The role

Bring creative ideas to life, inspire a high-performing team and lead an productive creative and production studio. This role is ideal for a curious creative leader who excels at shaping strategy, driving operational excellence and staying connected to the craft.

Responsibilities

- Partner with marketing to shape briefs, challenge assumptions and identify the strongest creative opportunity before the work begins
- Translate briefs into compelling creative strategies, campaign and content ideas
- Lead concept development from ideation, iterations and refinement, production and final delivery
- Present creative work and articulate the strategic rationale to senior stakeholders, building alignment and confidence in the creative direction
- Direct and approve work before it moves to senior stakeholders and final deployment
- Lead creative collaboration with agency partners, ensuring external work aligns to strategy, brand standards and operational realities
- Ensure creative and media work as one system. Understand audience, channel strategy, placements and opportunities before creative is fully developed.
- Provide clear creative direction and performance feedback
- Establish and evolve ways of working across briefs, prioritization, reviews, approvals and production to maximize efficiency
- Champion elevated creative thinking, storytelling and craft, ensuring work strengthens and evolves the Air Canada brand while remaining consistent with its identity




- Build design systems and documentation that extend across channels
- Identify opportunities across process, systems and software to automate and streamline production
- Build strong relationships with cross functional teams
- Partner with studio operations to balance creative ambition with timelines, budgets, channel requirements and other restraints
- Drive a high-performing creative culture, mentoring the team, championing new ways of working and creating an environment that encourages collaboration, curiosity and exceptional creative work

Requirements

- Degree or college diploma in Graphic Design or Advertising or related creative discipline.
- 10+ years of working experience in Creative/Art Direction
- 5+ years leading teams (Must have, please ensure your resume demonstrates this)
- Strong portfolio that demonstrates execution across full funnel 360 marketing campaigns (commercial video, OOH, digital paid media, digital product/web, email, experiential)
- Exceptional communication and influencing skills, with the ability to give clear creative direction, present work with confidence and build alignment with senior stakeholders.
- Curiosity about culture, creativity and what’s happening in the world. Must demonstrate how you continually bringing new influences and perspectives into the work.

Other

- Contract (40 hours/week)
- Based in Toronto
- Travel for productions required
- Hybrid 2 days (downtown Toronto)

📌 Creative Lead (Toronto)
🏢 Air Canada
📍 Toronto