Director, Performance Creative

NBCUniversal•New York, NY

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

NBCUniversal Creative Team is looking for a Director of Performance Creative — a strategic practitioner who will build and lead the performance creative practice across our entire creative organization. The foundation exists. We have a functioning performance creative capability within our digital portfolio — measurable, iterative, and proven. Your job is to take that foundation, evolve it, and extend it across everything we do. That means bringing versioning, optimization, and a testing mindset to creative work that has never been approached that way before. It means working with creative teams who think in concepts and scripts, not variants and KPIs — and changing how they work without breaking what makes them great. This is equal parts strategic, operational, and organizational. You need to think at the level of capability architecture and understand how a campaign actually runs. You need to be a credible voice with creative teams, with clients, and with leadership. And you need to be comfortable building something that doesn't have a fully defined playbook yet.

Requirements

Performance creative expertise across paid media environments. You think in variants, not just concepts. You know what makes a good A/B test and what makes a bad one. You've built testing frameworks that actually got used. You understand how creative performs across platforms — digital, social, CTV, and beyond.
Fluency in how media is planned, bought, and measured. You don't need to come from a media company — but you need to understand how media works. You know how campaigns are structured, how inventory is sold, how measurement works across platforms, and what clients actually care about when they look at a performance report.
Strategic range and organizational influence. You can operate at the level of capability architecture — thinking about what this practice should look like in two years — and also roll up your sleeves when needed. You've worked cross-functionally with creative, sales, and technology teams. You know how to bring people along on a change they didn't ask for.
Data literacy and analytical rigor. Comfortable with campaign analytics, performance reporting, and the tools that support them. You can turn data into a clear narrative and a clear next step. You know the difference between a meaningful insight and a vanity metric.
Cross-functional range. You move fluidly across teams with different processes, priorities, and vocabularies — creative, sales, strategy, ad ops, technology. You pick up how other teams work quickly and operate as a credible collaborator in rooms you didn't originally come from.
Director-level seniority and judgment. You've led a capability or a team before. You take ownership without waiting for permission. You manage up and laterally with confidence. You know when to push and when to listen.
Fresh thinking, grounded in reality. You bring perspective from outside the legacy media model — you've seen performance creative done well and you know what it takes to build it. But you're realistic about organizational constraints and skilled at working within them while pushing against them at the same time.

Responsibilities

Build the performance creative practice: Define what performance creative means at NBCU beyond our existing digital work. Develop the methodology, frameworks, and playbooks that make versioning, A/B testing, and optimization a standard part of how we work — from pitch to production to measurement. This is change management as much as it is creative strategy.
Expand from pitch to production: Work with creative and strategy teams to embed a performance lens at the earliest stages of client conversations — connecting creative approach to client KPIs from the start and building in testing options before a single asset is made. The goal: clients see NBCU as a performance creative partner, not just a creative vendor.
Oversee the existing performance creative capability: Maintain and evolve the performance creative work already running across our digital portfolio. This is the foundation you're building from — it doesn't go away, it grows. Your direct report (Coordinator) handles day-to-day campaign execution and reporting; you provide strategic direction, quality oversight, and a clear path toward expanded scope.
Lead client relationships strategically: Serve as the senior performance creative voice in client conversations — bringing data-driven POVs, optimization recommendations, and a clear narrative around what we're testing and why. As the broader creative organization builds its own performance creative fluency, client relationship ownership will evolve accordingly.
Develop benchmarks and best practices: Turn what we're learning into something the whole organization can use. Benchmarks, creative best practice guides, case studies, pitch-ready materials — the infrastructure that makes performance thinking scalable across teams who weren't originally built for it.
Partner on performance creative systems: Work with the Director of Creative Technology to define the technology requirements for versioning, A/B testing, and optimization at scale. Be a credible voice on what systems the team needs to deliver on this mandate — and an active partner in building them.
Drive internal adoption: You're asking creative teams, sales teams, and clients to work differently. That doesn't happen through a deck. It happens through relationships, demonstrated results, and the patience to bring people along without losing momentum.