DTC Creative Strategist

We run direct response ecommerce brands on paid social. Creative is the only real lever left, and creative only works when it is built on genuine customer understanding rather than guesswork.

We are hiring one person to sit alongside the founder every day and own the research-to-script pipeline. You dig into the market, find out what customers actually feel and fear and want, turn that into new angles and avatars, and produce the scripts and briefs our editors turn into ads. The founder handles the ad account and feeds you the results. Your job is to work out what those results mean and what we do next.

This is not a coordination role. You are not managing a calendar or chasing assets. You are the person who finds the insight and writes the thing.

What you will actually do

Deep customer research

Mine voice of customer at volume: Reddit threads, Amazon and competitor reviews (especially the one and two star ones), YouTube and TikTok comment sections, Facebook groups, forums, Quora, post-purchase surveys, support tickets, our own ad comment sections.
Pull direct language out of it. Not summaries. The exact phrasing people use when they describe the problem to a friend.
Build and maintain a swipe of pain points, emotional triggers, objections, purchase anxieties, failed prior solutions, and the specific moment that pushes someone from tolerating the problem to buying a fix.
Run and interpret real customer research: surveys, buyer interviews, post-purchase questionnaires, review analysis. You should be comfortable getting on a call with a customer and asking the uncomfortable follow-up question.
Segment what you find into distinct avatars with distinct triggers, not one blurred "target customer."

Competitor and market research

Systematic teardowns of every meaningful competitor: their ad library, their creative formats, which ads have been running longest and at what volume, their funnel, their landing pages, their offer, their pricing, their review sentiment, their weak points.
Track what is scaling in adjacent categories and steal the structure, not the copy.
Identify where the market is in terms of sophistication and awareness, and what that means for the claims we can make and the way we have to open an ad.
Find the gaps. Where is every competitor saying the same thing, and what is the unclaimed position.

Angles and avatars

Generate new angles continuously. Most will die. That is expected. We want volume of genuine swings, each one traceable back to a specific piece of evidence.
Every angle comes with a rationale: which avatar, which pain point, which awareness stage, which competitor claim it displaces, why now.
Develop and articulate mechanisms. Why does this product work, explained in a way that is concrete, ownable and believable rather than generic.

We read every application properly, so we expect the same in return. Start your application with the answer to 4+4 on the first line, nothing else on that line. Anything without it goes in the bin unread.

Scripts and briefs

Write ad scripts for static, UGC, talking head and b-roll voiceover formats. Written to be spoken, not written to be read.
Write briefs our editors can execute without coming back with questions: reference material, pacing, on-screen text, b-roll requirements, tone, and what the ad is actually trying to do.
Write and iterate primary text, headlines, hooks, and supporting funnel copy including advertorials, listicles and landing page sections.
Produce hook variations at volume and understand the difference between testing a hook and testing an ad.

Creative feedback loop

You will not be in the ad account. The founder reports the results back to you: what spent, what converted, hook rate, hold rate, CTR, CPA, ROAS.
Your job is the diagnosis. Given those numbers, why did this ad win or lose, and is the problem the hook, the angle, the avatar, the proof, the offer or the format.
Turn every test into a documented learning about the customer, not just a verdict on the ad.
Maintain the creative learning log so we stop relearning the same lesson, and translate each learning into the next round of scripts.
What we are looking for

Non-negotiable

You have written ad creative that has spent real money on Meta and you can explain what worked and why.
You can research. Genuinely research. Not read three Reddit threads and write a persona document full of adjectives.
You write in spoken language. If your copy sounds like marketing, it will not survive here.
You understand direct response fundamentals: mass desire, market sophistication, awareness stages, mechanism, proof, objection handling. Familiarity with Schwartz's Breakthrough Advertising is a strong signal, and we will assume you have read it.
You can take a set of reported metrics and reason from them accurately. You do not need to be a media buyer, but you need to know what a high hook rate with a dead CTR is telling you.
You work fast and iterate without ego. Creative gets killed here on data, not on taste.
You are self-directed. We will tell you the objective, not the steps.
Excellent written English and a good ear for regional voice differences across AU, NZ, UK, US and CA.

Strong advantage

Experience with competitive intelligence and scraping tools (ad library tools, review scrapers, comment scrapers, AI research workflows).
Comfort with AI tooling as a research and production accelerant, paired with the judgment to know when its output is generic filler.
Experience briefing editors and knowing what is realistic to produce.
Background in one of: supplements, consumer hardware, home and auto, pet, or another problem-solution physical product category.
Basic ability to build or mock up static creative concepts so briefs are unambiguous.

Not a fit if

You need a detailed brief before you can start.
Your research process is asking an AI for a customer persona.
You think great creative is a matter of opinion.
You want to work on brand awareness, brand books, or anything that cannot be measured within seven days.
How we work
Daily contact with the founder. Fast async communication, short calls, no meeting theatre.
We test in structured rounds with clean variables. One meaningful change per cell wherever possible.
Every recommendation is expected to carry its evidence. "I think" is fine, as long as it is followed by "because customers in this segment keep saying X."
Premium positioning standard across everything we produce. Direct response discipline, but nothing that looks or sounds cheap.