Description
The Zendesk Creative Team brings Zendesk to life by designing high-impact brand moments that are aligned with our voice, look, and feel, and stand out from the competition.
As the Creative Lead for Experiential Marketing, you will enhance our creative platform across both digital and in-person experiences. Your focus will be on fostering human imagination, innovation, and storytelling to create engaging interactions that align with Zendesk’s brand and business goals.
This role is part of Creative Leadership and sits in close collaboration with the Experiential Marketing team, the Creative Studio, Communications, the executive leadership team (ELT), combining strategic leadership with a hands-on approach to create world-class immersive experiences that shape the way people interact with our brand.
Key responsibilities:
- Own the design system for Zendesk’s event architecture
- Define and steward a cohesive system of visual principles, templates, and components that scales across event types and channels.
- Translate brand strategy and event objectives into connected experiences across presentations, livestreams, and in-person environments.
- Set clear guidance and quality standards so internal teams and agency partners can apply the system consistently while making each event feel distinct.
- Deliver creative excellence at our flagship events
- Lead creative direction for Relate, Showcase, AI Summit, and other flagship events, translating event strategy into memorable customer experiences.
- Bring storytelling to life across the full attendee journey: demand generation, registration, in-person and digital experiences.
- Partner with the Experiential Marketing team and external agencies from concept through execution to ensure every detail meets a high creative bar.
- Lead through teamwork and creative partnership
- Build strong partnerships across Creative, Experiential Marketing, agencies, Communications, executive leaders, and business stakeholders to align the work around shared event goals.
- Create an environment of candor, respect, psychological safety, and constructive critique.
- Guide and mentor creative partners, share best practices, and help the broader team deliver its best work.
Skills required:
- Strong expertise in event branding with a focus on the customer experience
- Understanding of production processes
- Experience with brand activations and attendee engagement
- Experience with cross-functional group facilitation, creative ideation, executive engagement, and strategic concept development
- Strong business acumen skills, including financial literacy, executive presence, and project management
- Customer-obsession, entrepreneurial spirit, persistence, bias towards action and a well-rounded skill set
- Ability to translate complex business problems into inspiring creative opportunities
- Provide clear creative direction and feedback to internal creative team and agency partners
- Willingness to travel to site visits and/or on-site events
- Proven ability to work across timezones effectively
- Experience using generative AI tools as part of the creative process
- Proficiency in Adobe, Figma, and Google apps