with our brand teams to raise the bar on our creativity, driving meaningful differentiation of our brands.

RESPONSIBILITIES

This role will:

• Bring the outside in and translate a deep understanding of evolving media and tech landscape and consumer behaviour into unmissable creativity fit for today’s world
• Foster strong relationships with external creative partners to source fresh perspectives and cutting-edge ideas and embed productive ways-of-working that drive effective outcomes
• Strengthen the role that insights and culture play in fostering creativity and always active activation
• Understand how to balance and integrate brand led and creator led work as well as wider collaborations
• Lead for Unilever on how Creative Technology can be leveraged to accelerate quality and speed of our creative execution in the Social and AI era.

Key Interfaces:

• Business Group Brand Directors
• Business Unit Digital leads
• External creative partners
• CMI
• UniOps & Procurement Leaders for building and delivering technology solutions.
• Growth Initiatives & Capabilities Team.  

ALL ABOUT YOU

Experience / Skills

• Proven track record of leading high-performing creative teams and delivering award-winning work that scales with impact. Able to demonstrate how to translate this knowledge to make Unilever an industry leader in brand creativity
• Brand Crafter and Practitioner with prior experience leading (or close partnering) a brand/category is preferred for the role
• Deep understanding of the evolving media landscape and consumer behaviour.
• Passion for innovation and knowledge of new creative technologies. Strong perspective on genAI developments – recent experience in working on genAI projects.
• Networker who is a creative talent scout who can leverage the experts inside and outside of Unilever to land pioneering change at scale.
• Master of Creative excellence in digital (in particular social and retail channels)
• Experience of working with creators and creativity with a social-by-design emphasis
• Change leader, who can co-create/co-design and scale solutions that are pioneering in nature. Proven in driving effective global programmes that land with impact and scale.
• Strong collaborator, with ability to listen to understand business needs and to work in service of the brands’ strategies and priorities.
• Results driven, to measure the success and impact of everything they do.

Leadership Behaviours -

• Consumer and Customer Love; creates better futures for our consumers, every day. Brings the voice of the consumer and customer into everything we do, always. Invests time inside and outside to understand the needs of consumers and customers.
• Passion for High Performance; sets high standards for self and others. Prioritises delivering against GAP today and pioneer for the future. Using data driven insights for key decision making and measuring ROI. Develops strong relationships internally/externally to create joint business plans with impact.
• Agility; continuous learning mindset, using internal and external partnerships to be ahead of future trends. To quickly adapt and innovate to address changing business, market and industry needs to drive competitive advantage.
• Personal Mastery; shows self-wellbeing and resilience. Operates with gravitas and self-assured intent. Courageous and bold where needed, setting high targets and standards for themselves and their teams. Creating psychological safety to empower teams.
• Talent Catalyst; Leveraging and growing talent from practitioners to experts across Unilever. Celebrating diversity of thought and creating an environment where everyone can thrive. Creating a culture of continuous learning and career development.
• Purposeful Impact: Cares deeply about delivering positive impact for the business, people, and planet.

NOTES

About Unilever

Unilever is one of the world’s leading suppliers of Food, Home and Personal Care products with sales in over 190 countries and reaching 2 billion consumers a day. Unilever has more than 400 brands found in homes around the world, including Dove, Tresemme, Lynx, Lifebuoy, Shea Moisture, Persil, Domestos, Ben & Jerry’s, Magnum, Marmite, The Vegetarian Butcher, Graze and Pot Noodle.

Faced with the challenge of climate change and the need for human development, we want to move towards a world where everyone can live well and within the natural limits of the planet. That’s why our purpose is ‘to make sustainable living commonplace’ 

Location

In 2020, Unilever announced the intention to build a new sustainable campus site in Kingston, London to house the employees who currently work in 100 Victoria Embankment in Blackfriars ("100VE"), Lever House in Kingston and Graze in Richmond, the build is due to be complete in early 2025. Most recently, in August 2024, we announced our intention to retain our premises in 100VE until our lease expires in 2027.

We are due to consult with our existing workforce on the new proposal to retain 100VE for the duration of our lease. Therefore, until such a time consultation has concluded as to the retention of our 100VE office, this role will be based in 100 Victoria Embankment until early 2025 and then will move to the Kingston Campus.

What We Offer

Not only do we offer a competitive salary and pension scheme, we also offer an annual bonus, subsidised gym membership, a discounted staff shop and shares. You’ll have the opportunity to work directly with our renowned and exciting brands in a flexible and hybrid working environment.

Whilst the role is advertised on a full-time basis, we would be happy to discuss possible flexible working options and what this may look like for you. We are a key advocate of wellbeing and offer a variety of support for our people including hubs, programmes and development opportunities. We strive to achieve a family-friendly and inclusive workplace and to, above all, create possibilities for all.

Diversity at Unilever is about inclusion, embracing differences, creating possibilities and growing together for better business performance. We embrace diversity in our workforce. This means giving full and fair consideration to all applicants and continuing development of all employees regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership, and pregnancy and maternity. We are also more than happy to provide reasonable adjustments during our application and interview process to enable you to be present your best self. To find out more, including about our Employee Resource Groups, please click here Equity, Diversity & Inclusion at Unilever | Unilever.

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How is Unilever tackling this?

Many of Unilever’s recruitment sites publish a warning to candidates about recruitment fraud. The Cyber Security team also proactively scan for signs of people setting up fake Unilever sites and act to close them down.

What can I do?

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