Creative Strategist

Come and pour love, care and flare into brands that deserve it :)

About the opportunity

We’re ready to welcome a thoughtful, energetic, creative soul into our full-time studio team: someone with the courage and imagination to help develop the creative vision for our next wave of Lovers projects, stewarding amazing performances from our collective of collaborators too. We’ll help you blossom as an admired, reliable, mid-level creative strategist (someone who develops and art-directs clever creative outcomes for brand communications), supporting you to work across a spectrum of projects, from identities to campaigns and key comms. You’ll work closely with nice, supportive colleagues in our central team to co-develop relevant, exciting, work for super-interesting clients like Greenpeace, My/Mochi Ice Cream and Alexandra Palace.

About Lovers

Lovers is a creative supergroup built to help brands sing. We use our special collective model to choreograph passionate teams around important brand challenges, from rebrands to campaigns and key comms. We build bespoke teams for every project, aligning people with projects based on passion and fit, choreographed by our permanent team of leaders. In just six years we’ve grown from a romantic idea (“people work better when they care”) into a wonderful, diverse collective with a really strong portfolio and track record. Today we’re a trusted creative partner for brands as diverse as Alexandra Palace, Google, Allbirds, Warner Music, Badoo, the Museum of Sex, Poppy’s Funerals and Nike.

The role in detail

As our creative strategist you’ll come up with smart creative approaches to solving our client’s brand communication challenges. Half ‘strategist’ (brilliant, clear thinking) half ‘creative’ or ‘art director’ (brilliant imagination, strong design eye, good collaborator), you’ll always be focused on helping our projects move forward creatively.

Working alongside our close-knit central team, you’ll be responsible for helping to conceive and deliver head-turning, smile-raising ideas, orchestrating Lovers teams to execute them. You’ll be ready to make ambitious, useful, emotive and memorable creative work in a range of different media. This role is about mastering the art of creative strategy, idea-making and collaborative execution, enlisting designers, copywriters, strategists, researchers, photographers, illustrators, filmmakers, animators and others from the Lovers group.

It’s a full time role for someone with brilliant creative thinking ability, impressive communication skills, super-high creative and design standards, and a flare for inspiring everyone to see a creative way forward, especially clients seeking creative leadership from Lovers. Creative strategy is core to what we do.

Our varied projects will immerse you in diverse and fascinating subjects. Many ideas will start with you, but you’ll constantly be dreaming about which collaborators you want to enlist to help develop and execute projects with you. You’ll have direct contact with clients, and will take responsibility for helping them feel confident in you, Lovers, and the work we’re delivering. You’ll also help curate extracurricular initiatives, including our play space, Pillow Talk and Lovers get-togethers. Above all, you’ll learn how to collaborate fairly and effectively – something remarkably few creative companies are focused on properly teaching.

You’ll actively help identify and win our next round of projects too, inspiring new clients to pursue bold ideas and helping existing ones take their best next steps.

Key skills

Here’s a list of things that will help you do well in this role (we offer training in all of these areas as part of our partnership with YCN, so you’ll be able to improve your skills as you grow at Lovers):

— Strategic interest. Strategy or ‘what we could do’ interests you.

— Interrogating briefs. Digesting and unpacking challenges.

— Imagination. Ability to come up with original, creative ideas.

— Scoping projects. Forming ideas about how a project could be shaped.

— Design & Art Direction fluency. Your native tongue, including Adobe.

— Identifying collaborators. Figuring out who to bring on board.

— Building proposals. Designing and writing powerful presentations.

— Communicating. Speaking and writing warmly and clearly.

— Professionalism. Being on point, on time, on budget.

— Cultural awareness. We’re sensitive to the world around us.

— Presenting skills. Persuasively presenting and explaining work.

— Positive outlook. A focus on the most ideal way forward.

— Determination. A deep drive and work ethic to make work great.

— Kindness. A warm, generous personality that people warm to.

— Perceptiveness. Noticing and appreciating, more keenly than most.

— Foresight. Thinking ahead to help projects run smoothly.

— Pro-active Instinct. We’re often inventing and improvising.

— Diplomacy. A knack for reconciling varied points of view in a project.

— Bringing the best out of people. This is key to creative leadership.

Your experience

As this is a junior-middleweight role, your past experience may skew more junior, or more middleweight. You’ve most likely been working in the creative communication industry for 2+ years. You might currently be freelance or full time, and will have most likely worked in a design studio or creative agency or in-house creative department. It may be that you’re more used to a title like ‘Designer’, ‘Art Director’ or ‘Creative’. Here are some strands of experience you’ll be ready to build on:

— Developing compelling brand identities and communications (essential).

— Briefing collaborators. You’ve enlisted collaborators in your work before.

— Thinking for yourself. You’re got some confidence as a self-starter.

— Guiding work to greatness. You can spot what a piece of work needs next.

— Multidisciplinary working. Your work has some variety within it.

— Developing concepts. You know how to shape an idea, from hazy to clear.

— Pitching ideas. You know how to present ideas in a clear, compelling way.

— Navigating feedback. You listen carefully, finding the best path forwards.

— Commissioning assets. For example; photography, illustrations, sound, film.

— Running personal projects. You make time to follow creative passions.

Our work patterns

Our working hours are 9am-6pm Monday to Friday, and we’re currently working three days a week from home, and two days in a comfortable new studio space near London Fields, with the option to come in more often if you wish. We come in on two set days currently (Tuesdays and Thursdays) as we continue to review our work patterns in 2022.

Equal Opportunities

We’ve deliberately written this job description to make sure it’s not asking you to ‘be’ any particular type of person, so if you feel you could do the job (or learn to do it) then please consider applying, whoever you are. Lovers is a place for all talented creative people, regardless of background.

We are an equal opportunities employer and we’re determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of gender, age, disability, religion, belief, sexual orientation, or race, or any other protected characteristic. If there is any aspect of this application process that you would like to query or ask for support with, please let us know.