Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Creative Coordinator
💰 $45,000 - $75,000
MarketingCreativeProject ManagementContent Production
🎯 Role Definition
The Creative Coordinator is the operational backbone of creative teams, responsible for planning, tracking, and delivering creative assets across campaigns and channels. This role liaises between designers, copywriters, producers, agencies, and stakeholders to ensure on-time, on-brand creative output. The Creative Coordinator combines project management, production knowledge, and a strong understanding of creative workflows to streamline processes and elevate creative quality.
📈 Career Progression
Typical Career Path
Entry Point From:
- Marketing Coordinator or Marketing Assistant
- Production Coordinator or Project Coordinator
- Junior Designer, Junior Producer, or Studio Assistant
Advancement To:
- Senior Creative Coordinator
- Creative Producer or Production Manager
- Creative Operations Manager or Art Director
Lateral Moves:
- Content Strategist
- Digital Project Manager
- Account Manager (Agency)
Core Responsibilities
Primary Functions
- Develop, maintain, and manage detailed project plans and creative production timelines for multi-channel campaigns, ensuring deliverables are tracked from brief to final delivery and deadlines are consistently met.
- Translate marketing briefs and stakeholder requests into clear creative briefs and asset specifications for designers, copywriters, video producers, and external agencies, including size, format, and technical requirements.
- Coordinate cross-functional teams (design, copy, social, paid media, web, video) to sequence work, allocate resources, and resolve dependencies so campaigns launch on schedule and meet quality standards.
- Serve as the main point of contact for internal stakeholders and external vendors/agencies, facilitating communication, capturing feedback, and driving approvals across iterative creative reviews.
- Maintain and govern brand guidelines and creative standards across all assets, performing quality control and brand compliance checks before assets are published or handed to production.
- Manage the digital asset management (DAM) system and shared creative libraries — organizing, tagging, versioning, and archiving assets for quick retrieval and reuse.
- Prepare and manage production budgets and vendor invoices for shoots, print production, digital asset creation, and post-production, reconciling costs against project estimates and approvals.
- Coordinate photoshoots and video productions: scheduling talent and crew, securing locations and permits, assembling call sheets, and overseeing logistics to execute creative shoots efficiently.
- Oversee file preparation and technical specifications for print, web, mobile, email, and social platforms — ensuring correct color profiles, bleed, resolution, file types, and accessibility requirements.
- Support creative testing initiatives by preparing multivariate assets, coordinating A/B test variants, and tracking production of variant assets for performance marketing.
- Track project performance metrics and KPIs (time to delivery, revision counts, on-time rate, budget variance), prepare status reports, and present program health to creative leadership and stakeholders.
- Maintain a centralized production calendar and editorial schedule that aligns creative workflows with marketing campaigns, product launches, and external events.
- Facilitate creative review sessions and stakeholder workshops, capture actionable feedback, prioritize revisions, and ensure feedback is addressed clearly and in a timely manner.
- Coordinate localization and translation workflows, managing regional asset adaptations, copy transcreation requests, and vendor communications to ensure on-brand global rollouts.
- Implement and refine creative operations processes, including intake forms, brief templates, approval matrices, and handoff procedures to improve speed, clarity, and output quality.
- Manage relationships with freelance creatives and external vendors — negotiating scopes of work, monitoring deliverables, ensuring contractual compliance, and onboarding new partners.
- Produce and distribute creative status updates, asset trackers, and post-mortem analyses to capture lessons learned and continuous process improvements.
- Support creative direction by preparing mood boards, style guides, and reference materials that align with campaign strategy and brand positioning.
- Coordinate digital publishing and campaign launches by uploading assets to ad platforms, CMS, email platforms, and social schedulers; verify live assets and troubleshoot publishing issues.
- Conduct pre-flight checks and final QA for campaign assets across devices and platforms, including link testing, responsiveness, metadata, and tracking tag verification.
- Maintain version control and change logs for key creative assets, ensuring a clear audit trail for approvals, iterations, and final releases.
- Manage ad hoc production needs (retouching requests, last-minute creative updates, emergency re-sizes) with agility while minimizing disruption to ongoing projects.
- Support content governance by ensuring legal, compliance, and accessibility reviews are completed and documented before external publication.
- Collaborate with analytics and growth teams to ingest performance feedback and iterate on creative assets based on data-driven insights and user behavior patterns.
- Drive continuous improvement initiatives: recommend tooling upgrades (project management, DAM, proofing tools), automation opportunities, and workflow optimizations to scale creative operations efficiently.
Secondary Functions
- Assist with quarterly creative audits to identify outdated assets and opportunities for consolidation or refresh.
- Support onboarding and training for new creative team members on systems, processes, and brand standards.
- Maintain and update role-based documentation, process maps, and templates to preserve institutional knowledge.
- Facilitate cross-team knowledge sharing sessions and contribute to supplier review meetings to ensure high vendor performance.
- Prepare executive-ready slide decks and summaries highlighting creative program impacts, resourcing needs, and next-quarter plans.
- Support event creative logistics, including signage, collateral production, booth assets, and on-site vendor coordination.
- Manage small in-house design or production projects independently, from scoping through delivery, when required.
- Liaise with legal and compliance teams to track approvals and archival retention requirements for marketing assets.
Required Skills & Competencies
Hard Skills (Technical)
- Project management: proficiency coordinating multiple concurrent creative projects, using tools like Asana, Trello, Jira, Monday.com, or Wrike.
- Digital asset management (DAM): experience organizing, tagging, and maintaining shared creative libraries and version control.
- Adobe Creative Cloud literacy: familiarity with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and basic After Effects/Premiere workflows to support designers and vendors.
- Production knowledge: understanding of print production specifications, color profiles (CMYK), bleed, dielines, and pre-press workflows.
- Video production basics: experience coordinating shoots, timelines, post-production deliverables, codecs, and file handoffs.
- File preparation and optimization: creating correct export settings for web, mobile, email, social, and programmatic advertising platforms.
- Content management systems (CMS): experience publishing and troubleshooting assets in CMS platforms (WordPress, Contentful, Drupal) and email platforms (Mailchimp, Braze).
- Creative brief development: ability to translate marketing objectives into clear, actionable creative briefs and acceptance criteria.
- Analytics & performance tracking: familiarity with campaign tracking, UTM conventions, basic Google Analytics or marketing analytics dashboards to interpret creative impact.
- Budgeting and vendor management: experience creating estimates, managing purchase orders, and reconciling invoices for production.
- Localization workflows: coordinating translation, transcreation, and regional asset adaptations.
- Accessibility: basic knowledge of digital accessibility standards (WCAG) and how they apply to creative assets.
- Basic HTML/CSS: familiarity with simple email and web asset troubleshooting and responsive considerations.
Soft Skills
- Excellent written and verbal communication — clear, concise briefs and status updates for creative and non-creative stakeholders.
- Strong organizational skills and attention to detail — proven ability to manage complex deliverables and version control across channels.
- Time management and prioritization — ability to balance urgent requests with long-term project plans and resource constraints.
- Stakeholder management and diplomacy — able to manage expectations, negotiate timelines, and drive consensus across teams.
- Problem-solving orientation — resourceful in resolving production bottlenecks, creative conflicts, and last-minute requests.
- Collaborative team player — fosters positive working relationships with designers, marketers, agencies, and external vendors.
- Adaptability and resilience — comfortable in fast-paced environments with shifting priorities and tight deadlines.
- Creative sensibility — appreciation for design, storytelling, and brand expression to support high-quality creative outcomes.
- Critical feedback and constructive review skills — able to synthesize feedback into actionable tasks for creative teams.
- Leadership potential — able to mentor junior coordinators and take ownership of cross-functional initiatives.
Education & Experience
Educational Background
Minimum Education:
- Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Communications, Graphic Design, Advertising, Film/Media Production, or equivalent experience.
Preferred Education:
- Bachelor's or Associate degree focused on Graphic Design, Advertising, or Production Management; certificates in project management or digital marketing a plus.
Relevant Fields of Study:
- Marketing
- Communications
- Graphic Design
- Advertising
- Film/Video Production
- Fine Arts / Visual Communications
- Media Production
Experience Requirements
Typical Experience Range:
- 2–5 years of experience supporting creative teams in-house or at an agency, with demonstrated exposure to multi-channel campaign production.
Preferred:
- 3+ years of creative operations, production coordination, or project management experience within marketing, creative agencies, or studio environments; experience with DAM systems, Adobe Creative Cloud workflows, and vendor/agency management preferred.