Senior Manager Brand & Creative

Team & Vendor Management Manage, mentor, and provide creative direction and feedback on deliverables for internal creative team members, freelancers, agencies, and vendors while identifying resource needs and making appropriate business cases to support company priorities. Develop creative approaches for campaigns that support investor education, project marketing, company reputation, executive visibility, business development, and employee communications, including executive-, investor-, prospect-, and partner-facing materials.

The Senior Manager, Brand & Creative develops, evolves, and executes visual brand expression for CMB Regional Centers and NHK Capital Partners. This role translates business and marketing strategy into creative concepts, campaigns, brand systems, and polished deliverables that strengthen each companys market position. Both strategic and hands-on, the Senior Manager leads high-visibility creative initiatives, personally develops priority work, guides internal and external creative resources, establishes quality standards, and builds the processes required to deliver consistently excellent work. The ideal candidate is an experienced brand creative with exceptional visual judgment, strong business acumen, leadership presence, and the ability to guide creative work from strategy through final delivery. This person must be equally comfortable presenting recommendations to senior leadership, coaching creative professionals, developing flagship campaign assets, and ensuring that final work is accurate, polished, and delivered on time. Essential Job Functions Brand Stewardship & Creative Leadership Develop, maintain, socialize, and enforce brand guidelines, visual systems, templates, and quality standards. Serve as the creative lead for both CMB and NHK, ensuring each distinct brand is consistent, credible, compelling, strategically aligned, and appropriately evolved across audiences, channels, campaigns, events, and business needs. Present and secure alignment on creative recommendations with marketing leadership, senior executives, and business stakeholders. Stay current on relevant design, brand, marketing, digital, and communication trends and apply them thoughtfully. Creative Development and Execution Partner with content and communications leadership to translate messaging and narrative strategy into cohesive visual storytelling. Develop creative approaches for campaigns that support investor education, project marketing, company reputation, executive visibility, business development, and employee communications, including executive-, investor-, prospect-, and partner-facing materials. Develop integrated campaign concepts and key visual systems that can be effectively extended across print, digital, email, social media, presentations, events, and other multimedia. Provide creative direction for photography, video, motion graphics, digital experiences, and other multimedia storytelling. Ensure deliverables demonstrate strong visual hierarchy, typography, image selection, information design, accuracy, and narrative flow. Creative Operations Establish and manage scalable systems for creative intake, prioritization, production, review, approval, and delivery. Maintain visibility into workload, deadlines, dependencies, and resource needs, and ensure all assets are tagged, searchable, regularly updated, and consistently socialized for cross-department use. Team & Vendor Management Manage, mentor, and provide creative direction and feedback on deliverables for internal creative team members, freelancers, agencies, and vendors while identifying resource needs and making appropriate business cases to support company priorities. Proactively ensure that resources are in place to deliver on priorities and needs of the business, making business cases for required resources. Knowledge, Skills and Abilities Exceptional portfolio demonstrating sophisticated brand work, integrated campaigns, art direction, and hands-on creative execution. Expert visual-design skills with strong command of typography, layout, imagery, information design, and Adobe Creative Cloud; Premiere Pro experience is a plus. Ability to connect creative recommendations to business strategy, audience needs, marketing objectives, and regulated-industry requirements. Strong work ethic, with high standards of excellence resulting in exceptional deliverable quality, efficiency, and accuracy. Excellent organizational and time management skills in order to balance competing priorities and successfully meet deadlines. Advanced knowledge, skills, and ability for project management including ability to work well under pressure while maintaining creativity within defined set of legal and regulatory parameters and complying with internal processes and procedures for content approval. Ability to read, write, speak, and understand English; travel may be required up to 20% based on business and project needs. Education and Experience Five (5) to seven (7) years of progressive experience in graphic design, art direction, brand creative, or related discipline. Bachelors degree in graphic design, visual communication, advertising, marketing, or a related field required; equivalent relevant experience may be considered. Experience managing or formally directing the work of other creative professionals and managing freelancers, agencies, and/or production vendors. Experience developing integrated campaigns and building or evolving brand systems. Experience directing photography and video production. Experience in financial services, commercial real estate, highly regulated industries, complex B2B organizations preferred. Strong proficiency using Microsoft Office required; prior work experience with social media, photography, and/or videography required. Experience designing for international audiences a plus.