Associate Creative Director

Chicago, IL (Hybrid)

$109K/yr – $145K/yrMid Level5+ years expFull time

Posted 1 day ago

Top 1% of applicants do these two things.

The other 99% submit and hope. You're about to do something different.

Job Summary

Own and deliver bold, platform-driven ideas from concept to finished craft, mentor junior creatives, and surface cultural signals to guide strategy and client storytelling.

  • Lead concepting across strategy, media, and analytics to feed algorithms and cross-platform impact.
  • Guard voice and craft while balancing play and purpose.
  • Research platforms, trends, and culture to uncover opportunities and inform ideas.

Job Description

Responsibilities

  • Make the work: You'll be hands-on, concepting and building attention-grabbing ideas from blank page to finished craft. You'll work alongside strategy, account, media relations, and analytics to make sure your ideas feed algorithms and transcend platforms.
  • Sharpen the idea, balancing craft and strategy: Whether your instrument is a headline or a layout, you'll help guard the voice and visual identity of every brand you touch. Stay playful, but always purposeful. Your work won't just entertain, it'll deliver results.
  • Bring others up with you: You'll mentor junior creatives and help set the bar on craft — not by managing from a distance, but by being in the work next to them.
  • Be the pulse of culture: Research platforms, subcultures, emerging media, and niche communities to unearth untapped opportunities. You need to know before anyone else what Gens Alpha and Z are doing on social channels, why brands are jumping all over a meme, what conversations are capturing the attention of journalists (and why), and who is poised to become the next big thing in the cultural conversation. These inputs will shape the ideas you develop and bring to teams and clients.
  • Help sell it: You'll present your thinking with conviction — internally, and increasingly in the room with clients.

Requirements

  • Experience: 5–8 years in art direction, design, or copywriting — especially if you've worked on earned, digital, and social-first campaigns, or for culturally relevant brands.
  • Craft, whichever your discipline: If you're an art director, you'll need to work quickly and accurately across Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator) and presentation software (PowerPoint). Bonus points for illustration, After Effects, photography, retouching, filmmaking, videography, editorial, animation, HTML. If you're a copywriter, you'll need range — from a scroll-stopping caption to a script to a manifesto that actually means something — and the instinct to know which the moment calls for.
  • A sense of humor: If you can't laugh at yourself (or at least at the internet), we're not the place for you.
  • Obsessive curiosity: About trends, people, platforms, memes, and the mechanics of why certain things just work.
  • A social media sixth sense: You know which platforms matter most, what kind of content works where, and how to surprise people in their scroll.
  • Pop culture proficiency: From mainstream moments to niche internet corners, you stay plugged into what everyone's talking about, and what they're about to.

Preferred

  • Bonus points for illustration, After Effects, photography, retouching, filmmaking, videography, editorial, animation, HTML.
Weber Shandwick logo

Weber Shandwick

Weber Shandwick is the earned-first global communications agency. Led by world-class strategic and creative thinkers and activators, Weber Shandwick has won some of the most prestigious awards in the industry, including being named #1 in the Public Relations and Brand Strategies category on Fast Company’s 2024 Most Innovative Companies list, one of Fast Company’s Best Workplace for Innovators in 2023, PRWeek’s 2024 Global Agency of the Year, ranked #1 on PRovoke’s Global Creative Index in 2024 and honored on Ad Age’s A-List in 2024 & 2020 and Best Places to Work in 2019, in addition to being awarded Campaign Global’s PR Agency of the Year in 2023. Weber Shandwick was the most awarded PR agency at the 2023 and 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, including earning the PR industry’s first-ever idea-led Cannes Grand Prix in the Brand Experience & Activation category and cumulatively earning more than 225 Cannes Lions. Weber Shandwick has also been named PR Agency of the Year by Campaign US in 2021, honored as PRovoke’s Global Agency of the Decade in 2020 and ranked #1 on PRovoke’s Global Creative Index in 2021 and 2022. Additionally, the firm was named PRWeek’s Global Agency of the Year in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 and was awarded PRWeek’s Purpose Agency of the Year in 2020 and 2021. Weber Shandwick also received Honorable Mention on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Global Marketing Agencies in 2021, as the only PR agency featured.  Part of the Interpublic Group (NYSE: IPG), Weber Shandwick is the anchor agency within The Weber Shandwick Collective – the strategic communications and consulting network. For more information, visit https://www.webershandwick.com/. Social Media Community Guidelines: http://bit.ly/wssocialterms

Founded in 2001
New York, NY, US
4.4K employees (1,170 in marketing)

Traffic Signals

Monthly Visitors
74.1K
Traffic Source Mix
Search
36%
Direct
46.1%
Referral
5.6%
Social
11.7%
Paid
0.4%

Headcount Trend

Current headcount: ~4.4K

Marketing Team

Marketing Team Size
882 (20% of company)
Median Career Experience
14 years
Median Tenure
7.1 years
Marketing Roles Posted (Last 30 Days)
38

Recent News