Why Creative @ CBRE

Committed to providing a world-class experience for creatives to grow, connect and succeed, Creative @ CBRE is on a mission to reimagine what it means to be creative talent in the commercial real estate industry. “It’s an unexpected place to find creatives but there are so many great opportunities at CBRE,” says Kenneth, one of our senior creative directors under our Global Marketing function. He began his career at CBRE as a senior graphic designer—initially having reservations about making the leap to the 100k+ employee global organization. He wasn’t sure if it would be a great fit with his agency background. “Boy was I wrong! I came in not really knowing what I was getting myself into and then here we are, 12, 13 years later, and I love it. I've been challenged constantly. Whenever I feel like I'm stagnating for even a moment, a new opportunity arises. That's one of the great things about CBRE—It's a very dynamic organization with a lot of opportunities for you to move into.”

We asked Kenneth to give us some insight into why a creative should choose CBRE. Here’s what he highlighted:

Culture
The Reward of Dynamic, Challenging Work
Mentorship
Career Growth and Expansion

The Culture

We do a great job here culturally, not just within our creative and marketing infrastructure, but in general. We have a Healthy Balance Council where people come together to think about ways that we can better our work/life balance. For instance, on my team, one of the things that we took out of the council was blocking out our Friday afternoons so that we don’t have meetings. That way, you can focus on your work, head down, tie up everything for the week so you can go into the weekend with a clear mind—start the next week fresh. I think that's important.

My number one priority is to also hire the right people to make sure that our company culture and my team culture remains intact. We constantly have to pivot and collaborate, routing items through our Digital and Technology team, through legal, through operations, having multiple stakeholders approving items, so there’s no time or place for egos here. We're all in this together. It all starts at the very beginning of that stream—hiring the right people so that we keep that collaborative spirit.

We pull in the best people and hold ourselves to a high standard and our clients, in turn, hold us to that same standard. You work with elite-level professionals, not only within the creative ecosphere, but outside of that—marketing colleagues, brokers, and so many more.

The Reward of Dynamic, Challenging Work

Creative @ CBRE changes day to day, month to month, quarter to quarter. That is because we are the industry leader and have a stronghold on maintaining our position across all our business functions. To new creatives that are coming in, there's a very entrepreneurial spirit here. I think that's at the core of our DNA because of our company’s historical sales background. We work with a lot of brokers here and it's about relationships. They say, “time kills deals,” so marketing, research, data and technology, they hold a very high standard for shared services. It’s directly related to the service the brokers are providing to our clients, as well as their bottom line. So, they're constantly challenging us to bring new, fresh, innovative strategic ideas to the table, activating technology, coming up with new ways to tell our unique story to set us apart from our competition.

We execute differently. It could be a conceptual idea, looking at the full landscape or the full field, coming up with an integrated marketing or creative campaign that spans across multiple touchpoints. It's not simply “hey, I'm going to put together a presentation.” We're going to strategize go-to-market materials and show our clients that we already understand them; we know their brand, and we know their culture. We know how CBRE aligns to it and how we're a great fit. Then, all of our resources, our platforms, and the investments we've made in technologies empower us to be able to deliver our client’s message, their story, in a way that no one else can.

Mentorship

Our Creative Talent Platform is an initiative that we've been working on for approximately three years now; we launched it a little over a year ago. It’s dedicated to providing a mentorship platform for creative talent. There’s also great opportunity for some of the senior designers to be mentors and grow their leadership skills. There are assets like tools, resources and vendors available on the platform.

That’s another plus about being a part of CBRE—because of our scale and scope, we have access to enterprise-level agreements with major vendors, such as Adobe, that gives us a premier level of access that you will not get in a smaller agency environment. They white glove us in a sense, and we get a lot of different things that are a part of our enterprise license, such as creative jams or training sessions, that we’re able to provide on the platform.

Career Growth and Expansion

There are so many opportunities for you to expand and learn new things. That's what has always kept me here—there's always a new challenge to overcome. The ultimate goal is to work your way up at CBRE because it's the premier destination within our sector. You will enjoy every day here because each day is different from the last, as it should be. You should be growing from the successes of your previous projects, constantly stacking that and doing better and better.

The key is to make it the best experience that it can be. Raise your hand, get your seat at the table, and bring new ideas. I think it's great for those who want to say “get me activated on that project,” “can I get in that meeting with you?” Ask critical questions from a creative standpoint that are going to help frame out what our final output is going to be. Those are the type of people who do really well here. For those who are seeking those opportunities, we're looking for those that can plant roots, grow, learn and form great relationships.