Associate Creative Director (Tokyo)

AKQA is a creative agency that transforms strategic insights into beautiful concepts through art and craftsmanship, guiding clients toward a better future.

As an Associate Creative Director, you will be expected to go beyond the brief—developing strategic approaches based on consumer insight, generating bold and innovative ideas, and presenting them as compelling narratives to clients.

At AKQA, our work extends far beyond advertising. From building brand and CX visions to designing digital and physical experiences, our projects span a wide range of disciplines. While leveraging your creative expertise built through past experience, you will also be expected to cross boundaries and take on new challenges in unexplored domains.

In particular, AKQA Tokyo is on a mission to grow our team and become Japan’s leading creative agency—one that creates a better future for brands through transformative brand experiences that go beyond traditional marketing. We are looking for passionate, ambitious new talent to join us in this journey.

 

Role Requirements

• Deliver and inspire award-winning work from both yourself and others who work with you, influencing where appropriate a dramatic change through ideas, creativity and the use of interactive media.
• Lead, direct and manage a cross-disciplinary and culturally diverse set of talents, both internal and external to AKQA to deliver successful solutions and high-quality works to clients on time.
• Create ground-breaking work that positively impacts our clients, our teams and the world.
• Foster and line-manage creatives that are eager to grow their craft in art direction, copywriting or design.
• Learn new skills and stay abreast of technical and digital design developments, and successfully apply them to work practices to help improve processes and procedures.
• Work with other AKQA network creatives collaboratively on joint initiatives.
• Work closely with the strategy teams to shape briefs that empower our teams to deliver work that pushes our client's brand to the forefront of their global audience's minds.
• Extensive hands-on experience in client work within Japan, with the ability to communicate effectively with both team members and clients in both Japanese and English.

 

Key Responsibilities

• Creative briefs

Contributes to strategic development of a well-defined creative brief and any additional briefing documents, speaking with the client directly when necessary. Listens to and responds to a brief, understanding where/if there are gaps. Knows what questions to ask during the briefing session in order to act upon it. Understands how to respond to a brief.

 

• Idea generation
  Leads by example to consistently inspire creative colleagues to originate world- class, pioneering ideas that conceptualize world-class solutions. Generates useful, usable ideas across all existing and emerging digital platforms. Continually develops practices and processes to inspire, innovate and harness new ways of thinking.

 

• New business development
  Creatively leads new business pitches. Responsible for crisp ideas and creative workflow; effective and dynamic storyteller for oral pitch presentation.

 

• Creative craft skills
  Selects the most appropriate supplier for the required task. Successfully leads multiple suppliers, partners and clients to ensure outsourced projects are creatively delivered on time, within budget and to the highest standards. Helps to ensure AKQA continues to create unique and inspirational solutions.
  
  
• Stakeholder management
  Successfully manages multiple suppliers, partners and customers to ensure the best outcome for both customer and AKQA. Keeps stakeholders informed of project progress at all times and manages expectations proactively.

 

• Client Leadership
  Understand client business goals and ambitions. Takes briefs from clients and successfully creates stories that communicate client’s needs and ambitions to the consumers.