Head of Content and Social

Job title:
Head of Content and Social

Location:
London (Shoreditch)

Reports to:
Director of Marketing

Salary: £50 - £64 k (depending on experience) plus benefits

Hours: 9:30 am - 5:30 pm Monday to Friday, with hybrid working to be discussed and agreed, Tuesday and Thursday are compulsory office days

About the role

D&AD sits on top of one of the best content assets in the creative industry. Sixty years of Pencil-winning work. The juries who judged it. The Festival stage. The students coming through New Blood who will be running the industry in a decade. Masterclasses and Learn, where the people who actually make the work teach how they do it. Shift, where careers start without a degree.

Almost all of that walks in and out of the building underutilised.

We are looking for a Head of Content and Social to fix that. The successful candidate will set the content and social strategy, but also be close enough to the work to make it themself when it counts. This is not a role where you write the deck and hand it over.

You’ll lead a team of three plus freelancers and agencies when required to build a year-round content engine that turns access to the creative community, creative and brand leaders and ambassadors into compelling interviews, reports, video, webinars, sales enablement tools and brand content. The team is made up of a Senior Editor who owns the written and editorial output; a Content Editor & Producer you will hire, covering video, audio and photography capture and turnaround, and a Social Media Manager who is responsible for ensuring our brand and messages reach the right people in the right way.

This job is part hands-on and part strategic, and the split moves week to week. Festival week and other event periods you’ll be on the floor with a camera or mic. Other weeks you are setting direction, briefing, editing other people's work and making sure the plan holds.

Content and social strategies across the full portfolio: D&AD Awards, Festival, New Blood, D&AD Learn/Masterclasses and Shift. You decide what we make, for whom, on what channel, and why it will land. You are measured on what the channels do for entries, ticket sales, brand love and revenue.

Define the cultural moments we play in and which conversations, debates and industry flashpoints are ours to enter, which we ignore, and what we say when we do. You also keep enough room in the calendar to react inside a day when something breaks. Ensure the social and content calendars balance the awards cycle, campaign priorities and whatever the industry is actually talking about that week.

• The channels. Linked In, Instagram, Tik Tok, You Tube, D&AD website, email newsletter and other new social platforms relevant to the strategy. Your team runs them, you read them and grow them. You know the difference between what performs for a creative director on Linked In and what performs for a 19-year-old on Tik Tok, and you get both made.

• Social first by default. Develop repeatable social-first formats across Tik Tok, Reels, Shorts and You Tube, and set the standard for pacing, hooks, storytelling and retention in everything we cut. Everything is shot with the edit in mind and cut for the platform it lives on. You understand how short-form actually performs, at the level of the first two seconds, the pacing, the hook and where people drop off, and you can give a specific, useful note on a cut rather than a general one.
  
  You know the difference between a film with clips pulled from it and content built to be social from the moment the camera goes up. You are also the quality gate on the edit: you review the output, feed back properly, and help the team balance quality…