The posting
Location: Daily Mail Headquarters, Derry Street, HSK, London, W8 5HY Position: Full Time/ Permanent/Hybrid – 4 days per week in the office
About the role
The Lead Commercial Video Producer leads commercial video production across DMG New Media's brands. This is a hands-on senior role: you will produce your own projects, whilst you will also lead a small in-house team of Commercial Video Producers, building the processes they work to and representing commercial production across the business.
You will work closely with the commercial creative team, who develop and pitch responses to client briefs, and our commercial project management team, who own the client relationship and the campaign timeline. Your team will be involved in those processes, and take full ownership once a brief is won, taking the idea-as-sold and developing and producing it into high-performing branded content that seamlessly delivers client needs in our own tone of voice, sitting comfortably on the channel it's published on.
You'll also own branded content compliance for commercial video, making sure every production is delivered to a high standard, safely, on-time, within-budget and legally compliant.
Our productions are built for social: everything we make is built for the feed, from how it's shot to how it's cut, and you'll bring deep experience of producing native, platform-first branded content.
How we deliver
Our brands already have editorial producers and in-house creators making video every day, so the right way to deliver a commercial project changes from job to job. Broadly, our Commercial Video Producers work in two ways:
- Own it. You produce the project entirely, from crewing and casting to final delivery. That might be a multi-camera shoot, a glossy promo, a run of street vox pops, or anything in between.
- Oversee it. Sometimes the best people to make the content are already on the brand, whether that's an editorial producer, one of our in-house creators, or the team behind a recurring show or sponsored format. You work alongside them, owning the brand integration and the timeline, and bringing whatever production support the job needs so the partnership lands naturally.
Main Responsibilities
Producing
- Produce commercial projects from handover through shoot, edit and final delivery.
- Own your shoots, including call sheets, risk assessments, crewing and contributor releases, with production management supporting and signing off.
- Cast contributors and work with our in-house creators, presenters and external talent to get the best from them on camera.
- Find and secure locations, drawing on the centralised location and supplier relationships held by production management, as well as your own research and relationships.
- Specify the deliverables for each job, including versions, cutdowns and usage rights, working with our Platforms team, and briefing editors accordingly.
- Make sure rushes, project files and releases are safely archived at the end of every job.
Briefing, budgeting and costing
- Provide top-line costings and production feasibility at brief and pitch stages, using our internal cost benchmarks, so our responses are realistic and deliverable.
- At brief stage, flag what will and won't work on each platform, including format and length, branded content rules and ad policies, so we only sell ideas we can deliver natively.
- Manage the live production budgets, managing potential overspend and underspend, and reconciling each job with production management.
Leading the team
- Line manage, mentor and develop the Commercial Video Producers, and any future additional hires to the team, balancing workload so the team can always cover for each other.
- Build and maintain a reliable pool of freelance commercial video producers who can be brought in at short notice, as campaigns exceed internal capacity or skills.
- Create and maintain commercial production workflows, templates and standards with the Senior Operations Production Manager, and make sure the team's projects are tracked accurately.
- Set the quality bar for commercial output and review work before it reaches clients.
Compliance
- Own branded content compliance for commercial video production, including ASA, CAP and CMA guidance, platform restrictions and restricted categories.
- Work closely with the Commercial Video Lead on compliance across the sales pipeline, and with production management, who track and implement it day to day.
- Make sure Commercial Video Producers understand and apply the rules on their projects.
Collaboration
- Liaise closely with the Commercial Video Lead, and work alongside the commercial project management, sales and account management teams, representing the production department.
- Contribute production insight and creative ideas to brainstorms and brief responses alongside the commercial creative team.
- Work with channel leads, editorial producers, show producers and in-house creators to ensure that commercial work is editorially aligned with each brand’s output and tone of voice.
- Work with the Lead Creative Producer to identify and shape editorial formats with sponsorship potential, so our originals open up new opportunities to sell.
- Work with the Production Lead on in-house editing and videographer resource, alongside the Lead Editor and Lead Videographer on the craft behind each project, and with the Audio Visual Services team on studio and kit use.
- Work with the design team on brand assets and graphics for commercial work, including client logos, packaging and end cards.
- Be client-friendly and confident: you'll often be the senior person on a shoot, and on bigger projects the lead in the room.
Person Specification
- Significant experience as a senior or executive producer of branded content at a publisher, agency or production company, with a strong social-first portfolio.
- Proven experience producing branded content specifically for social, with a deep understanding of how content is shot, edited and delivered for each platform.
- Genuinely hands-on: able to run a shoot on your own, from a light-touch creator shoot to a multi-camera promo.
- Editing and camera skills of your own are a bonus.
- Experience managing and developing producers in a busy, fast-moving team.
- Strong production budgeting: able to give quick, accurate top-line costs and deliver productions efficiently.
- A strong working knowledge of branded content compliance.
- Confident casting contributors and working with creators, presenters and high-profile talent.
- Fluent in short-form social video on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts. Long-form experience is a bonus.
- An instinct for integrating brands naturally, and for knowing when content needs polish and when it needs to feel real.
- A builder of practical processes that people actually use, and comfortable working in shared workflow tools.
- An established network of crew, freelancers and suppliers.
- Excellent communication with clients, creatives and colleagues at every level.
What success looks like
In your first six months, you will have:
- Ensured every piece of commercial content is delivered on time, to the highest standards, with excellent client and in-house creative feedback.
- Produced your own live commercial projects.
- Developed a team of producers who deliver confidently and independently.
- Established a clear commercial production workflow, from handover to delivery, that your team and partner teams follow, with every project tracked with the production management team.
- Built a reliable pool of freelance commercial producers.
- Become a trusted partner to the Commercial Video Lead, Commercial Project Managers, channel leads and production management.
Package Description
Our benefits package increases the longer you’ve been with us. Here’s what to expect:
- 25 days’ holiday (increasing by 1 per year up to a total of 30)
- Pension plan and life cover
- Discounts on online shopping, dining cards and vouchers, and access to our Employee Assistance Programme
- Onsite gym, subsidised canteen and onsite nurse and GP clinics
Plus much more...
About Us
DMG New Media is building the next generation of social-first publishing, creating platform-native brands across news, sport, lifestyle, entertainment and culture for global audiences. Our network includes Daily Mail, Mail Sport, Metro, Eliza, The Respawn, This Is Money, Nosey and many more, and reaches hundreds of millions of people across social platforms each month. We have a growing roster of in-house creators and talent, and we’re continuing to scale rapidly across both short-form and long-form video.
Our Production team makes the video behind it all: original editorial shows and formats for our brands, and branded content for our commercial partners, published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and emerging platforms.
Our Commitment
We are committed to increasing diversity and maintaining an inclusive workplace culture. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates regardless of their ethnicity, race, gender, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability.
We are Disability Confident Committed. Please let us know if you require any recruitment documentation in other formats or if you require reasonable adjustments to be made during the recruitment process. Please be assured that any such information will be held separately to your recruitment application and will not be considered as part of the selection process.
