By Kyle Mau, founder of HireUA
We’ve hired and placed dozens of Creative Strategists for DTC e-commerce brands.
- Supplements
- Food and beverage
- Women’s jewelry and apparel
This is one of the hardest positions we fill.
The expectations are sky high.
Rightfully so. You want what’s best for your brand.
Look, I get it. You want every one of these requirements. And what I’m about to say might scare you off from working with us.
That’s fine.
Whether you hire us or do this yourself, read the next section and take the math with you.
I’d rather you get this hire right, any way you can, than hold out for a list of requirements nobody can meet.
That’s where most brands hunting for this role get stuck.
Every requirement you add shrinks the pool.
Every Requirement You Add Shrinks the Pool
Here’s the ask we see over and over when brands try to hire creative strategists:
- Scaled a brand to $50 to $100 million
- Supplement experience
- Writes the scripts and the briefs
- Edits the videos
- Makes ads with AI
Start with the first one.
How many brands have crossed $100 million in sales? There are more than 200 Shopify merchants with $100 million in sales revenue.
Add the brands that aren’t on Shopify and you’re at a few hundred. Maybe a thousand.
At each of those brands, one to three people owned creative strategy while the brand grew. That’s a few hundred to a couple thousand people on the planet.
Now add supplements. Call it one brand in ten.
You’re at dozens.
Now add “can also edit the videos.”
A senior strategist at a nine-figure brand has had an Editor for years. They haven’t cut footage since they got promoted.
You’re at a handful.
Now add “and will take $120K.”
The handful who are left are employed, paid well, and probably holding equity.
They aren’t reading your job post.
That’s napkin math.
The exact numbers don’t matter. The direction does.
Each line on the list divides the pool, and by the fifth line you’re describing someone who doesn’t exist.
Three Jobs Called Creative Strategist
Here’s the other thing that makes this search painful.
“Creative Strategist” is one title covering three different jobs.
Before you hire creative strategists, you need to know which of those jobs your business actually needs.
The Media Buyer who does creative.
- They live in Ads Manager
- They know what a winning ad looks like because they’ve watched the numbers on a thousand of them
- They can tell you the architecture of a testing system for Meta down to the campaign structure
Ask them to write a script and they freeze.
The Copywriter who does strategy.
- They came up writing direct response
- They can find the angle, write the hook, and brief an Editor with the messaging pillars laid out
Ask them how they’d scale spend from $200K to $600K a month and they talk in theory.
The Editor who does concepts.
They’ve cut hundreds of UGC ads and they know which hooks hold attention in the first two seconds. Their portfolio is beautiful.
Ask them why one ad beat another and the answer is about the footage, not the customer.
We pulled six resumes from one search for this role. Every one of them said Creative Strategist at the top.
- One was a Video Editor and Creative Director with a cinematic portfolio
- One was a Head of Performance Marketing who managed a team of seven
- One did brand communications for a luxury car company
- One was a Media Buyer running affiliate offers
- One was a Direct Response Copywriter
- One was a freelance strategist and Media Buyer
All six were telling the truth about their title. Each was a real third of the job the brand described.
The brand wanted all three thirds in one person.
Why Category Experience Can Backfire
The second most common requirement after the revenue milestone is category experience.
- Supplement brands want supplement experience
- Food and beverage wants food and beverage
- Jewelry wants jewelry, and when they can’t find it, they ask for supplements because supplement ads “go deep on emotional triggers”
Here’s how that plays out.
A jewelry brand writes a JD asking for direct response experience, ideally from supplements.
They hire a strategist who fits it.
Three months later the post-mortem reads: jewelry isn’t a functional product like supplements.
It needs taste. It needs to look aspirational.
The strategist could write the emotional angle but couldn’t make it beautiful.
The requirement produced the hire that failed.
Category experience tells you someone has seen the ads in your space. It doesn’t tell you they can make the ads your space needs next.
A strategist who spent four years on one supplement brand learned that brand’s customer, that brand’s offer, and that brand’s winning formats.
Your customer is different, and their winning formats are already running against you.
If you want to hire creative strategists who can adapt, look for a process that transfers between categories.
- Research the customer.
- Find the angle.
- Brief it.
- Test it.
- Read the result.
- Iterate.
A strategist with that process learns your category in 90 days. A strategist without it never does, even if they’ve spent years in it.
Ad Spend Is a Weak Proxy
Almost every JD for this role sets a spend threshold. $500K a month. $1 million a month.
The logic goes: ads that scale are ads that work, so someone who’s been responsible for big spend has made ads that work.
Half true.
Spend is a function of the product, the offer, the margin, the inventory, and the budget the owner was willing to risk.
The strategist controls one input out of five.
Brands know this, because when they write the exceptions into their own JD, the list is long.
Lower spend is acceptable if the brand had a small addressable market.
- If inventory capped the scale
- If fulfillment couldn’t keep up
- If the founder wouldn’t release budget
That’s most brands under $10 million.
So a strategist who took a niche brand from $30K to $150K a month in spend, profitably, with a clear method, has done something harder than a strategist who inherited a $700K account at an agency and kept it running.
The spend number on the resume tells you the size of the brand they sat inside. It doesn’t tell you what they did there.
When you hire creative strategists, that distinction matters.
Ask a different question: how much of the spend growth did they cause?
What the Senior Version Costs
Let’s price the person on the original list. The one who scaled a brand past $50 million, in your category, and still makes their own ads.
Before you hire creative strategists with that track record, start with the market for the ordinary version of the role.
As of August 2026, the average annual pay for Creative Strategy in the United States is $100,896, with the 75th percentile at $135,000 and top earners at $150,000.
That’s the average strategist. Not the one who has done nine figures.
The person who has done nine figures is sitting in London or New York on $150K to $200K, a benefits package, and a slice of equity in the brand they scaled.
- They have seniority
- They have a team
- They have the stability of having already done it
Which raises the question every brand skips: why would they move?
Most brands answer with “we’ll pay them well.”
Then you ask for the number, and it’s $4K to $12K a month. Or “whatever it takes for the right person.”
Neither is a number.
You can’t headhunt someone out of a nine-figure brand with “whatever it takes.”
You need a floor for what you expect them to have done and a ceiling for what you’ll pay, and you need to know what you offer beyond salary.
If the ceiling is $12K a month, the person who scaled a brand to $50 million isn’t moving for it. That’s fine.
It just means you’re hiring a different person, and you should write the JD for that person instead.
The Brands That Fill This Role Make Concessions
Here’s what we see in the brands that fill this position and keep the person.
- They train
- They have a strong enough culture and a clear enough process that they can take a strategist with the right raw material and teach them the brand
- They hire someone to run a creative engine they already understand, and to make it better
- They also trade
A brand that started at “must have scaled to $50 million” ends up happy with someone who owned the creative through $25 million, because that person had the process, the curiosity, and the ownership.
The brand wanted proof of scale. What they needed was proof of method.
The brands that stay stuck are the ones that want the hire to arrive finished.
Someone who can see things the founder can’t see, teach the team, and produce winners on their own from day one. That person exists.
They’re the Head of Growth at a nine-figure brand, and you’d have to pay them like it.
So decide what you can teach and what you can’t.
- You can teach your product, your customer, your offer, and your brand’s taste
- You can teach your testing cadence and your Ads Manager setup
- You can’t teach someone to be curious about why an ad worked.
- You can’t teach the instinct to go read 400 customer reviews before writing a hook. You can’t teach ownership
Hire for what you can’t teach. Train the rest.
What to Decide Before You Post the Job
Most of the pain when you hire creative strategists happens before the first candidate shows up. It happens in the JD.
Pick one of the three jobs.
Media Buyer who does creative, Copywriter who does strategy, or Editor who does concepts.
You can hire the other two later, or you may already have them.
If you want a Media Buyer, don’t reject a Media Buyer for not being a Copywriter.
We’ve watched brands do exactly that, then re-write the spec, then reject the next person for the opposite reason.
Set a floor and a ceiling.
The floor is the minimum you expect them to have owned.
“Took a brand from $4 million to $12 million” is a floor. “Scaled something into 8 figures” is a floor. “Any significant growth” is not.
The ceiling is the most you’ll pay, plus whatever you can offer beyond salary. Write both down before you start.
Keep one decision-maker.
Every stakeholder you add to the interview loop adds a week and a reason to say no.
Bringing in a fractional CMO for a second opinion sounds prudent. It’s usually where the strong candidate gets lost.
Interview more people than feels comfortable.
The best candidates in this role often have the worst resumes. They’ve been busy making ads, not polishing a CV.
A strategist who’s rejected from the resume alone never gets to show the method, and the method is what you’re hiring.
Give feedback in 24 hours.
Strategists who are worth hiring are being interviewed by someone else this week. A candidate held for ten days while you travel is a candidate you’ve lost.
Ask what they caused, rather than what spend they sat next to.
Ask them to walk you through one winning ad from the research to the result, and to explain why the ad after it lost.
Where the Right People Are
The people who fit the realistic version of this role, the ones with the process and the ownership who haven’t yet had a nine-figure brand to run it on, are in Eastern Europe and Latin America.
They’ve worked inside agencies running six-figure monthly spend for US brands.
They’ve written the scripts, briefed the Editors, managed the UGC creators, and read the results.
Some of them have owned creative for a brand through $10 million and are ready for the next one.
They ask for $3,000 to $6,000 a month.
That’s the same money the “whatever it takes” brands were quietly budgeting for a nine-figure strategist. Spent on the right person, with a brand willing to train them, it fills the role.
If you want us to find that person, book a call. Bring your JD. We’ll go through it line by line and tell you which requirements are shrinking your pool and which ones you can keep.
Tell Us Who You Need.
Tell us what needs to get off your plate. We’ll help define the role, tell you what it should cost, and recruit in the talent market where that role is strongest.