Our Purpose

Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we’re helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.

Title and Summary

Creative Strategist/ Art Director

Overview

The Services team is a key differentiator for Mastercard, providing the cutting-edge services that help our customers grow. Centered on data-driven technologies and innovation, this team provides consulting, marketing, loyalty and analytics to financial institutions and merchants globally. Marketing Services is the team within Services that develops and executes the marketing programs that help our clients achieve their marketing goals. The Advisors Creative Desk (ACD) sits within Services and is responsible for ideating and creating engaging, forward-thinking, on-brand content solutions and campaigns that connect our advertising partners, platforms, and our portfolio of brands.

As a Sr Creative Art based in Milan, you will shape the creative thinking and designs behind our work for the Italian market - turning client business challenges into sharp strategic platforms and bringing them creatively to life as ideas that can be seen, not just read. You will relish a fast-paced environment, juggle multiple deliverables, and be equally comfortable defending a strategic rationale and sketching out how the idea should look and feel.


The Role

- Translate client briefs and market insight into compelling creative strategies and campaign platforms for the Italian market, with occasional work across wider Europe
- Develop holistic, memorable campaigns from initial concept through to execution - Working closely with Creative Desk Project Managers, Art Directors and Copywriters to ensure end-to-end development and delivery of campaigns for assigned customers.
- Maintain quality, accuracy and consistency of content and design across all mediums to best industry practice standards and client branding guidelines by ensuring all output is checked and errors minimised.
-Overall responsibility for the production of communications material on time and to budget.
- Bring strong conceptual skills and a highly developed ability to express those concepts across a continuously evolving set of channels
- Craft short and long form copy in Italian and English for marketing purposes, including direct response designed to drive action and conversion
- Think visually: shape look, feel, layout and tone alongside designers and art directors, and communicate ideas through sketches, mood boards, storyboards or scrappy mock-ups where words alone won't land
- Execute across a wide array of channels including TV, online video, online banners, social platforms, and print - always to the highest standards of craft
- Present work concisely in internal reviews and client meetings, in both Italian and English
- Be proactive in bringing ideas that solve client challenges and grow the business


All About You

- Native or fully fluent Italian, with proven experience building creative work for the Italian market and a genuine feel for its culture, media landscape and consumer behaviour
- Fluent business English - you will work daily with colleagues and clients across Europe
- Experience developing creative strategy and concepts within a creative agency environment or client-side marketing team
- Ability to concept new campaigns across a variety of mediums, digital-first
- Ability to combine conceptual creative thinking with high-quality delivery
- A strong visual instinct - you have a point of view on design, typography and imagery
- Ability to interpret brand and style guidelines from various clients and apply them consistently across marketing collateral
- Ability to interpret creative briefing documents and translate them into compelling, on-strategy work
- Captivating presentation skills
- Passionate about social platforms, trends, technology and best practices
- Excellent organizational and communication skills

A plus:

- International or multi-market campaign experience
- Experience in financial institutions, banking, payments or wider FI industries
- Creative agency background
- A solid understanding of the customer journey as it relates to card and banking (acquisition, conversion, activation, early month on books, customer loyalty, cross-sell)
- A portfolio that shows both the thinking and the making - strategy decks alongside work you helped shape visually

Gross annual salary base range: 45,000 - 72,000 EUR

Corporate Security Responsibility

All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and, therefore, it is expected that every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must:

• Abide by Mastercard’s security policies and practices;

• Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed;

• Report any suspected information security violation or breach, and

• Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard’s guidelines.

Where applicable, additional information for positions located in Europe, including benefits, variable pay, and other disclosures, is available at https://careers.mastercard.com/us/en/disclosures. Candidates should review this information as part of the application process.