Global Creative Transformation

Global Creative Director | The Economist Group

Unifying siloed teams and elevating creative across three continents.

Context

When I joined The Economist, the brand’s global creative efforts were fragmented. Creative work was largely outsourced, and internal talent across London, India, and the U.S. operated in silos. The opportunity was clear: elevate the brand’s creative capacity from within and unite global teams under a shared vision, raising the level of output across digital, motion, and data storytelling.

My Role

As Global Creative Director, I led the creative transformation across all regions — building alignment across time zones, disciplines, and personalities. I inherited a distributed team of 8 (eventually expanding), and partnered with leaders in marketing, product, and editorial to centralize creative operations and develop internal talent.

Key leadership activities included:

• Building trust and cohesion among teams who had never collaborated.

• Training writers, editors, and marketers into skilled visual designers, animators, and infographic creators.

• Leading creative for global partners such as Gates Foundation, HCL, and IBM.

Process

We began by listening: assessing workflows, creative standards, and team dynamics.

From there, I:

• Designed a shared creative process that worked across time zones.

• Instituted weekly global reviews to unify quality and vision.

• Piloted internal upskilling programs to shift from outsourcing to in-house production.

• Encouraged experimentation with formats, particularly motion, data, and content design.

• Collaborated daily over Zoom, long before remote was the norm: turning distributed into distributed-by-design.

Outcomes

Scalable Digital Products:
Created a suite of pre-designed website templates—both single- and multi-page—that allowed the Content Studio to deliver campaigns 3× faster. These templates became a key product line: more profitable for The Economist, more accessible for clients, and easier to scale globally.

Unified Global Team:
Transitioned three siloed groups into a single, cohesive global creative studio.

In-House Transformation:
Reduced reliance on agencies by upskilling internal talent across motion, data visualization, and visual storytelling.

High-Impact Projects:
Delivered standout work, including a data-driven storytelling project for the Gates Foundation and a Davos-featured campaign for HCL.

Remote-First Culture:
Built a highly effective, fully remote creative team—before the pandemic made it the norm.

Quote

“

Tim didn’t just build a team, he built confidence across continents. We went from vendors to talented in house visionaries.

”

MD (M)