🧠 Creative Strategist — Own the strategy. Own the briefs. Own whether the creative earns spend.Location: [Bristol / Remote — confirm]Type: [Full-time / Contract — confirm]Reports to: [Senior Strategist / Head of Creative Strategy — confirm]Job SnapshotYou’ll own a book of 5–7 DTC brands and be responsible for one core outcome:Producing a consistent pipeline of performance creative that earns spend and gives clients clear evidence about what to make next.You’ll research markets, develop angles, write briefs, move creative through production and client approval, and read performance data well enough to decide what gets briefed next.This isn’t an art director role.You decide what gets made, why it should work, and what the results tell us to do next.
About the companyThe company is a Meta ads creative agency working with DTC brands, primarily across fashion, health and beauty.We’re around 50 people serving roughly 60 clients, producing approximately 1,000 ads per week. Our clients collectively spend around $80M per month on advertising, and over six years we’ve helped scale 200+ DTC brands.One of our signature offers is founder-led video: we write the scripts, founders film them on their phones in roughly half an hour per week, and we handle editing, buying and scaling.For some clients, we also buy the media.For most, we’re creative-only.That means our ads enter accounts alongside everything else the client is testing—and they have to earn budget on performance.That’s the harder version of creative strategy.And it’s most of what you’ll do here.
The Role OverviewYou’ll own the creative strategy for 5–7 clients.For each client, you own:The relationship. The research. The briefs. The weekly creative cadence. And the read on whether the work is actually performing.You’ll typically develop 4–5 briefed concepts per client per week, across static and video.You’ll then push those concepts through our production pipeline, work with designers, manage client approvals, monitor what happens after launch, and turn those results into the next round of creative decisions.Your job isn’t simply to generate ideas.Your job is to build a repeatable loop:Research → Hypothesis → Brief → Creative → Launch → Evidence → Better Brief
Responsibilities1. Own Creative Strategy Across 5–7 DTC BrandsEach client is yours from a strategy perspective.You’ll understand their customer, positioning, offer, account performance and creative history well enough to make informed decisions without waiting to be told what to do next.You’ll maintain:A client research one-pagerCustomer review and language filesPersonasA winning-ads library refreshed monthlyClear hypotheses behind every major creative directionYour strategy should come from the strongest available evidence, not simply what you personally find interesting.2. Build a High-Volume Briefing EngineYou’ll produce approximately 4–5 creative concepts per client per week, spanning static and video.For new clients, we commit to:First image-ad batch within 7 days of onboardingFirst video batch within 14 daysApproximately 5–6 distinct concepts in each initial batchWe say those dates out loud to clients.So we hit them.Every brief should make clear what business result we’re trying to change, who the customer is and what they currently believe, what idea or mechanism can move that belief, what proof and offer support it, and how we’ll know whether the asset worked.Unknowns are labelled as unknowns.They aren’t filled with something that merely sounds plausible.3. Own Creative Through ProductionWriting the brief isn’t the finish line.You’ll push every concept through our Airtable workflow:Brief Creation → Big Swing QA → Design Assigned → Design Internal QA → Design Approved → Client QA → Launch → Monitoring & OptimizingYou write the brief.You review the designer’s work in Frame.You get it in front of the client.And you watch what happens after it launches.There’s no throwing a brief over the wall and moving on.4. Diagnose Performance and Decide What Comes NextWe judge creative primarily by whether the account votes for it with spend.Our working definition of a winner is an ad that is:Under 14 days oldHolding at least 5% of the account’s seven-day spendGrowingA high ROAS on negligible spend isn’t automatically a win.Each client also has one primary KPI—such as ROAS, MER, new-customer ROAS or contribution margin.We agree on it, document it and use it to keep decision-making focused.You’ll diagnose performance through four core creative levers:Hook. Angle. Format. Awareness stage.When something wins, your job is to understand why it won so that the next brief gets smarter.When something stops working, you’ll distinguish creative fatigue from issues with the landing page, offer or other parts of the customer journey.And every performance claim should have evidence behind it.Ad. Client. Time window. Figure.We don’t brief off guesses.5. Own the Client RelationshipYou are the strategist clients interact with directly.We have substantial machinery behind you—including a BigQuery warehouse, reporting cockpit and AI concierge that can help draft client communication.But nothing client-facing goes out without a strategist’s judgment.Our service standard is straightforward:Promises are kept—or renegotiated before they’re due.Clients hear bad news from us first, with a plan attached.Problems are owned, even when they didn’t originate with you.The first 90 days of every client relationship are treated as critical, and clients should feel over-informed during them.Once a month, you’ll also bring each client one strategic idea they didn’t ask for.You’ll watch for early warning signs too—such as our ads not being launched, our share of spend falling below 5%, or an account going more than two weeks without a new ad.If something looks wrong, you raise it.You don’t wait for a report to tell you.
What Success Looks LikeYou’re winning in this role when:Your 5–7 clients receive a consistent weekly flow of strategically grounded creativeNew-client image and video batches hit the promised 7-day and 14-day deadlinesYour briefs move through production without becoming bottlenecksCreative hypotheses are based on research and performance evidenceWinning ads earn meaningful account spend—not just attractive surface-level metricsPerformance learnings consistently influence the next round of briefsClient problems and risks are surfaced before clients need to chase usClients trust you to understand both their creative and their businessYou can explain what won, why it won and what we should test next
Required ExperienceThis is best suited to someone with 2+ years of performance creative experience.You might currently be a:Creative StrategistPerformance CopywriterMedia Buyer who has moved toward creative strategyAgency and in-house DTC backgrounds can both work.You’ll need real writing ability.Briefs. Hooks. Scripts. Angles.We’ll ask for samples, and we’ll read them properly.You should also be comfortable opening an ads manager, sorting performance by spend and forming a defensible view of what’s happening.You do not need SQL.But you do need to be comfortable with numbers.Most importantly, you need a system for producing quality thinking at volume.4–5 concepts per week across 5–7 clients is a lot of creative output.People who struggle here often have the taste—but not the system.
Tools / EnvironmentYou’ll work across tools and systems including:Meta Ads ManagerAirtableFrameBigQuery-powered reportingInternal reporting dashboardsAI-assisted research, analysis and client communication toolsAI is part of how our strategists work.You’ll work alongside an assistant that can read live performance data across the portfolio and support research and briefing.You don’t need to arrive as an AI expert.But you do need either existing fluency or a genuine appetite to use it.
What We’ll Teach YouYou won’t be figuring this out alone.You’ll have access to a deep training library built around direct response principles and the lessons we’ve learned from working on accounts spending millions per month.You’ll learn our methodology for treating the creative brief as the control document for the customer journey, alongside:Awareness stagesClassic direct response principlesDesire, identity and belief modelsProven creative breakthroughsOur swipe filesStatic and video formats that have already wonMost of what we know comes from watching real accounts—not theory.
RampWe expect a new strategist to take approximately two months to reach a full client book.You’ll typically:Start with 1–2 clients alongside a senior strategist.Take another two clients around week four.Reach a full book of 5–7 clients by month three.That’s based on the ramp we’ve seen from recent hires, and we plan around it.
Compensation & BenefitsSalary: Starting from £40k gbp - can go way higher for exp - 100k+Additional compensation and benefits to be discussed later on.
Hiring ProcessOur process is designed to test the actual work:1. Intro callA conversation about your experience, how you think about performance creative, and what you’re looking for next.2. Paid brief exerciseYou’ll complete a creative brief using a real brand.3. Strategy team sessionYou’ll meet the team and work through a client-facing scenario.4. OfferWe move decisively once we know there’s a fit.
Who Thrives HereYou’ll thrive if you:Like having genuine ownership of client outcomesCan combine creative instinct with performance evidenceEnjoy writing hooks, angles and briefs at high volumeWant to know why an ad worked—not just whether it workedAre organised enough to keep multiple clients and production cycles movingCommunicate problems early rather than hiding themCan make decisions without needing constant approvalEnjoy working directly with clientsSee AI as leverage rather than a threat to the craftYou’re comfortable being accountable for the thinking behind the work.
Who Will StruggleThis probably isn’t the right role if:You want to be an art director—the designers make the adsYou need a month to develop each concept—we ship weeklyYou want to stay out of client communication—you’ll be in Slack with clients dailyYou rely primarily on intuition without being able to support it with evidenceYou copy competitors—we borrow patterns across categories, not from a client’s direct rivalsYou’re strong creatively but struggle to build systems around high-volume outputYou want responsibility for briefs without responsibility for what happens after they launch
ApplyIf you want to own creative strategy for serious DTC brands and be accountable for what gets made, why it gets made and whether it earns spend, we want to see how you think.For each concept, include the relevant performance numbers and your explanation of why you believe it won.👉 Apply here: https://www.orgboard.co/jobs/25bb6e68a91345c3b2a0d831141d8f90?src=linkedin_recruiterDue to the volume of applications, only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.
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