Creative Thinking Jobs in Illinois (NOW HIRING)

Job Summary:

Leads the development of consumer-driven creative strategy, brand platforms, and operational practices that strengthen brand-building across the enterprise portfolio. This role translates consumer behavior, cultural trends, business objectives, marketplace dynamics, and brand performance into clear strategic direction that inspires distinctive, effective creative work. Partners closely with brand, analytics, behavioral science, creative, and cross-functional teams to develop insights, briefs, campaign platforms, messaging frameworks, and tools that improve the quality and consistency of creative thinking. Also provides leadership for in-house agency operations, team capability building, and scalable ways of working that enable efficient execution, greater creative effectiveness and stronger business impact.
Responsibilities:
 

Lead Deep Consumer Insight Development:

• Develop deep, behavior-based consumer insights that inspire stronger brand strategy and creative work, including the ability to identify unmet needs, behavioral tensions, emotional drivers, and cultural shifts that unlock new growth opportunities.

• Go beyond reported data and surface-level findings to identify emotional tensions, cultural shifts, category behaviors, and unmet consumer needs; synthesize consumer data, social listening, cultural observation, category dynamics, behavioral science, sales trends, competitive activity, and brand performance into sharp strategic implications.

• Conduct learning when needed through desk research, cultural scans, social mining, qualitative synthesis, and informal ethnographic-style observation.

• Partner with Analytics, Behavioral Science, Brand Marketing, and other teams to turn available data into more useful strategic thinking and serve as an enterprise expert on modern consumer behavior.

• Build a repeatable standard for what great insight means inside the in-house agency.

Build Brand Campaign & Creative Platforms:

• Lead development of enduring brand platforms, campaign territories, strategic narratives, messaging architectures, and creative foundations for priority brands.

• Translate brand positioning, business objectives, audience understanding, and cultural context into clear strategic direction.

• Create platforms that scale across video, social, digital, retail, ecommerce, influencer, shopper, PR, and owned channels.

• Help brands move from one-off campaign ideas to long-term brand-building systems that are distinctive, ownable, creatively fertile, and connected to the brand’s role in consumers’ lives.

• Partner with brand teams to sharpen positioning, audience definition, brand voice, and consumer relevance.

• Provide clear, constructive, strategically grounded feedback on creative ideas, including identifying when work is too expected, generic, rational, category-conventional, or disconnected from the human truth.

Creative Thought Leadership & Knowledge Development:

• Act as an enterprise creative strategist by partnering with brand teams to clarify business challenges, consumer barriers, growth opportunities, desired behavior changes, and strategic choices.

• Write and lead best-in-class creative briefs for major campaigns and priority initiatives, transforming business asks into clear, provocative creative problems.

• Synthesize consumer behavior, marketplace dynamics, competitive activity, cultural shifts, performance data, and organizational knowledge into clear, actionable strategic guidance.

• Create strategic artifacts that shape and elevate brand thinking, including creative briefs, brand books, positioning frameworks, knowledge audits, audience profiles, messaging architectures, cultural trend reports, and campaign playbooks.

• Develop strategic narratives, thought pieces, and planning frameworks that enable marketers, agency partners, and creative teams to move beyond tactical execution toward stronger brand-building.

• Create tools, frameworks, and deliverables that improve how teams develop insights, evaluate ideas, write briefs, assess creative work, and make strategic decisions that raise the quality of creative thinking and inspire action.

In-House Agency Operations:

• Lead the operational foundation that enables the in-house agency to deliver high-quality work efficiently and consistently across the enterprise portfolio.

• Manage in-house agency workflows, resource planning, budget oversight, intake processes, prioritization, and ways of working to improve speed, clarity, and effectiveness.

• Oversee project management and agency operations support to ensure teams remain aligned on timelines, deliverables, stakeholder expectations, and executional excellence.

• Identify opportunities to simplify complexity, reduce friction, and create scalable systems that support growing creative demand across the enterprise.

• Develop and implement frameworks, governance models, and operational practices that improve consistency, accountability, and performance across agency initiatives.

• Partner with cross-functional stakeholders to connect strategy, creativity, and execution, ensuring marketing investments deliver maximum business impact.

Team Leadership & Capability Building:

• Lead, coach, and develop direct and indirect resources, including agency operations and owned digital platform support roles.

• Build a culture of creativity, discipline, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement within the in-house agency.

• Identify capability gaps and partner with leaders to build practical tools, examples, and training that help teams apply creative strategy and brand platform standards consistently.

• Champion new tools, technologies, AI-enabled approaches, and best practices that improve creative operations, production efficiency, and brand-building quality.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree required; advanced degree preferred.

• 10+ years of experience in creative strategy, brand strategy, integrated marketing, content strategy, in-house agency leadership, or related marketing capability roles; CPG experience preferred.

• Experience translating brand strategy and consumer insights into creative platforms, briefs, content systems, and marketing ideas.

• Strong understanding of owned digital platforms, social content, creative production, and integrated brand activation.

• Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders, manage ambiguity, and align cross-functional partners around shared priorities and decision rights.

• Strong business acumen, communication, storytelling, facilitation, and change leadership skills.

• Experience leading teams or matrixed resources and building capability through coaching, tools, templates, and repeatable standards.

• Digital fluency and curiosity for emerging marketing technologies, including AI-enabled tools that improve creative quality, efficiency, and scalability.

Disclaimer:
This job description is not intended and should not be construed to be an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, skills, efforts or working conditions associated with the job. It is intended, however, to be an accurate reflection of those principal job elements essential for making decisions related to job performance, employee development and compensation. As such, the incumbent may perform other duties and responsibilities as required.

Compensation 

The annual salary listed above is the expected offering for this position. An employee’s actual annual salary will be based on but not limited to: location, relevant experience/level and skillset, while balancing internal Conagra employees’ equity. Conagra Brands will comply with applicable law regarding minimum salaries for exempt employees.

Our Benefits

We care about your total well-being and will support you with the following, subject to your location and role:

• Health: Comprehensive healthcare plans, wellness incentive program, mental wellbeing support and fitness reimbursement

• Wealth: Great pay, bonus incentive opportunity, matching 401(k) and stock purchase plan

• Growth: Career development opportunities, employee resource groups, on-demand learning and tuition reimbursement

• Balance: Paid-time off, parental leave, flexible work-schedules (subject to your location and role) and volunteer opportunities

Our Company

At Conagra Brands, we have a rich heritage of making great food. We aspire to have the most impactful, energized and inclusive culture in food. As a member of our 18,000+ person team across 40+ locations, you are empowered to reach your potential, make an impact and own your career. We're in the business of building champions – within our people and our iconic brands like Birds Eye®, Slim Jim® and Reddi-Wip®.

Our focus on innovation extends beyond making great food, it also reflects our commitment to embracing new solutions that positively impact our team, the communities we serve and the health of our planet. Foodies Welcome.

Conagra Brands is an equal opportunity employer and considers qualified applicants for employment without regard to sex, race, color, religion, ethnic or national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, pregnancy, leave status, disability, veteran status, genetic information and/or any other characteristic or status protected by national, federal, state or local law. Reasonable accommodation may be made upon request.