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 explain not just what you'd test, but how you found the opportunity and why you believe it will work. Strong communication, prioritization, and cross-functional collaboration skills. A bias for speed — you generate learning quickly without over-engineering every test. What "AI-First" Means to Us We are not looking for someone who asks AI to spit out scripts and hooks. We're looking for someone who uses AI to: Analyze customer reviews, calls, and feedback at scale. Identify creative patterns across many accounts at once. Build and maintain shared account context. Surface cross-account testing opportunities. Automate recurring creative research and reporting. Improve the speed and quality of briefs and production workflows. Build systems that help the whole team make better creative decisions. You bring strong, independent creative judgment. AI is how you increase the depth, speed, and scale of that judgment. Familiarity with tools like Motion, Looker Studio, Asana, Slack, and Claude is a plus. Nice to Have Lead generation or high-ticket services experience. Home improvement experience. CRO and landing-page testing familiarity. UGC, founder-led, or spokesperson-led creative experience. Hands-on familiarity with editing or design tools. What Success Looks Like CDM consistently introduces genuinely new creative ideas instead of recycling the same concepts and formats. Creative iterations are more deliberate, strategic, and evidence-based. Media Buyers and editors produce stronger briefs and creative recommendations on their own. Learnings are captured, shared, and applied across accounts. AI-supported research and creative workflows are adopted department-wide. CDM has a repeatable creative-strategy engine that gets stronger with every test. Benefits Benefits of Working at CDM Competitive base salary + performance-based bonuses Flexible remote work environment with option for in-person collaboration (Vaughan, ON) Group Benefits - Medical, Dental, Vision, RRSP/401k Plan w/matching, more. Company-provided MacBook computer Home office budget and Clever merch delivery to get you started Work Abroad Policy: Need a new working environment? Our work abroad policy supports this! The chance to shape and grow a high-performing Client Success team A culture of performance and respect where the best work happens with extreme ownership and accountability meets collaboration. Clever Digital Marketing values the unique skills and experiences each individual brings to the team. We are happy to provide reasonable accommodations to candidates in need of support during the recruitment and selection process. Please note that artificial intelligence (AI) may be utilized during the interview or candidate evaluation process to support the fair and efficient screening, assessment, and selection of applicants.