Saatchi & Saatchi

Group Design Director, Brand Experience

Saatchi & Saatchi • $212K — $324K *
Media
11 - 15 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 12+ years in design, brand experience, or related fields leading multidisciplinary teams.
  • Strong portfolio showcasing premium brand experiences across various expressions.
  • Experience with luxury or aspirational brands, demonstrating how design fuels desire and brand value.
  • Solid grasp of brand and visual design fundamentals like typography, photography, and motion.
  • Proven history of designing physical environments or programs connecting to broader brand ecosystems.
  • Insight into how physical experiences drive content and social engagement.
  • Familiarity with experiential production, enabling effective collaboration with various specialists.

Responsibilities

  • Establish and guide a design vision for branded experiences across all channels.
  • Translate brand strategies into cohesive, connected design systems.
  • Ensure all expressions enhance the overarching brand world.
  • Integrate modern luxury sophistication into each touchpoint's design.
  • Lead design initiatives with a focus on physical environments and events.
  • Create experiences that drive participation and conversation beyond their physical space.
  • Collaborate with creative and technical teams to ensure concepts are realizable.

Benefits

  • Opportunity to lead in a dynamic, interdisciplinary team.
  • Engagement with high-profile, premium brands.
  • Access to cutting-edge technology and trends in design.
  • Mentoring and leadership opportunities within a creative agency.
  • A role focused on shaping distinctive brand experiences.
Full Job Description
Overview

The Kind of Design Leader We're Looking For:

You see the brand itself as an experience.

You understand that content, social, digital interactions, physical environments, technology, service, programming and culture are all design materials-and that the strongest brands create continuity across all of them.

You can move comfortably from thinking about how a brand appears in someone's feed to how it feels when they walk through its doors.

You understand the power of physical experience, but you also understand that the most influential physical experiences no longer end at the edge of the space. They become content. They create participation. They travel through communities and culture.

Most importantly, you know how to orchestrate all of those expressions into a brand world that feels distinctive, desirable and unmistakably premium.

About this Position:

We're looking for a Group Design Director who can help construct brands of elevated aspiration and worth-someone with a modern point of view on luxury and premium design and the conceptual ability to shape how a brand is experienced across every expression of its world.

This person will lead with a brand experience mindset, understanding that a brand is no longer defined by any single channel or execution. It is experienced through content and social, digital products and platforms, places and spaces, events and activations, emerging technologies, and the moments where all of those things intersect.

The Group Design Director will help establish and uphold a cohesive design vision across that entire ecosystem-ensuring the same level of aspiration, distinction and craft carries from a piece of content to a digital interaction to a physical experience.

A significant part of this role will be helping Team One expand how we design for the real world. We're looking for someone who understands how brands can inhabit places, spaces and experiences, and how those physical experiences can become catalysts for content, conversation, participation and social expression.

This is not a role for a traditional visual designer who thinks primarily in campaigns, nor are we looking for a deeply technical experiential specialist. We're looking for a multidisciplinary design leader who can see and orchestrate the entire brand experience.

They will partner closely with creative directors, designers, strategists, social and content teams, producers, technologists and clients to turn ambitious brand ideas into distinctive, connected experiences.

What You'll Do:

Lead the Brand Experience
  • Establish and guide the design vision for how our clients' brands are experienced across content, social, digital, physical and emerging channels.
  • Translate brand strategy and creative platforms into cohesive design systems and experiences that feel unmistakably connected regardless of where someone encounters the brand.
  • Ensure every expression-from a social asset or digital interface to a dealership, activation or cultural experience-contributes to a larger, ownable brand world.
  • Bring a sophisticated understanding of modern luxury and premium experience to the work,
  • ensuring aspiration and craft are evident at every touchpoint without relying on conventional luxury codes.

Design Across Places, Spaces and Channels
  • Lead and guide design across integrated brand experiences, with a significant emphasis on physical environments, activations, retail, hospitality, dealerships, events, installations and cultural experiences.
  • Understand how customer journeys, spatial design, environmental design, content, interaction and programming work together to create meaningful experiences.
  • Help teams conceive physical experiences that are designed not only for the people who encounter them firsthand, but to generate participation, content, conversation and social expression far beyond the physical footprint.
  • Connect IRL experience with content and social thinking from the beginning rather than treating amplification as something added afterward.
  • Bring enough understanding of experiential production and feasibility to guide concepts toward ideas that can ultimately be realized, while partnering with specialists on technical execution.

Build Connected Brand Worlds
  • Create and evolve visual and experiential systems that can flex across physical and digital environments without losing their distinction.
  • Guide typography, photography, motion, environmental graphics, spatial expression, digital design, content and other elements of the brand experience.
  • Partner with creative leadership to extend ideas across channels while maintaining a singular design point of view.
  • Ensure individual executions build toward a recognizable and ownable brand world rather than becoming disconnected expressions.

Connect Design, Culture and Technology
  • Maintain a strong understanding of emerging technologies and how they are changing the ways people interact with brands, content and physical environments.
  • Partner closely with our Creative Director of Emerging Technology & Innovation to explore new forms of brand interaction and expression.
  • Understand the creative potential of AI, real-time technology, spatial computing, interactive environments and other emerging platforms without needing to be the technical expert implementing them.
  • Continually explore changing consumer behaviors, cultural signals and new creative disciplines that can expand how brands show up in people's lives.

Set the Standard for Design Excellence
  • Establish and uphold an exceptional standard for design, aspiration, craft and innovation across the agency.
  • Lead, inspire and mentor multidisciplinary design talent while raising the creative ambition of the broader organization.
  • Partner with Creative Directors and Art Directors to strengthen design thinking within campaigns, content and integrated creative platforms.
  • Present and defend ambitious design recommendations to senior clients and agency leadership.
  • Bring together designers, creatives, strategists, technologists, producers and external specialists around a singular experience vision.


What You Bring:
  • 12+ years of experience in design, brand experience, creative direction or related disciplines, with meaningful experience leading multidisciplinary teams.
  • A portfolio demonstrating the ability to build and steward premium brand experiences across multiple forms of expression, rather than excellence within a single channel.
  • Demonstrated experience working with luxury, premium or aspirational brands and a sophisticated understanding of how design creates desire, distinction and long-term brand value.
  • Strong brand and visual design fundamentals, including identity, typography, composition, photography, motion and visual systems.
  • Meaningful experience designing for physical places, spaces, environments or experiential programs, and an understanding of how those experiences connect to broader brand and cultural ecosystems.
  • A strong understanding of how physical experiences can generate content, participation and social expression.
  • The ability to think simultaneously at the level of brand system, customer journey, environment, content and individual touchpoint.
  • Working knowledge of experiential production and feasibility, with the ability to collaborate effectively with producers, fabricators, architects, technologists and specialist partners.
  • Strong curiosity and fluency around emerging technologies and their potential role within brand experience.
  • Exceptional conceptual thinking, presentation and client-facing skills.
  • A demonstrated ability to mentor senior and emerging creative talent and raise the quality of work around them.
  • Automotive, hospitality, retail, entertainment or other premium experience-led category experience is highly valued.

About Saatchi & Saatchi

Saatchi & Saatchi is a global advertising agency headquartered in New York City. The company was founded in London in 1970 by brothers Maurice and Charles Saatchi and is now part of the Publicis Groupe, a French multinational advertising and public relations company. Saatchi & Saatchi has over 6,000 employees in 114 countries and provides a range of advertising and marketing services to clients in various industries, including automotive, consumer goods, financial services, and telecommunications. The company is known for its creative and innovative advertising campaigns, including the iconic 'Nothing is Impossible' campaign for Toyota. Saatchi & Saatchi has won numerous awards for its work, including Cannes Lions, Clios, and Effies.
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