Creative Strategy Director

This leader sits at the intersection of brand strategy, consumer insight, cultural relevance, and creative excellence, ensuring Coca-Cola brands create meaningful consumer connections and maximize marketing effectiveness.

The Director, Creative Strategy – Romania is the market’s seniormost leader for creative strategy, brand expression, content development, cultural storytelling, and asset excellence. The role acts as the market's expert on brand expression, creative effectiveness, and culturally resonant storytelling, partnering closely with Brand Directors, IMX, Media, Insights, PACS, and external agency partners

What are we searching for:

An exceptional marketer and strategic thinker who has consistently used creativity to build brands and drive business results.

The ideal candidate combines strong brand management capabilities with a proven track record of developing breakthrough communication platforms, leading cross-functional teams, and delivering highly effective creative work.

Experience may come from leading FMCG organizations, marketing leadership roles, communications strategy, or agency planning environments.

What You’ll Do For Us

1. Brand Growth & Business Impact

• Ensure creative ideas directly support brand growth objectives and portfolio strategy.
• Translate consumer, category and commercial opportunities into communication with impact.
• Challenge agencies to develop ideas with measurable business impact.

2. Creative Strategy & Brand Expression

• Lead the creative strategy for the assigned projects, ensuring distinctive, culturally relevant brand expression.
• Translate global creative platforms and toolkits into locally resonant creative assets that reflect Romanian consumer and cultural insights.
• Guide all creative work to ensure it is insight driven, brand led, and aligned with the brand’s strategic role within the portfolio.
• Protect and strengthen brand identity, distinctive assets, tone of voice, and storytelling quality.

3. Creative Development Leadership

• Lead end-to-end creative development from insight and brief through concepting, production, and final delivery.
• Craft and deliver worldclass creative briefs for agencies, ensuring clarity of objectives, consumer target, and cultural relevance.
• Evaluate and elevate creative ideas, ensuring they are breakthrough, brand building, and effective across all formats and channels.
• Oversee adaptation of global assets and creation of market specific creative to ensure premium craftsmanship and consistency.

4. Full Funnel Content & IMX Integration

• Ensure creative assets are designed to work across the full funnel: ATL, digital, social, experiential, influencer, earned, and retail communication.
• Partner with Media & Connections to align creative with channel roles, audience strategy, and media plans.
• Collaborate with IMX leads to ensure creative and activation ecosystems are coherent, integrated, and anchored in brand strategy.
• Ensure creative assets meet the needs of customer activation and ecommerce communication.

5. Cultural Relevance & Local Insights

• Champion Romanian cultural intelligence and embed these insights into briefs, storytelling, casting, and brand expression.
• Monitor cultural trends, social conversation, category behavior, and competitive creative to inspire differentiation.
• Act as the market’s cultural expert, ensuring brand work is modern, relevant, inclusive, and resonant.

6. Production Excellence & Agency Leadership

• Lead production excellence across all creative outputs: TVC, digital content, social assets, OOH, experiential materials, and sponsorship creative.
• Manage and inspire external agencies (creative, digital, social, production partners), ensuring high creative standards and performance.
• Oversee asset localization, versioning, adaptation, and quality control across channels.
• Drive efficient production processes, ensuring quality, speed, and responsible investment.

7. Cross Functional & System Collaboration

• Partner closely with Brand Directors, Media & Connections, IMX, PACS, Insights, Digital/Commerce, and the bottler to align creative with broader marketing and commercial plans.
• Work with PACS on earned storytelling, crisis related messaging, influencer strategies, and reputation sensitive content.
• Collaborate with bottler activation teams to ensure creative assets land correctly instore and in customer environments.

8. DME Stewardship & Governance

• Manage creative related DME within guardrails set by Senior Director I Marketing; final DME/P&L accountability remains with the GM.
• Ensure all creative investment decisions maximize quality, efficiency, and long term brand value.
• Maintain strong governance across legal, responsible marketing, claims approval, sustainability, brand safety, and risk management standards.
• Support dynamic reallocation of creative/production budgets based on performance and priority shifts.

9. Performance Management & Creative Effectiveness

• Lead the creative measurement agenda (creative testing, social/content diagnostics, IMX performance insights).
• Partner with Insights and Media to evaluate performance and integrate learnings into future creative cycles.
• Ensure each campaign has clear KPIs, success criteria, and post campaign analysis.
• Champion a culture of creative excellence, learning, and continuous improvement.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree required; Master’s preferred.
• 8–12 years of brand management, integrated marketing, communications planning, creative strategy, agency planning, or related leadership role
• Strong portfolio demonstrating capability in storytelling, content creation, and brand expression.
• Proven experience adapting global creative platforms to local markets.
• Expertise in digital, social, influencer, and integrated content ecosystems.
• Strong partnership and influencing skills across agencies, internal stakeholders, and bottler teams.
• Ability to drive creative excellence in fast paced, matrixed environments.
• Fluent in English; Romanian preferred.

What We Can Do For You

• Opportunity to shape the creative vision of Coca Cola brands in a strategically important European market.
• Work across full funnel campaigns, content ecosystems, sponsorships, digital, experiential, and more.
• High visibility with Romania Franchise leadership, Europe OU Creative & IMX teams, and global creative networks.
• Career pathway toward Senior Director Creative, IMX, or broader marketing leadership roles. 

Confidentiality Notice 

This job description outlines the general nature and responsibilities of the role. Duties may evolve based on business needs. All information is confidential and intended solely for internal hiring purposes within the Europe Operating Unit. 

Classified — Confidential