Apply: Director of Marketing, Brand and Communications

About Ascential Events
 
About Us
Ascential Events bring communities together to be inspired, to trade, to network and to learn. From the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity to Money 20/20 to Spring/Autumn Fair, we work hard for our customers to produce valuable events that make a meaningful impact on people, brands and businesses across the world. Our teams are passionate about the industries we serve – whether we’re inspiring a new generation of young creative talent, putting breakthrough technology into the classroom or acting as the launchpad for a hot new Scandi homeware brand.
Why Work For Us
Our values create a vision of the kind of company we aspire to be, and inspire what our people can become. We want people to be happy working here. We like working with progressive, energetic people who are great communicators and who instinctively put customers first. Ascential Events is, of course, an equal opportunities employer – we are proud of the diversity and dynamism of the people who work here, as this is crucial to our success as an international business. If you can bring brave ideas, an open mind and good humour, we would love to hear from you.

We need a clear-headed and creative person to lead the Lions customer strategy, taking overall accountability for the end-to-end customer experience (digital and live) of Cannes Lions. They will have a proven track record of devising innovative and robust strategic brand plans, and leading teams to deliver bold and brilliant cross-channel brand communications that deepen engagement and drive growth.

• Development, positioning, pricing and promotion of Lions’ new and existing products
• Executive lead on the rollout of the CX Programme, ensuring that what is implemented delivers to strategy
• Strategic lead on database / CRM requirements, functionality and management
• Establish a world-class content marketing engine that extends the reach of the campaign for creativity with key customers across the world
• And ensure the new systems and infrastructure are optimised and embraced across the business, to make the customer experience for new and retained customers mind-blowingly brilliant, from lead generation, through transaction and product delivery to retention and loyalty over time
• And to lead the team to design and deliver multi-channel customer journeys and marketing activities that leverage creativity to drive effectiveness
• Oversee all creative (words and pictures) output: websites, social media, onsite collateral and signage, video content ..
• Develop the visibility and understanding of the Lions brand across industry media globally. This includes crisis management as well as pro-active reputation building.

Experience required

• A qualified and experienced senior brand communications leaderYou will have specific experience of leading brand strategy projects, using research and analysis to identify insights and opportunities.
• You will have a proven track record of championing a progressive customer-led culture in your role, and of taking new initiatives and products to market
• You will have specific and recent experience working on multi-channel brand communications campaigns, ideally with digital content at their core.
• You will have first-hand knowledge of new and emerging content distribution channels, and how these can be used to grow businesses
• You will have several years experience managing and growing a team
• And will have been a part of a senior management team in a successful, ideally global, business or brand
• You will have a good working knowledge of the structure and culture of the advertising and communications industry
• And ideally some experience of large scale events/Festivals – though this is not critica
• You may well have won awards for creative work / content you have commissioned or produced
• Must be familiar with general computer use including Microsoft word, excel, PowerPoint and outlook
• Active user and consumer of a wide variety of social media channels wil be a distinct advantage
• Presence, energy, gravitas
• Articulate and a great writer
• Resilience and unflinching accountability
• Clear-headed: able to blend analytical and instinctive decision-making
• Ruthlessly well organised and gets things done. A do-er not a faffer.
• Empathetic and open to the needs and opinions of customers and colleagues