Wanted: A Conceptual Designer with a Flair for Marketing (or Vice Versa)

Wanted: A Conceptual Designer with a Flair for Marketing (or Vice Versa)

Taoti is looking to grow our creative team with another designer. But we need someone who designs with ‘marketing’ in mind...

Someone who believes that copy and visual design go hand in hand…

Someone who is conceptual by nature and can invent compelling creative out of thin air…

You notice that there’s no specific job title attached to this job ad? That’s because A: it’s not about the title, and B: we’re not sure exactly what the title will be (though you’re welcome to suggest one yourself! We’ll throw a field in the application to do so.) That probably depends on whether you’re a marketer that’s unusually good at design, or a designer who’s unusually good at marketing. What we don’t want is someone who says “Give me the words, and I’ll make it look great.” Or “Give me the design, and I’ll put great words to it.” Compelling marketing is the perfect marriage of copy and design in a way that we don’t believe they can be inherently separated—at least not at the conceptual phase.

We’ll spare you the standard list of job requirements and skill sets. (Do we really need to say that you should probably know the Adobe Suite??? That’s just a waste of our mutual time, right?) Instead, here are some things that we’re looking for and/or care about for this role…

• This is a senior level role. You can decide what constitutes ‘senior’ level, but if you graduated last year, that’s probably not going to cut it.
• Can’t stress this one enough: We’re looking for a high energy person with a big personality that can not only do the work, but help sell it (both to your colleagues, as well as to clients!) Think Don/Dawn Draper (but without all the boozing and womanizing.) Someone who has the confidence and poise to stand up in front of a room and convince people that your idea, despite making them just a little bit uncomfortable for whatever reason, is going to get the desired result. You know that good marketing takes friction, so you’re not afraid to go to the mat and push skeptics out of their comfort zone—because that’s how you move the needle.
To be clear, this is a hands-on design role. So unlike Draper, it’s not enough just to be ‘the big idea guy/gal.’ You need to be a practitioner
• -someone who likes to roll up your sleeves and crank out deliverables on a daily basis with the best of them.
• We’ve already covered this, but it’s important, so we’ll say it again: the words matter. They drive the creative. And yes, the words are part of your job. Don’t expect “copy writing’ to give you the prose so that you just have to paint in the lines.
• A lot of the typical work involves web design, branding, ad design, etc. But more and more, video is clutch. Being able to work with video is not a core job requirement, but it’s certainly worth big bonus points if you can do so!
• Taoti is striving to be an AI leader. Obviously, it’s a brave, new world when it comes to AI in this realm, but we want to lean into AI in a way that makes us a better agency and delivers more value to our clients. We don’t expect anyone to have all the AI answers, but the more you can help lead us down that path, the more valuable you’ll be to the team.

Shall we talk specifics? Here are some actual projects/tasks that you might have worked on recently if you already had this job here:

• Come up with a campaign concept (a series of print ads) to drive more visitors to a local tourist attraction
• Create a new ad concept (ie, TV Commercial) to promote “First Wednesdays” to sell more scratcher tickets for DC Lottery
• Lead a brand refresh for a private sector company
• Develop a series of social media posts to promote Events DC
• Collaborate with our UX team to come up with a new interface for DC Metro kiosks
• Conceptualize (and design) a new website to serve as the official public landing page for a high profile infrastructure project
• Create a series of animated digital ads to promote our own venue (www.The507Events.com)

So yes, the job calls for a pretty diverse set of skill sets. Every one of those projects above is a result of a killer proposal and then a successful pitch to the client. So again, being able to support our biz dev efforts with your stellar presentation skills is clutch. We have a biz dev team, but clients don’t want to hear from the sales people. They want to meet the people who will actually be working on their projects. That’s where you come in. That’s why your energy and ‘executive presence’ in the room is a critical part of the job.

Some tips on how to get on the short list:

• Your portfolio is of course first and foremost. We’re looking for an industry veteran who creates work that not just looks pretty, but gets real results. Talk to us about those results!
• As you just saw from the list above, we’re looking for a pretty versatile person with capabilities across lots of mediums. Show us your creative diversity!
• Energy. Personality. Poise. Presence… whatever you want to call it, we’re looking for creative leadership. Someone with a voice who isn’t afraid to use it.
• We’re in the marketing business, and marketing is all about standing out in a sea of sameness. Based on other job ads we’ve posted lately, we expect hundreds of applicants. Many of them who will be more than qualified on paper. How are you going to stand out among them? (Notice how this job ad doesn’t read like most? It’s refreshing, right? Even memorable? This is the kind of thing we’re talking about here. It’s not that we’d take issue with you using AI for your application, but if you do, you’ll end up sounding like everyone else. Which is just a waste of our mutual time.)

A bit about our culture...

“Fun but focused,” as one Taotian put it, is a great way to sum up our culture. We’re a fun and casual shop. The kind of place where you can wear whatever, come and go as you please, bring your dog to work, and have autonomy over your own day for the most part. We have the obligatory creative agency office toys and games. We even a company boat just a short walk from the office that we like to take afternoon cruises on from time to time. But we work hard. take the work seriously, and believe deeply in the mission to make meaningful and measurable impacts for our clients. All the perks and shenanigans and irreverent tone are fun, but to really fit in here, you need to be about the work, and frankly, you need to be good at your job. B- employees that might be able to keep their head down and make it in a lager operation don't tend to last long here. We tend to be a group of overachievers who look to not just grind out the work, but really push the agency forward in the process. Speaking of work, we are not one of those shops that expect their people to be on the clock 50-60 hours a week. Give us a solid and productive 40 hours, and that's all we ask for. But those 40 hours have to count.

We also believe in total transparency and open communication across teams and across ranks. Instead of chain-of-command, we want everyone to have and share their own voice. There are weekly check-ins with your manager (and sometimes, even other managers in other parts of the company.) Every month or so, the CEO holds ‘CafeClutch’ just so he can hear ideas and feedback directly from the team instead of through the filter of management. Questioning the status quo and suggesting better ways to do things is not only okay-it's expected.

Want to see what life at Taoti looks like? Check out our Instagram or ‘about us’ video.

What about benefits?

• 3 weeks PTO for starters, and that goes up each year you're here.
• Bonus opportunities (such as a 3% referral fee for work that you refer to us, $1000 employee referral bonus, and a profit-sharing bonus pool for the top ~20% of employees.
• A hybrid work environment. (We accrue telework just like we do PTO so you can save it up if you want to work remotely for larger chunks of time.)
• 100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance. (50% for qualifying dependents.) And we have good insurance.
• Paid family leave for men and women (including PTO plus short and long term disability options.)
• 3% retirement plan matching (plus access to a financial advisor).
• Mobile phone reimbursement
• Charitable contribution matching
• Tax-free metro benefits
• A sincere respect for work/life balance
• Money and time off allocated for professional development (also increases with tenure)
• A diverse team hailing from over 12 countries last time we checked
• A very hip/cool/funky/quirky office space on Barracks Row, in the heart of Capitol Hill. Just 2 blocks from the metro!
• Of course, the above is a quick list. See the handbook for all the gory details.

A bit more about Taoti…

Established in 1996, Taoti Creative is an independent, full-service creative / marketing agency located on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. We are independent and privately owned and have no corporate overloads, and we like it that way. We do stuff like web development, social media management, branding, experiential marketing, video, AR/VR, etc. We even have our own live events division and our own venue: www.The507Events.com for everything from experiential activation fabrications to hosting Bar Mitzvahs.

Our mission is to ‘move the needle’ for our clients. We leverage technology, creativity, and innovation to generate meaningful and measurable results for our clients—that’s what drives us. Speaking of clients, they’re about 40% non-profits, 20% commercial, and 40% government. Collectively, DC is our largest overall customer (spanning more than a dozen different contracts ranging from experiential marketing to overhauling the District's portfolio of more than 80 websites. We like to think of ourselves as "DC's Agency."

Some of our other customers include DC Lottery, DC.gov, EventsDC, Cyber.org, Democracy International, Howard County, Alaska Wilderness League, Architect of the Capitol, Jane Goodall Foundation, and dozens of ‘National Association of _____________,’ etc. The best way to talk about our work is to simply show it to you: https://taoti.com/our-work/. Our team of about 50 employees is about 65% in-house and 35% remote. We hail from over 12 countries. And for the last four years in a row, we’ve made the Inc5000 list of fastest growing companies in the United States. There’s of course plenty of additional information on our website. If you’ve not done so already, be sure to check out our 'get to know you' video: https://vimeo.com/289302105.

Our hiring process…

When every candidate comes in, we read the application (yes, a real person-not AI) and assign you between 1 and 5 stars. 1-3 stars means that you're probably not going to make the cut, and you'll get a canned notification from us to that affect within a few days. 4 and 5 stars are candidates that we want to give a second look to (that usually represents about 10% of the applicant poll.) Depending on how many of those we have, we'll likely reach out with various questions by email, and then as we start to narrow things down, we'll start reaching out for in-person conversations. Because this is a new addition to the team (as opposed to replacing someone who is leaving), we have the luxury of being able to take our time to find the right person. So our process runs on a rolling basis and goes for as long as we deem necessary to find our candidate. (That could be weeks or even months.) We apologize in advance for that, as we know you'd rather know something sooner than later. FWIW, take solace in the fact we notify everyone as soon as we decision them out, so if you've not heard from us, that means you're still in the mix. Regardless, we promise to notify all (serious) applicants, one way or another. If you have questions about the job or company during the process, you're welcome to reach out (we prefer you do so within our applicant system so that we can keep track of and share the threads, as hiring is a very collaborative process around here.)

Next steps…

If you’re qualified and interested, please apply on our website (www.taoti.com/careers.) Please note that these job ads often get placed onto other websites with their own application systems (we’re looking at you Jooble!) And some sites (looking at you Indeed!) have made up random salary ranges (Indeed!) So please be sure you're applying on our website.

Pretty please, no recruiters.