Director of Brand & Creative Marketing

Director of Brand & Creative Marketing

Marketing | Full-Time, Exempt | Reports to the Co-CEOs | Remote (U.S.) | Director: $150k-210k 

Please note: Must submit a portfolio to be considered for this role. 

About the Role

Seeking is looking for a highly entrepreneurial, hands-on Director / Sr. Director of Brand & Creative Marketing to lead the brand side of our marketing organization.

This is not a traditional management role and it is not a position for someone who wants to sit above the work.

We are looking for an operator.

This person will own Seeking's brand marketing strategy and lead an approximately 13-person organization spanning PR, creative, copy, social, influencer marketing, and broader brand initiatives and activations. They will be responsible for turning company goals into marketing strategy, turning strategy into executable plans, ensuring the right people are accountable for the right work, and ultimately determining whether that work is moving the business.

The role works closely with Seeking's Co-CEOs and alongside our Director of Growth and Lifecycle Marketing. Our Digital Marketing team owns areas such as paid acquisition, lifecycle/CRM, conversion optimization, and digital growth. This role owns the brand side of marketing while partnering closely with Growth to ensure both functions operate as one marketing organization and share accountability for company performance.

Seeking moves quickly. Our team is lean, scrappy, ambitious, and highly adaptable. The right person is comfortable making decisions, changing direction when the data requires it, getting into the details, and personally helping solve problems when necessary.

We do not need another layer of management. We need someone capable of building and leading a high-performing marketing organization.

What You Will Own

Marketing strategy, performance, and budget

• Own Seeking's brand marketing strategy, positioning, messaging, audience strategy, and overall brand direction.
• Translate company objectives into quarterly and annual marketing priorities, initiatives, OKRs, budgets, and measurable business outcomes.
• Develop the marketing strategy in close partnership with the Co-CEOs, progressively assuming greater ownership as alignment and trust are established.
• Understand Seeking's distinct audiences and develop strategies capable of effectively reaching both sides of the marketplace.
• Identify untapped audiences, market opportunities, positioning gaps, competitive opportunities, and new ways to grow the business.
• Own consumer research, competitive intelligence, campaign learnings, and brand insights.
• Determine what Seeking should do more of, less of, stop doing, or approach differently based on performance and business priorities.

Integrated Campaign Leadership

• Originate and lead major brand campaigns from initial insight through strategy, concept, execution, launch, measurement, and post-campaign analysis.
• Develop bold, culturally relevant ideas capable of generating conversation, press, signups, and revenue.
• Define the objective, audience, strategic insight, messaging, channels, success metrics, budget, responsibilities, and execution plan for major initiatives.
• Work closely with Creative, Production, PR, Social, Influencer, Digital Marketing, Product, Legal, and external partners to bring campaigns to market.
• Personally contribute ideas rather than relying exclusively on the team for campaign concepts.
• Evaluate concepts, scripts, copy, messaging, creative direction, activations, partnerships, and channel plans with strong creative and commercial judgment.
• Lead campaign production, including talent, agencies, production partners, shoots, post-production, rollout, media requirements, legal considerations, and timelines.

Performance & Business Accountability

• Own the performance of the brand marketing organization and ensure marketing activity ultimately contributes to business growth.
• Monitor company and marketing performance closely, including joins, revenue, CAC, ROAS, conversion, brand search, campaign performance, social growth, influencer performance, earned media, and other relevant KPIs.
• Diagnose why initiatives are or are not working and make changes quickly.
• Reallocate budget, resources, priorities, or strategy when performance does not justify the current approach.
• Maximize ROI across productions and activations by identifying opportunities to create additional revenue-driving content within existing budgets, helping recover costs and improve the overall return on each investment.
• Establish meaningful measurement frameworks for brand initiatives that connect marketing activity to commercial outcomes, including brand health.
• Partner closely with the Director of Growth & Lifecycle Marketing to understand acquisition and funnel performance and ensure brand and performance marketing strengthen one another.
• Lead campaign and quarterly retrospectives and turn learnings into concrete changes.

PR & Cultural Relevance

• Set the overarching PR narrative and determine what Seeking should be known for culturally.
• Lead and challenge the PR organization on strategy, angles, pitches, media opportunities, reactive opportunities, partnerships, spokesperson positioning, and execution.
• Help develop provocative, differentiated stories that can break through crowded cultural conversations while protecting the business and brand.
• Be comfortable operating around controversial subjects and challenging cultural conversations without becoming unnecessarily risk-averse.
• Understand what makes a story interesting to media rather than simply what the company wants to communicate.
• Be capable of rewriting or strengthening an angle, headline, pitch, talking point, or narrative when senior intervention is required.
• Build and develop a strong internal PR function rather than relying exclusively on agencies to provide strategic thinking.
• Own reputation and crisis communications, partnering with the Co-CEOs and Legal to protect the brand.

Team Leadership & Organizational Performance

• Lead, coach, develop, and hold accountable an approximately 13-person brand marketing organization.
• Manage managers and senior individual contributors across Creative, Production, PR, Social, Influencer, Copy, Brand Marketing, and related functions.
• Establish clear ownership, expectations, goals, accountability, and decision-making authority across the department.
• Evaluate talent continuously and identify where employees need coaching, clearer expectations, additional resources, changed responsibilities, or stronger performance management.
• Recognize high-potential employees and create opportunities for them to grow.
• Make difficult personnel recommendations when performance does not meet the needs of the business.
• Identify organizational gaps and recommend changes to team structure, roles, hiring plans, agencies, contractors, or external resources.
• Participate meaningfully in recruiting, interviewing, hiring, performance management, and termination decisions.
• Build a culture that combines empathy and development with extremely high standards for performance.

Marketing Operations & Planning

• Own the integrated marketing calendar in partnership with the Director of Growth & Lifecycle Marketing.
• Set department priorities and determine what gets worked on, delayed, re-scoped, or stopped.
• Turn large initiatives into clear workstreams, owners, milestones, dependencies, budgets, timelines, and success metrics.
• Build and continuously improve the operating processes required for a sophisticated marketing organization.
• Establish clear processes for briefs, campaign development, research, creative concepting, moodboards, reviews, approvals, production, PR planning, launch readiness, asset delivery, reporting, and postmortems.
• Ensure teams are brought into initiatives at the right stage rather than operating reactively.
• Remove bottlenecks before they reach the executive team.
• Identify unclear ownership and correct it.
• Ensure initiatives move forward without requiring the Co-CEOs to manage day-to-day execution.

Budget & Commercial Management

• Own and manage a significant seven-figure brand marketing budget.
• Build annual and quarterly budgets and allocate resources against the highest-value opportunities.
• Evaluate spend based on strategic importance and expected business return.
• Maintain visibility into commitments, actual spend, forecasts, and ROI.
• Oversee agencies, production partners, talent, influencers, vendors, sponsorships, and other external relationships.
• Lead or oversee high-stakes negotiations and ensure the team is negotiating effectively.
• Challenge unnecessary spend and identify opportunities to achieve better outcomes with existing resources.

How This Role Works With Other Marketing Leaders

Director of Growth & Lifecycle Marketing

The Director / Sr. Director of Brand & Creative Marketing and Director of Growth & Lifecycle Marketing will operate as peer leaders.

This role owns brand strategy, integrated brand campaigns, PR, Creative, Copy, Social, Influencer, brand activations, consumer insights, and the brand marketing budget.

The two leaders jointly plan around company goals, audience strategy, campaign performance, acquisition, landing-page effectiveness, creative performance, the marketing calendar, and overall business growth.

 

Leadership vs. Delegation

The Director creates the environment in which the marketing team can perform at a higher level by setting the strategy, establishing priorities, structuring the work, challenging the thinking, coaching the team, reviewing performance, removing gaps, and holding the organization accountable for results.

At the same time, this is a hands-on leadership role.

When a major campaign needs a stronger concept, a pitch needs to be rewritten, messaging is not working, a brief is unclear, a negotiation is stuck, or an important initiative needs senior attention, this person is expected to get involved and help solve it.

Strong leaders here do not say, "That's not my job."

They also do not take over their employees' jobs.

They know when to coach, when to challenge, when to make the decision, and when to roll up their sleeves.

What We Are Looking For

• 8+ years of progressive marketing experience, with exceptional candidates considered based on demonstrated scope and trajectory rather than years alone.
• 4+ years of meaningful people-management experience, including experience managing managers or senior functional leaders.
• Demonstrated experience across both brand marketing and PR/communications.
• Strong experience developing and executing integrated consumer marketing campaigns.
• Experience in a startup, high-growth environment, agency environment, or similarly fast-moving business, with the ability to operate with a high sense of urgency and keep pace with rapid execution, shifting priorities, and tight deadlines.
• Experience owning or meaningfully managing substantial marketing budgets.
• Experience working with agencies, production companies, creators, talent, vendors, and external partners.
• Working knowledge of campaign production from concept through delivery and distribution.
• Exceptional copy judgment and the ability to provide meaningful feedback across advertising, PR, social, influencer scripts, campaign messaging, and brand communications.
• Strong negotiator with sound commercial judgment.
• Experience creating structure, processes, and accountability inside growing or evolving teams.
• Comfortable making difficult decisions with incomplete information.
• Able to operate effectively with founders and senior executives who are highly engaged in the brand.
• Confident enough to challenge an executive recommendation when the data, customer insight, or strategy supports a different direction.

Marketplace or two-sided consumer platform experience is a plus.

Experience with culturally provocative, unconventional, entertainment, lifestyle, dating, or otherwise conversation-driving brands is highly valued.