Description of the role 

As the Marketing Operations and Creative Lead, you will provide strategic and hands-on leadership to a high-performing, multi-disciplinary team based in South Africa and dedicated to supporting the Northern Hemisphere business. You will set the standard for creative excellence, champion production quality, and oversee data analytics delivery across a fast-paced, high-volume marketing environment, with a primary focus on UK business needs.
This role demands a confident and collaborative leader who can balance strategic direction with operational execution. You will guide the team's creative output, oversee workflow and prioritisation, and ensure resources are allocated effectively. You will take responsibility for managing the flow of marketing and campaign requests into the hub - assigning tasks, upholding processes, removing obstacles, and maintaining momentum.
Working closely with the wider Marketing team based in the UK, you will influence, and shape creatively consistent work aligned to defined briefs and brand standards. You will mentor and develop your team of creatives, multimedia specialists, production experts, and data analysts, fostering a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Ultimately, you will ensure the team delivers high-quality, on-brand, and strategically aligned work that supports business objectives and strengthens our marketing impact.

Key Responsibilities

Leadership & Team Management:

•    Lead, mentor, and develop a team of creatives, multimedia designers, production specialists, and data analysts.
•    Foster a collaborative, motivated, and high-performance culture across geographies.
•    Conduct regular check-ins, performance reviews, coaching sessions, and skills development planning.
•    Ensure a healthy workload balance and support staff wellbeing in a demanding, fast-paced environment.
•    Work with the Head of Marketing Operations to ensure strong alignment, communication, and integration with the UK Marketing team.

Creative Direction & Brand Custodianship:
•    Guide the creative output of the team, ensuring all work meets brand standards and communicates clearly to Northern Hemisphere audiences.
•    Serve as a brand guardian by overseeing the development, application, and evolution of brand guidelines across all team outputs.
•    Collaborate with cross-functional teams to understand project requirements and develop strategically aligned creative concepts.
•    Challenge, refine, and elevate creative ideas and deliverables, ensuring best-in-class execution.
•    Manage relationships with external creative and production partners.
•    Ensure campaign creative aligns with channel requirements, audience insights, and performance expectations.
•    Oversee the testing, launch, and implementation of marketing outputs from this team - reporting on issues, resolutions, performance, and learnings.

Operational Oversight, Workflow Management, Resource Planning & Capacity Management:
•    Own end-to-end workflow management, including intake, prioritisation, and allocation of briefs.
•    Traffic management to ensure efficient movement of work through the team and timely delivery of high-standard output.
•    Maintain visibility of team capacity, resource allocation, and operational bottlenecks.
•    Develop and maintain production schedules, ensuring on-time, within-budget delivery across all projects.
•    Monitor project progress, identify risks early, and implement corrective actions to maintain workflow momentum.
•    Manage the full production process for creative, multimedia, and marketing communications projects, from briefing to final delivery.
•    Allocate team resources according to skill, specialism, and business priority.
•    Monitor workloads and provide early escalation when demand exceeds capacity.
•    Plan short-term and long-term resourcing needs, identifying skill gaps and making recommendations for team growth.

Quality Assurance & Production Excellence:
•    Build and maintain a rigorous QA process across all creative, production, and analytical outputs.
•    Ensure consistency, accuracy, compliance, and brand alignment across digital, print, video, multimedia, and data insights.
•    Coordinate the approval process for all team outputs, ensuring timely reviews and clear feedback loops.
•    Ensure proper quality checking processes are in place, with regular audits to safeguard standards and consistency.
•    Supervise documentation, compliance, and approval trails - ensuring briefs, assets, plans, and performance reports are stored correctly with a clear audit trail.

Stakeholder Management & Cross-Border Collaboration:
•    Act as the primary point of contact for UK stakeholders across all Marketing teams.
•    Provide exceptional stakeholder service: aligning expectations, managing deadlines, and communicating progress proactively.
•    Prepare and deliver timely presentations, reports, and updates to internal stakeholders on project status and team output.
•    Facilitate seamless collaboration with all internal partners to deliver integrated, insight-led campaigns.

Continuous Improvement & Innovation:
•    Drive a culture of operational excellence, creative innovation, and continuous optimisation.
•    Stay up-to-date with industry trends, emerging technologies, design techniques, multimedia production approaches, and analytics best practice.
•    Identify opportunities to improve processes, tools, and workflows to enhance efficiency, productivity, and overall output quality.
•    Champion the adoption of new methodologies and technologies to future-proof the team's capabilities.

Experience, skill and capability

Leadership & Team Management:
•    Proven experience (minimum 10 years) in marketing production management, creative operations, or a similar leadership role.
•    Demonstrated ability to lead, motivate, and develop multi-disciplinary creative, production, and analytics teams.
•    Strong decision-making skills with the ability to prioritise and manage multiple concurrent projects in a fast-paced environment.
•    Excellent communication, presentation, and stakeholder management skills, with experience collaborating across geographies.
Creative, Production & Campaign Expertise:
•    Strong understanding of creative, multimedia, and campaign production processes across digital, social, and print channels.
•    Solid knowledge of design principles, campaign best practices, and creative development workflows.
•    Experience managing end-to-end production processes, resource allocation, and traffic/workflow operations.
•    Ability to review, challenge, and elevate creative output to ensure the highest standard of brand alignment and execution.
•    Familiarity with website content workflows and CMS platforms (e.g., WordPress); understanding of digital development processes and constraints.
Technical Skills:
•    Proficiency in project management tools (e.g., Basecamp, Trello, Asana, Jira) and Microsoft Office (particularly Excel and PowerPoint).
•    Competency with Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat) for reviewing and approving artwork.
•    Knowledge of press preparation, artwork QA, and digital asset management best practices.
Data & Analytics Understanding:
•    Experience working with CRM data and coordinating data-driven campaign workflows.
•    Ability to interpret analytics input to support campaign optimisation and continuous improvement.
Problem-Solving, Quality & Continuous Improvement:
•    Excellent problem-solving abilities with a strong focus on identifying risks early and implementing corrective actions.
•    Commitment to rigorous quality assurance, process improvement, and operational excellence.
•    Ability to build and refine efficient processes, tools, and workflows that enhance productivity and output quality.

What We Value

At Investec we seek creative, talented people with passion, energy and stamina, who collaborate unselfishly.

We are committed to diversity and inclusion when recruiting internally and externally.