Group Design Director - Brand Experience

Company description

About Team One: 

Team One is Publicis Groupe’s fully integrated media, digital, and communications agency built to help premium brands thrive in a rapidly evolving world. We’re known as the ‘architects of aspiration’ helping luxury brands reach modern affluents and next-gen consumers through culturally fluent strategies and experiences, unmatched access, and the agility to move at the speed of culture.  

We’re a team of 400+ creators, doers, and difference-makers across six North American offices—Los Angeles (our HQ), Dallas, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Boise. Together, we’re proud partners to iconic brands, including Lexus and the Lexus Dealer Association, Marriott International, The Ritz-Carlton, Barclays, The RealReal, HKS Architects, Metabo HPT, KB Home, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Moėt Hennessy, Citi., and Cathay Pacific Airlines.

We take pride in our industry-shaping creativity, connection, and exceptional culture that have been recognized with honors like Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators and Ad Age’s Best Places to Work.

Overview

The Kind of Design Leader We’re Looking For:

You see the brand itself as an experience.

You understand that content, social, digital interactions, physical environments, technology, service, programming and culture are all design materials—and that the strongest brands create continuity across all of them.

You can move comfortably from thinking about how a brand appears in someone's feed to how it feels when they walk through its doors.

You understand the power of physical experience, but you also understand that the most influential physical experiences no longer end at the edge of the space. They become content. They create participation. They travel through communities and culture.

Most importantly, you know how to orchestrate all of those expressions into a brand world that feels distinctive, desirable and unmistakably premium.

About this Position:

We’re looking for a Group Design Director who can help construct brands of elevated aspiration and worth—someone with a modern point of view on luxury and premium design and the conceptual ability to shape how a brand is experienced across every expression of its world.

This person will lead with a brand experience mindset, understanding that a brand is no longer defined by any single channel or execution. It is experienced through content and social, digital products and platforms, places and spaces, events and activations, emerging technologies, and the moments where all of those things intersect.

The Group Design Director will help establish and uphold a cohesive design vision across that entire ecosystem—ensuring the same level of aspiration, distinction and craft carries from a piece of content to a digital interaction to a physical experience.

A significant part of this role will be helping Team One expand how we design for the real world. We’re looking for someone who understands how brands can inhabit places, spaces and experiences, and how those physical experiences can become catalysts for content, conversation, participation and social expression.

This is not a role for a traditional visual designer who thinks primarily in campaigns, nor are we looking for a deeply technical experiential specialist. We’re looking for a multidisciplinary design leader who can see and orchestrate the entire brand experience.

They will partner closely with creative directors, designers, strategists, social and content teams, producers, technologists and clients to turn ambitious brand ideas into distinctive, connected experiences.

What You’ll Do:

Lead the Brand Experience

• Establish and guide the design vision for how our clients' brands are experienced across content, social, digital, physical and emerging channels.
• Translate brand strategy and creative platforms into cohesive design systems and experiences that feel unmistakably connected regardless of where someone encounters the brand.
• Ensure every expression—from a social asset or digital interface to a dealership, activation or cultural experience—contributes to a larger, ownable brand world.
• Bring a sophisticated understanding of modern luxury and premium experience to the work,
• ensuring aspiration and craft are evident at every touchpoint without relying on conventional luxury codes.

Design Across Places, Spaces and Channels

• Lead and guide design across integrated brand experiences, with a significant emphasis on physical environments, activations, retail, hospitality, dealerships, events, installations and cultural experiences.
• Understand how customer journeys, spatial design, environmental design, content, interaction and programming work together to create meaningful experiences.
• Help teams conceive physical experiences that are designed not only for the people who encounter them firsthand, but to generate participation, content, conversation and social expression far beyond the physical footprint.
• Connect IRL experience with content and social thinking from the beginning rather than treating amplification as something added afterward.
• Bring enough understanding of experiential production and feasibility to guide concepts toward ideas that can ultimately be realized, while partnering with specialists on technical execution.

Build Connected Brand Worlds

• Create and evolve visual and experiential systems that can flex across physical and digital environments without losing their distinction.
• Guide typography, photography, motion, environmental graphics, spatial expression, digital design, content and other elements of the brand experience.
• Partner with creative leadership to extend ideas across channels while maintaining a singular design point of view.
• Ensure individual executions build toward a recognizable and ownable brand world rather than becoming disconnected expressions.

Connect Design, Culture and Technology

• Maintain a strong understanding of emerging technologies and how they are changing the ways people interact with brands, content and physical environments.
• Partner closely with our Creative Director of Emerging Technology & Innovation to explore new forms of brand interaction and expression.
• Understand the creative potential of AI, real-time technology, spatial computing, interactive environments and other emerging platforms without needing to be the technical expert implementing them.
• Continually explore changing consumer behaviors, cultural signals and new creative disciplines that can expand how brands show up in people's lives.

Set the Standard for Design Excellence

• Establish and uphold an exceptional standard for design, aspiration, craft and innovation across the agency.
• Lead, inspire and mentor multidisciplinary design talent while raising the creative ambition of the broader organization.
• Partner with Creative Directors and Art Directors to strengthen design thinking within campaigns, content and integrated creative platforms.
• Present and defend ambitious design recommendations to senior clients and agency leadership.
• Bring together designers, creatives, strategists, technologists, producers and external specialists around a singular experience vision.

What You Bring:

• 12+ years of experience in design, brand experience, creative direction or related disciplines, with meaningful experience leading multidisciplinary teams.
• A portfolio demonstrating the ability to build and steward premium brand experiences across multiple forms of expression, rather than excellence within a single channel.
• Demonstrated experience working with luxury, premium or aspirational brands and a sophisticated understanding of how design creates desire, distinction and long-term brand value.
• Strong brand and visual design fundamentals, including identity, typography, composition, photography, motion and visual systems.
• Meaningful experience designing for physical places, spaces, environments or experiential programs, and an understanding of how those experiences connect to broader brand and cultural ecosystems.
• A strong understanding of how physical experiences can generate content, participation and social expression.
• The ability to think simultaneously at the level of brand system, customer journey, environment, content and individual touchpoint.
• Working knowledge of experiential production and feasibility, with the ability to collaborate effectively with producers, fabricators, architects, technologists and specialist partners.
• Strong curiosity and fluency around emerging technologies and their potential role within brand experience.
• Exceptional conceptual thinking, presentation and client-facing skills.
• A demonstrated ability to mentor senior and emerging creative talent and raise the quality of work around them.
• Automotive, hospitality, retail, entertainment or other premium experience-led category experience is highly valued.

Why It’s Great to Work Here:

• We live by our C.O.R.E. values:
  • Collaborative - We work together to get better stuff done than we could alone.
  • Optimistic - Honest and confident in our quest forward; believing the impossible is possible.
  • Results-driven - Creativity is always in service of results and never for its own sake.
  • Entrepreneurial - Build something new. Shoot for the moon.
• We offer comprehensive benefits and ‘work perks’ like great options for medical / dental / vision insurance, 401(k) with company matching, unlimited PTO, generous paid parental leave, tuition reimbursement, family forming assistance reimbursement, pet adoption assistance + “pawternity” leave, etc.
• We have a hybrid work schedule 3 days a week in office.
• We’re part of Publicis Groupe which is a huge global network, so there are many resources that come with that like Business Resource Groups for a variety of communities like Publicis Parents, VivaWomen, Egalité, etc.
• We give back to our communities with our annual Day of Good and volunteer opportunities throughout the year.
• We love to grow our talent and promote from within whenever possible, and we offer professional development trainings and regular structured performance reviews.
• We have a lot fun! We have a whole committee called “Team Fun” that plans parties and events for us to celebrate birthdays, holidays, cultural moments, etc. Some recent fun events include a flower bouquet bar, origami lessons, and hearing from creative entrepreneurs at our Moonshot speaker series.

Additional information

Our Publicis Groupe motto “Viva La Différence” means we’re better together, and we believe that our differences make us stronger. It means we honor and celebrate all identities, across all facets of intersectionality, and it underpins all that we do as an organization. We are focused on fostering belonging and creating equitable & inclusive experiences for all talent.

Publicis Groupe provides robust and inclusive benefit programs and policies to support the evolving and diverse needs of our talent and enable every person to grow and thrive. Our benefits package includes medical coverage, dental, vision, disability, 401K, as well as parental and family care leave, family forming assistance, tuition reimbursement, and flexible time off.

If you require accommodation or assistance with the application or onboarding process specifically, please contact [email protected].

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

 

Compensation Range: USD $180,215.00 - USD $286,832.00/Annually. This is the pay range the Company believes it will pay for this position at the time of this posting. This role may also be eligible for bonus or incentive compensation. Consistent with applicable law, compensation will be determined based on the skills, qualifications, and experience of the applicant along with the requirements of the position, and the Company reserves the right to modify this pay range at any time. Temporary roles may be eligible to participate in our freelancer/temporary employee medical plan through a third-party benefits administration system once certain criteria have been met. For regular roles, the Company will offer medical coverage, dental, vision, disability, 401k, and paid time off. The Company anticipates the application deadline for this job posting will be 11/2/2026.