Fractional Creative Director The Baby Academy Chicago, IL Job Details Part-time $6,000 - $7,000 a month 12 hours ago Qualifications Teamwork Customer behavior analysis Tooling Team development Managing design projects Content performance analytics Leading team collaboration initiatives Data-driven content AI-driven automation Marketing agency experience Managing art or design teams Generative AI Cross-functional communication Branding project leadership Managing media, arts or design teams Art direction Senior leadership Performance marketing Full Job Description Fractional Creative Director

ABOUT THE BABY ACADEMY

The Baby Academy is the leading organization dedicated to live, online, evidence-based prenatal and postpartum education and support in the U.S. Taught by certified nurse-midwives who are engaging, world-class instructors, we deliver structured, insurance-covered education and support that extends and augments the support provided by primary clinical teams. We exist to turn early parenting overwhelm into self-assured competence, improving real-world outcomes for parents, health systems, and payers alike. We are currently completing a major brand strategy and rebrand, including a new visual identity, creative direction, and brand bible. This role will not be starting with a blank sheet of paper or being asked to reinvent The Baby Academy from scratch. The opportunity is to inherit that strategic foundation and make it sensational in the real world across every major customer touchpoint.

OVERVIEW

The Baby Academy is seeking an exceptional, commercially minded Fractional Creative Director with outstanding creative instincts and a genuinely modern approach to how great creative gets made. We're looking for an established Creative Director who has already led creative at a senior level across high-growth consumer brands, joining us on a fractional basis to bring external perspective, set creative direction and elevate the work produced by our internal team and agency partners. This is a senior, hands-on creative leadership role for someone with outstanding taste, strong conceptual instincts, and the ability to translate business and customer insights into creative ideas that work across paid media, social, web, email, campaigns, and brand experiences. The successful candidate will help determine what The Baby Academy should make, why it should work, and how each idea should evolve based on real-world performance. The role will operate within a lean creative model. You will be supported by a colleague focused on high-volume execution, allowing you to concentrate your time on the ideas, creative judgment, experimentation, and hands-on creative work where senior creative talent creates the greatest value. A key part of the mandate is to bring a modern approach to creative development. The successful candidate will be naturally curious about performance data, customer behavior, culture, emerging creative formats, and new technology. They will use AI not simply to make existing work faster, but to expand what a small internal team is capable of producing - raising both the speed and the ceiling of creative quality. This is not a traditional part-time graphic design role focused on completing assigned briefs, nor is it a role for someone whose superpower is simply briefing other creatives. We are looking for a proactive, hands-on creative leader who continually identifies opportunities, generates new ideas, improves the work around them, and is comfortable opening the tools and getting stuck into the work when that is the fastest route to a better result.

REPORTS TO

VP, Marketing

CREATIVE SUPPORT

Full-time Production Designer focused on high-volume execution, adaptation, versioning, and production support

WEBSITE:

www.yourbabyacademy.com (current website, pre-rebrand)

ROLE TYPE

Fractional / Part-Time, 20 hours per week

MONTHLY RETAINER

$6,000-$7,000, depending on experience

LOCATION

330 N Wabash Ave, Chicago, IL, 60611, United States Expectation of a minimum of 1 day in the office per week, working alongside the CEO, the VP of Marketing and the Senior Leadership Team

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Creative Strategy & Concept Development Own the development of high-level creative concepts across paid media, social, web, email, brand campaigns, partnerships, and other customer touchpoints Translate business goals, customer insights, cultural observations, and brand strategy into distinctive, compelling creative ideas Develop clear creative territories, campaign concepts, visual approaches, and testing hypotheses that can be efficiently extended by the Production Designer Continuously identify new creative opportunities rather than relying solely on assigned briefs or predetermined production requests Help establish what great creative looks like for The Baby Academy and consistently raise the quality bar across the organization Use the company's evolving brand strategy and visual identity as a foundation, ensuring creative work is distinctive, consistent, and appropriately adapted to different channels and objectives Performance Creative & Commercial Curiosity We care about great creative because it works, not simply because it looks great. Partner with growth, paid media, and agency teams to understand creative performance and identify patterns in winning and underperforming work Turn performance insights into new creative hypotheses, concepts, iterations, and structured tests Approach creative as both a brand-building and commercial discipline, balancing emotional resonance, clarity, differentiation, and measurable performance Be genuinely excited by performance differences between creative executions, intensely curious about why Creative A beat Creative B, and proactively turn those insights into the next creative hypothesis Stay close to customer feedback, social comments, organic content performance, competitive activity, and emerging cultural signals to identify new creative opportunities Help build a repeatable creative testing approach that increases the speed at which the organization learns and improves Creative Direction & Production Leadership Provide clear, high-quality creative direction to the full-time Production Designer and other creative partners, while remaining hands-on enough to develop, build, refine, or prototype creative personally when appropriate Turn concepts into actionable briefs, references, design systems, and feedback that enable fast, high-quality execution Review and refine creative output to ensure work meets a consistently high standard before launch Create a productive division of labor in which senior creative time is focused on ideas, judgment, direction, and quality while production resources handle adaptation, versioning, resizing, and executional volume Guide creative across Meta, display, email, presentations, landing pages, web assets, social content, partner materials, and future formats Partner closely with marketing leadership, audience growth, lifecycle, content, clinical, and external agency teams to ensure creative supports the broader customer and brand strategy AI-Native Creative Development Use AI as a core part of the creative process across ideation, concept exploration, visual development, production, iteration, and workflow design Continuously evaluate new AI tools and creative technologies that can materially improve the quality, speed, or range of work the team can produce Develop workflows that allow a lean internal team to create work that would historically have required significantly more time, budget, or external production support Proactively introduce the team to new capabilities, tools, and techniques rather than waiting for the organization to prescribe them Use AI to raise the ceiling of creative quality, not simply to automate lower-value tasks or produce more of the same work Brand Stewardship & Cross-Channel Consistency Help bring The Baby Academy's evolving brand strategy and visual identity to life across day-to-day marketing execution Ensure the brand feels coherent across paid media, social, email, website, landing pages, presentations, partnerships, and other customer-facing experiences Protect consistency without allowing brand guidelines to become creatively restrictive or repetitive Identify areas where the customer-facing experience can be visually improved and proactively recommend solutions Partner with external brand and creative agencies when appropriate, translating strategic brand work into practical internal systems and execution

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

The overall quality, originality, and distinctiveness of The Baby Academy's creative improves materially across paid media, web, email, social, campaigns, and brand experiences The creative function consistently generates new ideas and testing hypotheses rather than operating as a reactive production service Creative performance improves through a stronger connection between commercial results, customer insight, and what the team creates next The Production Designer operates with clear direction and can efficiently turn strong concepts into a high volume of polished, channel-appropriate execution The Baby Academy's brand becomes increasingly consistent and recognizable while still allowing creative work to feel fresh, relevant, and channel-native AI meaningfully expands both the speed and quality of the team's output, enabling work that would previously have required substantially more time, budget, or external support Marketing leadership experiences the creative function as proactive, commercially engaged, highly collaborative, and continually raising the standard of the work

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

Significant prior experience operating at Creative Director level, with responsibility for setting creative direction, developing major concepts and campaigns, and raising the creative standard across a brand or portfolio of clients 8+ years of progressive creative experience, ideally including senior Creative Director, Creative Director or equivalent leadership experience within a high-quality agency or consumer brand environment A portfolio demonstrating not simply strong individual design execution, but clear ownership of creative ideas, campaigns, brand systems, and the direction of other creative talent Strong understanding of digital and performance creative, including how concepts need to adapt across paid social, web, email, display, and other customer touchpoints A performance-creative mindset and genuine excitement about understanding what performs, why it performs, and how those insights should shape the next creative idea or test Demonstrated fluency with modern AI-enabled creative tools and a track record of using technology to improve creative quality, capability, or efficiency Experience directing designers, production resources, freelancers, agencies, or other creative partners, combined with the craft and confidence to remain personally hands-on when the work calls for it Excellent taste, communication, judgment, feedback, and cross-functional collaboration skills Ability to operate effectively in a fractional environment - prioritizing high-leverage creative work, moving quickly, and creating clarity for executional resources

OPPORTUNITY

This is an opportunity for an experienced creative leader to have disproportionate impact without taking on a traditional full-time agency or corporate creative role. The Fractional Creative Director will have the chance to shape how The Baby Academy shows up during one of the most important and emotionally significant periods in a customer's life, while working within a business that is actively investing in brand, growth, customer experience, and a more sophisticated creative capability. The structure is intentionally designed to keep senior creative talent focused on the work where it creates the most value: ideas, judgment, direction, experimentation, and raising the creative bar. A dedicated production resource will support execution and scale, allowing the Fractional Creative Director to spend less time on repetitive production and more time improving what the organization makes and why. We are particularly interested in experienced creative leaders who are excited by a flexible, high-impact working model and who want to pair deep creative experience with a genuinely modern, AI-forward approach to building great work. The Baby Academy is an equal opportunity employer. We value thoughtful leadership, sound judgment, creativity, curiosity, collaboration, empathy, and a strong commitment to protecting customer trust. If you are interested, please send a CV/Cover letter letting us know what interested you in The Baby Academy, what in your background makes you a particularly good fit, and what appeals to you about the fractional structure.

Pay:

$6,000.00 - $7,000.00 per month Application Question(s): Have you led creative for a consumer-facing brand, including setting creative direction and directing the work of designers, freelancers, agencies, or other creative resources?

Work Location:

In person