Associate Creative Director

About Everything Bagel Partners LLC

At Everything Bagel, we build and support breakthrough brands that disrupt categories and captivate audiences across digital, social, and beyond. Our brand team leads strategy and messaging for some of the most exciting startups and scaling companies across wellness, beauty, CPG, and education and more. We believe in brand-building that’s strategic, deeply human, and creatively fearless.

Role summary

The Associate Creative Director (Design) is a client-facing creative leader responsible for owning creative direction and quality across an assigned book of business (pods). This role bridges strategy and execution by translating client context into high-quality briefs, directing Art Directors and designers, and ensuring work ships on-brand, on-strategy, and optimized for channel best practices.

This is not a “big idea only” role. You will be deeply involved in direction, critique, systems, and delivery quality.

Key responsibilities

Client leadership & pod ownership

• Own creative direction and final sign-off for an assigned portfolio of clients

• Serve as the primary creative partner to clients (alignment, expectations, presentations as needed)

• Partner with PM/Client Services to manage prioritization, timelines, and scope
  
  

Briefing & context translation (critical)

• Attend client meetings as needed (kickoffs, planning, reviews)

• Convert meetings and client inputs into clear briefs that include:

• objective, audience, offer, deliverables, channel specs, references, constraints, success metrics

• Identify ambiguity early and propose options/solutions to unblock execution
  
  

Creative direction & review

• Provide clear, prioritized, actionable feedback to designers and Art Directors

• Ensure consistency with brand standards and channel performance best practices

• Maintain quality across high-volume marketing output (web, email, ads, organic)
  
  

QA ownership & risk management

• Implement and maintain a tiered QA system:

• Designer self-QA → AD review → ACD final review

• Reduce revision cycles by improving upstream direction and clarity

• Escalate only high-risk work per agreed rubric (VIP accounts, new campaigns, strategic landing pages)
  
  

Team leadership & development

• Mentor Art Directors to strengthen direction, critique, and decision-making

• Coach designers on craft and execution standards

• Run weekly creative calibration sessions to ensure consistent output and alignment
  
  

Creative operations & standardization

• Build and maintain templates and standards for:

• briefs, feedback, file naming/versioning, handoffs, QA checklists

• Identify process improvements that reduce rework and increase throughput as the company scales
  
  

Success metrics (example KPIs)

• Reduced “directional miss” rate (major rework due to wrong concept/strategy/context)

• Improved first-pass approval rate (Designer → AD → ACD)

• Reduced average revision rounds per asset type

• Improved on-time delivery rate and reduced cycle time

• Fewer escalations to Head of Creative over time (without quality decline)

• Higher internal clarity scores on briefs and feedback
  
  

Qualifications

Required

• 7+ years professional design experience (agency or high-velocity marketing environment preferred)

• 2+ years in a lead role directing designers and/or Art Directors

• Strong portfolio across digital marketing:

• paid social/performance ads, email campaigns, web/landing pages, organic social

• Excellent briefing and critique skills (can articulate “why” and give actionable guidance)

• Strong client communication skills, including the ability to push back constructively

• Ability to lead remotely with dependable ET overlap
  
  

Preferred (nice-to-have)

• CRO/landing page optimization familiarity

• Experience with performance testing/iteration cycles

• Experience leading distributed teams

• Experience partnering closely with Paid Media teams
  
  

Tools (edit to match your stack)

• Figma (required)

• Adobe Creative Suite (helpful)

• Slack + Google Workspace

• Project management tool (Asana/ClickUp/Monday/etc.)

• Loom or async review tools
  
  

Application instructions

Please submit:

• Resume or LinkedIn

• Portfolio link (required)

• Location and time zone

• A brief note describing:

1. the channels you’ve led most (ads/email/web/organic),

2. an example of turning unclear client input into a clear brief.

This ACD role is a delivery-owning, client-facing pod lead position (briefing + direction + final QA), not a purely conceptual role.