Studio Director
Department: WPP / Ogilvy
Location: London / National
Contract type: Permanent
Full Time/Part time: Full Time
Reporting into: WPP Lead
The Role
As a Studio Director within the Studio Network—a dynamic WPP-operated brand amplification powerhouse—you will be at the helm of creating and scaling distinctive, platform-native content across Europe. Your core mission is to seamlessly run one of our studios, acting as the trusted partner and strategic advisor for brand marketers. You will lead a talented core team, orchestrate creative delivery, and continuously elevate the quality of our output, ensuring our studio remains the go-to destination for every brand brief.
At Ogilvy, we are guided by David Ogilvy’s core values: Do the Right Thing, Do the Best Work of Our Lives, and Do It Together. If these principles resonate with you, we’d love for you to join us in shaping what’s next.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead with Impact: Direct the studio’s daily operations under the clients leadership, ensuring every brief meets agreed standards and service levels are consistently achieved.
- Build Lasting Partnerships: Become the trusted face of the studio to brand marketers across your markets. You'll join their planning sessions, showcase results, and proactively remove any roadblocks.
- Optimize and Orchestrate: Smartly match capacity to demand, balancing your core team, flexible resources, and the wider network bench to handle workflow peaks smoothly.
- Elevate the Creative Standard: Act as the guardian of quality, overseeing decision gates, tracking compliance to our 100% KPI, and ensuring we hit high scores on the clients Creative Scale.
- Global Collaboration: Seamlessly manage the daily workflow with our global delivery centres (India and South Africa), ensuring flawless quality control before assets reach client approvers.
- Drive Continuous Improvement: Own the quarterly studio scorecard, pinpointing and driving at least one major operational improvement each quarter.
- Champion Your Team: Foster a supportive environment focused on retention and growth. Lead onboarding, ongoing training, and certify the team on every new brand.
Key Skills
- Proven leadership in running a high-volume, high-quality creative or content studio.
- Exceptional stakeholder management skills, with a knack for building trust with senior brand marketers and navigating complex matrix structures.
- Strong operational acumen, including capacity planning, resource management, and workflow optimization across global delivery centres.
- A sharp eye for creative quality and platform-native content, with experience using data and performance metrics to measure and elevate output.
- Excellent problem-solving abilities, capable of turning scorecard data into actionable quarterly improvements.
- A passion for people development, with a track record of building, retaining, and growing high-performing teams.
About You
You are a natural leader who thrives at the intersection of operational excellence and creative brilliance. You don't just manage processes; you inspire teams and build unshakeable trust with clients. You are commercially savvy, culturally fluent, and possess a proactive mindset that spots opportunities for improvement before they become issues. If you are ready to drive an engine that produces world-class content for one of the world's most iconic brand portfolios, and you love seeing your team grow alongside the work, you'll be right at home here.
Benefits & Culture
At Ogilvy, we are a friendly, collaborative, and eclectic team united by a shared commitment to doing the best work of our lives. Beyond client work, you’ll have the chance to shape our vibrant culture, join active social teams, and contribute to our industry-leading DEI initiatives.
Here is a snapshot of the benefits we offer:
- Hybrid Working: We embrace a hybrid model that blends collaborative in-office time with the flexibility to work remotely.
- Annual Leave: 25 days holiday, a paid volunteering day, plus the option to buy up to 5 additional days.
- Pension: a generous matched scheme. Contribute 4% (Ogilvy pays 6%) up to a maximum contribution of 7% (Ogilvy pays 10.5%—totalling a powerful 17.5%).
- Healthcare & Wellbeing: BUPA Private Medical Insurance, plus discounted BUPA dental cover or financial contribution towards your physical and mental wellness.
- Employee Assistance: 24/7 access to remote GPs, mental health support, physio, nutrition consultations, and confidential counselling for you and your family.
- Free 1-to-1 Coaching: Professional and personal growth coaching sessions annually.
- Life Assurance & Income Protection: Financial peace of mind for you and your loved ones.
Ogilvy champions innovation and the thoughtful application of AI. We encourage you to use AI tools to enhance your application and achieve the best possible results. During interviews, we may explore how you leverage AI, showcasing your judgment and ability to integrate these technologies effectively.
Please ensure your application authentically reflects your own skills, experience, and unique contributions.
Our ambition is to attract the very best diverse talent to Ogilvy, and to be the employer of choice in the UK. We want everyone to feel welcome when they join us, and once they’re here, for them to want to stay with us, grow their career, and to feel they belong with us.
We are an equal opportunity employer and we’re committed to creating an inclusive, welcoming environment for everyone who wants to work at Ogilvy. For us, diversity, equity and inclusion is integrated into everything that we do. We believe that for creativity to flourish, everything about how we work must have diversity at its core. Your race, colour, ethnic, religion, gender, gender identity, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, have no bearing on our hiring decisions, but we encourage everyone to feel free to express their true selves in an environment we are consistently striving to make as inclusive as possible.
We aim to facilitate an accessible and positive application experience for all candidates. If you require any adjustments from us to support you through the process or expect to require any adjustments to working conditions to be able to best perform in the role, please let us know. We are happy to consider all reasonable adjustments.
If you live with a disability and you would like to take advantage of our offer of a guaranteed interview under the Disability Confident Scheme, please ensure you fill out our voluntary Equal Opportunities Questionnaire when applying.