Head of Digital and Creative Services

Job Title: Head of Digital and Creative Services

Locations: Chester, Manchester, London (Hybrid)

Full Time, Permanent

Springer Nature Group

Springer Nature opens the doors to discovery for researchers, educators, clinicians and other professionals. Every day, around the globe, our imprints, books, journals, platforms and technology solutions reach millions of people. For over 175 years our brands and imprints have been a trusted source of knowledge to these communities and today, more than ever, we see it as our responsibility to ensure that fundamental knowledge can be found, verified, understood and used by our communities – enabling them to improve outcomes, make progress, and benefit the generations that follow.

About Springer Health+ (part of the Springer Nature Group)

Springer Health+ is a leading global medical communications and education provider. Working in partnership with pharmaceutical companies and key opinion leaders. At Springer Health+, we see beyond the data – we see the people behind every breakthrough. We do more than help experts across the medical community keep up with science; we help them move it forward, making healthcare smarter and more human.

Purpose of the role

The Head of Digital and Creative Services will shape and activate the creative and digital strategy for Springer Health+, Adis and the Local Pillar, building the capability, governance and operating model needed to deliver high-quality digital and creative services consistently across global and local teams.

Reporting to the Digital Services Director, the role will lead the digital and creative services team as a centre of expertise and strategic enablement hub, establishing scalable ways of working, governance, supplier management and advisory support serving both pharma HQ and local affiliate teams across the world.

The Head will help teams in all locations identify, sell, scope, procure and deliver effective digital and creative solutions, acting as the bridge between commercial requirements, scientific content, local market needs, creative specialists and external production partners.

The Head will provision and promote creative and digital support to business stakeholders across the global agency businesses in the UK and USA, the six additional Local Pillar geographies across Europe and Asia, the Adis journals portfolio and the Independent Medical Education team in the UK and USA.

Accountability

The role is accountable for building an enablement model that supports both central and local teams, clarifies what should be delivered internally, externally or locally, and improves consistency, quality and cost control across the creative and digital supplier ecosystem.

Key Responsibilities

Market, service and commercial support

- Collaborate with stakeholders from across the business to develop scalable digital and creative offerings that can be promoted and delivered across local and global teams.

- Support the definition, scoping, budgeting and resourcing of solutions such as websites, HCP platforms, e-learning, video, animation, infographics, podcasts, data visualisation, omnichannel programmes and digital congress activities.

- Provide oversight for particularly complex, high-value or strategically important digital and creative programmes enabling all offices to achieve self-sustaining digital and creative production capabilities

- Provide strategic enablement to local teams, helping them translate client needs into strong briefs, appropriate solution choices, realistic budgets and well-managed supplier relationships.

- Support country, account and business-development teams in the identification and shaping of appropriate digital and creative opportunities.

- Contribute to account planning, client workshops, capability presentations, proposals and pitches where requested by business unit leaders.

- Develop proof of concepts, templates, case studies and other promotional tools that enable teams to sell and deliver these services confidently.

- Develop reusable briefing templates, supplier evaluation criteria, pricing guidance and decision tools that raise digital and creative confidence across countries without creating unnecessary central dependency.

- Support the creation of clear, realistic and commercially sustainable scopes, budgets, production plans and delivery models.

Creative strategy and team management

- Shape and implement the creative and digital strategy in alignment with the wider strategy and priorities established in consultation with senior business stakeholders across SH+, Adis and the Local Pillar. This includes defining the future-state role of the digital and creative services team as a strategic enablement function, centre of expertise and catalyst for capability building across geographies.

- Manage the creative team, including objectives, performance, workload, priorities, wellbeing and resource allocation.

- Build the team’s capability to advise, challenge and enable internal stakeholders on creative and digital strategy, supplier selection, solution design, production quality and cost-effective delivery.

- Match internal and external creative resources to projects according to requirements, specialist skills, capacity, cost and timescales.

- Identify capability and capacity gaps and recommend appropriate recruitment, development, supplier or organisational responses.

The postholder will manage creative professionals and is expected to have a strong grasp on high-quality design work but is not required to be a practising designer or provide specialist design coaching.

Creative production and workflow

- Design, introduce and maintain a consistent, scalable creative and digital production process covering requests, briefing, procurement, resource allocation, production, review, approval and completion. The process should be usable by both central and local teams and should support better decision-making even where delivery is completed by external vendors.

- Select and manage the workflow tools required for scheduling, capacity planning, collaboration, review, approval and reporting.

- Establish clear responsibilities, handovers and quality checkpoints, ensuring briefs are actionable and appropriate specialist review is included.

- Identify practical opportunities to use AI tools and automation to improve productivity, streamline routine production tasks and reduce avoidable rework across digital and creative workflows.

- Promote appropriate adoption of AI-assisted ways of working within the team, ensuring tools are used responsibly, transparently and with suitable human review.

- Monitor workloads, capacity, project status and bottlenecks, continually improving the process to reduce delays, rework and inefficient use of resources.

Partners, standards and governance

- Build and manage a preferred network of agencies, freelancers, technology partners and specialist suppliers, including selection, onboarding, commercial negotiation, capacity planning and performance review.

- Determine the appropriate balance between internal delivery, external production, reusable templates and suitable automation.

- Establish and maintain proportionate standards for creative production, quality assurance, brand consistency, user experience, accessibility, AI-assisted production and supplier delivery.

- Work with creative, scientific, editorial, technical, legal, compliance and information-security specialists to ensure work receives the appropriate review and governance.

- Introduce governance for externally delivered creative and digital work, including common briefing expectations, supplier monitoring, quality review, cost transparency and post-project learning.

Operational and financial management

- Maintain oversight of workload, capacity, supplier commitments, delivery performance and the financial health of significant projects. Use this visibility to identify duplicated effort, unmanaged supplier spend and opportunities to consolidate or improve external delivery models.

- Regularly review the cost, performance, quality and value of vendors, including those used by local teams, and recommend improvements to supplier selection, briefing, pricing, governance and delivery oversight.

- Report significant operational, financial, quality or capability risks

Skills, Experience, Qualifications:

Essential experience and capabilities:

- Significant experience managing creative, digital or integrated production teams in a medical communications/healthcare communications, agency.

- Proven experience implementing creative and digital capabilites development and delivery strategies.

- Experience building shared services, centres of expertise or enablement models that support distributed teams without removing local ownership.

- Strong understanding of creative production, workflow design, resource management and quality assurance.

- Experience selecting, implementing and maintaining workflow tools for briefing, scheduling, review, approval and reporting.

- Good knowledge of digital deliverables and the disciplines required to scope and produce them.

- Experience managing agencies, freelancers, production partners or other specialist suppliers, including organisations with English as a second language

- Ability to coach non-specialist commercial and local market teams on how to brief, assess, challenge and manage digital and creative suppliers effectively.

- Strong project, commercial and financial-management skills, including estimating, budgeting, capacity planning and supplier-cost management.

- Confident client-facing, presentation and stakeholder-management skills.

- Ability to work effectively with creative, scientific, editorial, technical, operational and commercial specialists.

- Ability to lead implementation independently while working within the strategic direction established by the Digital Services Director.

Desirable experience

- Experience working across local-market and global pharmaceutical programmes.

- Experience developing shared services, centre-of-expertise or distributed production models across multiple geographies.

- Familiarity with pharmaceutical review, approval and compliance processes.

- Experience developing shared services or distributed production models.

- Knowledge of accessibility, inclusive design, omnichannel communications and digital analytics.

- Experience introducing AI-assisted or automated creative-production processes with appropriate human oversight.

- Understanding of how AI can support productivity, ideation, content adaptation, workflow efficiency and production-quality control in a regulated healthcare communications environment.

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