Vice President, Creative Planning, Brand Experience

We’re looking for a Vice President, Creative Planning who can find the idea hiding inside a business problem — then help turn it into something people want to talk about, participate in, and share. You’ll work across a portfolio of fast-moving consumer brands, partnering with strategy and integrated teams to create earned-first ideas that can live anywhere: social, creators, experiences, partnerships, content, PR, and beyond.

This is a hands-on creative leadership role for someone who loves the messy middle between insight and execution: finding the cultural tension, cracking the idea, making it bigger, and helping teams bring it to life.

This role will be part of our Creative Planning team, partnering closely with a strategist partner, in collaboration with digital, social, analytics, and creator teams to support existing client work and new business opportunities primarily for our Brand Experience team. The work revolves around creating integrated campaigns that connect brands with people through culture, creativity, earned influence, and unforgettable experiences.

Your mandate is bigger than delivering strong creative work: you’ll help raise the creative ambition of Brand Experience — pushing teams beyond familiar category ideas toward work with a real reason to exist in culture.

We believe people who live interesting lives are best positioned to deliver interesting ideas. So, we encourage you to bring your whole self to work. If you are energized by fun and fast-moving brands, love turning insights into experiences, and want to help define what’s next for modern brand communications, we would love to meet you.

Key Responsibilities

• Create ideas that earn attention. Turn client business challenges, strategic insights, cultural cues, audience behaviors, and data into distinctive creative territories, platforms, campaigns, activations, and integrated brand experiences that get noticed, talked about, and acted on.

• Lead creative development from brief to execution. Shape campaign approaches; lead brainstorms, workshops, and concept development; and ensure the work stays strategically grounded, creatively ambitious, audience-relevant, and true to the core idea.

• Raise the creative bar. Set a high standard for originality across the work. Originate, review, and strengthen concepts, creative rationales, campaign narratives, POVs, plans, decks, and other client-facing materials — pushing teams beyond the expected and making good ideas better.

• Be a trusted creative voice with clients. Serve as a creative partner to key clients, presenting and selling ideas with clarity and conviction, connecting creative choices to business value, navigating feedback, and building the trust required to bring ambitious ideas to life.

• Build integrated ideas with multidisciplinary teams. Partner closely with other specialists to turn earned-first ideas into connected programs across channels. Be a strong creative voice and collaborative partner within integrated agency teams.

• Turn culture into creative opportunities. Stay close to culture shifts, communities, audience behavior, earned and social media and creator trends, technology, and the marketplace.

• Help win new business and grow existing relationships. Play a leading creative role in pitches and organic growth opportunities, helping shape the central creative idea, pitch narrative, integrated activations, and presentations that make our thinking distinctive and compelling.

• Make the team and the work better. Create productive conditions for creativity: lead working sessions with clarity, give useful creative direction, solve problems collaboratively, and help people get to stronger work.

• Expand how we create. Explore emerging storytelling approaches and technologies that can unlock new forms of creativity, improve how teams develop ideas, and ultimately produce better outcomes for clients.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in creative strategy, planning, integrated marketing, communications, or a related creative environment, with at least 5 years focused on consumer brand strategy and communications

• Proven expertise working with integrated consumer communications programs for categories such as CPG, food, wellness, lifestyle, parenting, retail, consumer tech, or other fast-moving consumer brands

• Experience working in an agency environment or closely with cross-functional agency teams is strongly preferred

• You have demonstrated ability to translate client business priorities into smart communications strategies, integrated workstreams, compelling creative platforms, and clear action plans for teams.

• You possess a deep understanding of how earned media, influencer, social, experiential, partnerships, content, and digital channels work together to build modern brand relevance and drive measurable outcomes.

• You have a sharp eye for culture, trends, communities, and conversation shifts, with the ability to turn emerging stories into timely, ownable client opportunities.

• You have experience developing creative concepts for standout campaigns, pitches, brand moments, activations, or creative concepts.

• Bachelor's degree in communications, marketing, advertising, writing, design, strategy, or a related field

• You are a curious, entrepreneurial, and solutions-oriented mindset, with the confidence to challenge convention, encourage fresh thinking, and turn friction into opportunity.

• You have comfort and curiosity around integrating AI tools into communications planning, creative development, workflows, reporting, and team processes.

Benefits and More

• You will receive a competitive base salary and bonus opportunity

• You will also be able to enroll in our Health, Dental, Vision, company paid Life Insurance, Flexible Spending Account, as well as 401k (match) plan.

• Monthly allowance for cell phone, office equipment, etc.

• Generous PTO policy with paid maternity/paternity leave

• Transit benefits

• Professional learning and development opportunities

• Workplace flexibility

• On-site and off-site social gatherings

The anticipated salary range for this position, at the time of posting, is $150,000-$210,000. The salary of the applicant selected for this role will be based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to, education, internal equity, geography, relevant years of experience, certifications, skills, abilities of the selected applicant, and other job-related qualifications. In addition, a range of medical, dental, vision, disability, 401(k) matching, paid time off, and/or other benefits also are available by the company.

Ruder Finn provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy (including childbirth, lactation and related medical conditions), national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information, military and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Ruder Finn will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. Ruder Finn believes that diversity and inclusion among our employees is critical to our success as a global company, and we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool.