On Board Experiential is hiring: Creative Director in San Francisco

Overview

On Board Experiential (OBE) is an award-winning, full-service, experience-led agency that creates meaningful brand experiences worldwide. We work out of our homes and physical offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and NYC, or wherever our adventures take us. Our clients include Nike, Meta, JPMorgan Chase, The Infatuation, Stripe, and OpenAI. Event Marketer has recognized OBE as one of the best places to work in events.

The most important part of our business is our people. They are hardworking, brave and make magic happen on the regular. We support a healthy work-life balance with recovery days, happy hours, fitness challenges, and company offsites. We conduct open meetings to facilitate discussions that heal, inspire, and bring us closer. We encourage each other to bring our whole selves to work and hear about lived experiences and unique perspectives. Itʼs part of the job description.

We are considering candidates for any of our office locations: San Francisco (Mill Valley), Los Angeles, and New York.

Summary of Position

As Creative Director, you bring big, transformative ideas and motivate cross-functional teams to realize grand visions. You examine client problems and briefs to create thoughtful, viable and unexpected creative solutions. You blend visionary strategic thinking and art direction to inspire game-changing ideas in collaboration with our team of experts and articulate them into clear and powerful concepts. You are a true team player with expertise in experiential marketing strategy. Your leadership elevates the agency’s creative output, resulting in award-winning work. You have the passion and creative chops to crank up brand impact for some of the world’s leading companies.

Essential Job Functions

Creative Leadership:

• Thoughtfully develop and present winning new business pitches that expand business relationships and agency opportunities.
• Understand and work within project parameters, including client goals and requirements, internal goals, audience experience, technical constraints, budget and timeline to create industry-leading creative work.
• Elevate the work. Lead Creative project teams by clarifying team dynamics and next steps, monitoring progress, infusing big ideas into the work, and delivering inspired creative work that meets or exceeds client expectations.
• Guide and contribute to strategic development of integrated experiential and virtual marketing campaigns throughout all phases of a project, overseeing planning, concept development, design and implementation. Produce and guide fantastic work that solves clients’ business challenges in unique and innovative ways.
• Be the conduit between upfront strategy development and design exploration and execution:
• Strategy: Clarify and anchor the client brief, objectives and KPIs; conduct primary and secondary research on the brand, audience, and other key project elements; distill and curate ideas based on strategic insights; contribute storytelling and copywriting; validate recommendations with clear rationale; pivot and adjust with strategic excellence.
• Art Direction: Coordinate with diverse design talent to bring together the best aesthetics that are on-brand and forward-looking.
• Interface with internal teams, vendors, and clients for creative sell-in and review.
• Remain current with industry trends and strive for best-in-class output across ideation, strategy, art direction and beyond.
• Contemporary Relevance: Stay up to date on current events, culturally relevant movements and DE&I best practices to enhance collaboration and maintain an inclusive environment for authentic perspectives.
• Audience-Centricity: Foster deep understanding and empathy for the brand’s intended audience.

Creative Process:

• Act as the catalyst that translates ideas, pushes concepts, and elevates overall creative and design output.
• Conduct and participate in internal and client brainstorming sessions and workshops aimed at solving strategic and tactical business needs.
• Develop robust KPI plans per program to prove ROI and strengthen client relationships.
• Coordinate with talent and resources, including vendors, photographers, printers, fabricators, freelancers, and web and interactive contractors, to complete creative materials for each project.
• Recap and reflect on all creative pitches and projects to capture key learnings and elevate the work.

Agency Process & Impact:

• Collaborate with Account, Production and Technology leads to ensure client deliverables are met on a timely basis with consistency and high quality.
• Contribute to guiding and standardizing best practices to drive the agency’s capabilities and collaboration forward.
• Stay informed on industry trends and share insights with the agency at large.

People Management & Growth:

• Encourage curiosity and continually raise the creative skill level of the department.
• Provide mentorship and direction to strategists, writers, designers, artists, and creative technologists with regular feedback and growth guidance.
• Manage creative team members or freelancers to ensure high-quality work, career satisfaction, growth and retention.
• Collaborate with the CCO, senior leaders in the creative department and OBE Leadership to evolve the design team and agency offerings.
• Contribute to hiring processes to recruit and onboard new talent who complement and elevate the team.

Desired Skills and Experience

Education/Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Communications, Design or related field.
• Experience with MacOS and the Adobe Creative Cloud, Keynote, Microsoft Office, and Google products.
• A solid portfolio of 8+ years including experiential marketing projects (at least 3 years at an experiential agency).
• Work samples that include strategy, copywriting and/or design, personally owned and delivered as part of your role.
• Experience or interest in technology, lifestyle, sports and/or entertainment industries is a plus.

Essential Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Effective communicator and storyteller who can articulate ideas verbally and visually to clients and team members.
• Active listener who seeks to understand and integrate key insights into project work and processes.
• Experience collaborating with strategists, designers, artists, technologists, producers, account managers and content developers.
• Strategic and visually compelling point of view in all creative output.
• Adept at multi-tasking with the ability to coordinate multiple projects and resources while maintaining excellence.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment.
• Inspirational leadership with the ability to push the team to improve ideas.
• Adaptability to changes and pivots.
• Ability to integrate client and internal feedback while staying aligned with objectives and justifying decisions to stakeholders.

Other Qualities and Skills

• Natural curiosity and a drive to learn and grow.
• High energy and flexibility for non-traditional hours as needed.
• Willingness to work a hybrid schedule (up to 4 days in office) and travel up to 50% of the time.

Compensation: Range: $140,000 - $220,000 annually. This is the pay range OBE believes it will pay for this position at the time of this posting. Compensation will be determined based on experience, skills, certifications, market pay, and role demand. OBE reserves the right to modify this pay range. Benefits include medical/dental/vision insurance, employer paid life and personal accident insurance, Annual Profit Sharing/Bonus Plan, 401(k), Healthcare/Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts, PTO, STD/LTD benefits.

EEO Statement: On Board Experiential is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status, age or any other federally protected class.

Notes: This description may include optional sections such as Create a Job Alert, Application details, and Voluntary Self-Identification forms. This refined version excludes non-job-related form fields and extraneous content to focus on responsibilities and qualifications.