Creative Director

Position Summary:

The Creative Director is a marketing leadership role responsible for the creative vision, concept development, and campaign quality of athenahealth's marketing work. This leader originates and shapes big creative ideas, from campaign concepts through major brand moments, and builds a creative team capable of consistently delivering work at that level.

Essential Job Responsibilities:

• Develop original creative concepts for major campaigns, brand initiatives, and cross channel marketing moments, working from strategic and messaging directions set by Brand and Editorial & Content Strategy.
• Pitch and defend creative concepts to senior marketing leadership and other stakeholders, building consensus around a strong creative direction.
• Set the overall creative vision for how athenahealth shows up in market, ensuring big ideas are distinctive, on brand, and effective.
• Partner with stakeholders early in the planning process so creative concepts are grounded in strategy from the start.
• Push the team to develop bolder, more ambitious creative rather than defaulting to safe or expected ideas.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of creative talent, including designers, copywriters, and other creative staff, building their range and ambition as creative thinkers.
• Recruit and develop creative talent, building a team capable of generating strong concept work consistently.
• Create a culture where creative risk taking is encouraged and where the team is pushed to do their best conceptual work.
• Provide creative feedback and direction that helps individual team members grow, not just improves the immediate deliverable.
• Establish creative development opportunities, including exposure to new tools, techniques, and outside inspiration, to keep the team's thinking fresh.

Additional Job Responsibilities:

• Serve as the primary creative voice in planning conversations with Brand, Product Marketing, Demand Generation, Segment, and Customer Marketing.
• Work closely with the Head of Creative and Content Operations to align creative ambition with production capacity, timelines, and resourcing, and to ensure operational realities are considered early in concept development.
• Partner with Brand to ensure creative concepts express brand identity in ways that feel fresh and distinctive, not just compliant.
• Champion creative excellence as a standard across the marketing organization, advocating for the resources and time needed to develop strong concepts.
• Stay current on creative trends, tools, and techniques relevant to B2B marketing and healthcare technology, bringing new thinking into the team.

Expected Education & Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Advertising, Design, Fine Arts, Communications, or a related field required.
• 10+ years of progressive experience in creative roles, including concept development, art direction, or copywriting, with a strong portfolio of creative work.
• At least 5 years in a creative leadership role managing and developing other creative talent.
• Proven track record developing and pitching big creative concepts that were adopted and executed at an enterprise scale.
• Experience in B2B SaaS, healthcare technology, enterprise software, or similarly complex organizations preferred.
• Strong, distinctive creative point of view, with the ability to generate original concepts rather than iterating existing ideas.
• Ability to pitch and defend creative work persuasively to senior stakeholders, including pushback and negotiation on creative direction.
• Skilled at balancing creative ambition with brand guardrails and business objectives.
• Demonstrated ability to recruit, mentor, and grow creative talent, with a track record of developing people into stronger creative thinkers.
• Experience building a creative team culture that supports experimentation and high-quality conceptual work.
• Strong feedback and coaching skills, with the ability to give creative direction that develops people over time.
• Excellent presentation and storytelling skills, with the ability to bring stakeholders along on a creative vision.
• Comfortable operating in a matrixed organization where creative vision must align with strategy, production capacity, and business goals.