Lead Performance Creative Strategist

Why This Role Exists This is a founding role — which means your ceiling is uncapped and your fingerprints will be on how an entire function works for years to come. You'll own how CDM identifies, develops, and scales creative — video and static — built Paid Social–first , with support for our Paid Search team, so our clients grow faster than their competitors can copy them. Here's the bet we're making: creative is the most durable lever in performance marketing. Budgets, algorithms, audiences, and targeting all converge over time — everyone eventually gets access to the same tools. The creative is what still separates the winners from everyone else. CDM believes the agencies that dominate the next decade will be the ones that treat creative strategy as a rigorous, repeatable discipline instead of a guessing game. You will be the person who builds that discipline here.

Key Responsibilities

Who We Are
Clever Digital Marketing is a performance marketing agency helping large home improvement companies across the US and Canada grow through Paid Social, Paid Search, CRO, and strategic advising. We manage a large portfolio of accounts, an in-house creative team, and significant monthly ad spend. As we scale, we're building a stronger creative-strategy function to help clients find new creative winners — and to turn one-off learnings into repeatable systems that compound across every account.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

What You'll Own This is a senior, strategic role. You won't be editing every asset or running campaigns day-to-day. Your job is to raise the quality of the thinking, research, and strategy behind everything we produce and test.
1. Generate net-new creative. Develop original concepts, messaging angles, hooks, formats, and storytelling approaches for video and static ads — not variations on the same three ideas.
2. Find the ideas before you have them. Run customer, competitor, and market research to uncover motivations, objections, and pain points that haven't been explored yet. Mine reviews, sales calls, and customer feedback for the insight that makes an ad work.
3. Turn performance into strategy. Analyze why creative wins or loses and translate it into clear next steps. Write sharp, actionable briefs grounded in customer insight, direct-response principles, and a defined testing hypothesis — and push iteration beyond surface-level hook and footage swaps.
4. Build the system. Create CDM's creative-strategy frameworks, brief standards, testing processes, and a shared learning repository. Spot what's working in one account and determine where it can be adapted across others.
5. Level up the whole team. Coach Media Buyers and editors so stronger creative thinking becomes a department-wide capability, not something that lives with one person. Partner with CRO to align messaging, personas, offers, and landing-page experiences. Provide direction for UGC, founder-led, and spokesperson-led formats.

6. Use AI as a force multiplier. Build AI-powered workflows and tools that accelerate research, ideation, and production for the entire team — more on that below.

What We're Looking For

- 5+ years in performance-focused creative strategy.

- Deep understanding of Meta advertising and direct-response creative.

- Strong direct-response copywriting and short-form storytelling skills.

- A track record of developing concepts from customer research and performance data — not just intuition.

- Fluency with creative metrics (Hook Rate, Hold Rate, CTR, CPL) and the judgment to weigh them against lead quality and down-funnel performance.

- Experience across multiple brands, accounts, or verticals.

- A structured approach to testing — hypotheses, iteration strategy, isolating variables.

- Demonstrated ability to build systems, processes, frameworks, or knowledge bases.

- Advanced, practical experience using AI for research, analysis, ideation, workflow design, or creative enablement.

- The ability to explai