What are the responsibilities and job description for the Creative Director position at CarGurus?
Car shopping is complicated. At CarGurus, we use data and technology to make it simple, giving people the tools they need to confidently find, buy, finance, or sell a car. The best part? Our work makes a real impact. We're the most-visited car-shopping site in the US and we are growing fast in our international markets. Ready to come along for the ride?
CarGurus is seeking an experienced Creative Director with a proven track record of bringing consumer brands to life. Reporting to the VP of Brand, you will build and mentor a small in-house team, augmenting our in-house talent with a network of freelancers and smaller agencies to deliver a variety of creative assets that supports all our Marketing efforts. As part of the overall brand team, you will serve as an evangelist for our brand identity and voice, ensuring that creative across our company works to represent our brand in a unified and effective way.
What You'll Do:
- Serve as the creative leader for CarGurus, refining our brand and bringing it to life through a broad range of touchpoints to build awareness, engagement and preference for CarGurus.
- Partner with the Brand strategy team and our brand agency to provide input to their work, ensuring that their results meet the creative team needs for future iterations and applications.
- Work with the broader marketing team to extend agency-led campaigns into a portfolio of media assets
- Build and develop an impactful in-house creative team while using a curated network of external partners to complete projects as needed
- Provide leadership for the ongoing interpretation and evolution of our brand standards in support of new applications across the business
- Concept and direct multimedia work including performance creatives, email templates, banner ads, digital videos, offline collateral, content marketing design assets and social media posts
- Continually update best practices for CarGurus to drive response and action from our creative efforts; incorporate up-to-date research and third party expertise (e.g. Google, Facebook, Media agency guidelines) to inform all our efforts.
- Partner with UX design to evolve overall site branding and where visual design/messaging support is required to build/evolve specific elements of our site experience
- Ensure that creative projects are prioritized appropriately and delivered on time, on strategy and on budget
- Build out a team with a reputation for delivering on commitments, and for being a great team to work on and with.
Who You Are:
- 10 years in a creative role, with 5 years of experience managing design and copy professionals. Visual design roots and some video production experience preferred.
- Highly collaborative, you like to partner with and support the needs of a range of internal partners
- Experience mentoring a high-performance team. People leader who can identify, recruit and develop great talent to create premier work.
- Love of design; you stay current and ahead of the latest design trends and digital advancements
- Experience with and appreciation for rigorously testing & optimizing creative to deliver performance
- Highly organized, with experience setting up internal process to receive, prioritize, and deliver on creative requests.
- Fast paced, results-oriented and able to prioritize opposing demands for multiple internal partners
- Low-ego and willing to roll up sleeves, but skilled at delegating and coaching to manage team output.
- Able to inspire great work from your team, whether designing a marketing campaign or a PowerPoint template
- Previous in-house tech/start up experience preferred
CarGurus Culture:
Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalized folks tend to only apply when they check every box. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch. We'd love to have a chat and see if you could be a great fit.
At CarGurus, we invest in our people's professional growth with everything from learning and development programs to tuition reimbursement. Want to work on projects that expand your skill set without sacrificing your work/life balance? You got it. We also strive to provide perks and benefits that employees actually care about like free lunch, commuter subsidies, and more. That includes equity in the company—our way of showing that we want you here for the long haul.
We work hard every day to build the world's most trusted and transparent automotive marketplace, but trust and transparency don't just apply to our consumers. They extend to our talent, too. We aim to create a workplace where everyone feels they can bring the ultimate expression of themselves and their potential—where you don't just fit, you thrive. We don't discriminate based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
We recognize that flexibility plays a critical role in enabling our people to thrive in both their personal and professional lives. We currently welcome Gurus into our Cambridge, MA office on a voluntary basis but do not require employees to physically be in the office. We will adopt a hybrid working model when health experts and government officials in our local communities deem it safe to do so. Specific arrangements within this model will be up to team leaders' discretion; we encourage you to discuss your questions and needs during the interview process.
All US CarGurus employees are required to provide proof of full vaccination against COVID-19, unless they have an approved medical or religious accommodation. This helps us to safeguard the health of our employees and their families, our customers and visitors, and the community at large.
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