Actual AI builds AI-powered marketing creative for real advertisers — HVAC, dental, home services, DTC. Small NYC shop. The ads we make have to perform, not just look impressive.
We're hiring a Creative Strategist: the person who owns the thinking behind the ad, not just the render.
If you've held a creative strategist role at an agency or brand — or you've been the person mining reviews, building angle docs, briefing editors, and reading Ads Manager to decide what gets made next — and you've watched AI collapse the gap between having an idea and seeing it on screen, this is the role.
Why this is different from a strategist job anywhere else: at most shops you write a brief and wait three days for an editor. Here you can have the concept on screen in an hour. That changes what the job is. The bottleneck moves off production capacity and onto the quality of your thinking — which is exactly where we want it, and exactly why we care so much about who we hire for this.
Who We're Actually Looking For
Most people applying to AI creative roles right now are AI enthusiasts who learned some tools. We want the opposite: a marketer, strategist, or creator who has decided to go AI-native.
The tools are learnable in a few weeks. Knowing why a 55-year-old homeowner in Phoenix clicks on one thing and scrolls past another is not.
People who tend to fit: agency creative strategists, performance marketers who own creative, direct response copywriters, UGC/brand creatives, editors who moved into strategy, media buyers who got tired of blaming the creative and started making it.
What You'll Own
Strategy & Research
- Customer research — review mining, VOC, forums, support tickets, sales call transcripts
- Competitor and ad library teardowns: what's running, what's scaling, what quietly died
- Angle and hook development — multiple genuinely distinct concepts per offer, not variations on one
- Awareness-level mapping: matching the message to where the buyer actually is
- Creative briefs another person could execute without a follow-up call
Production
- Scripts, VO, and on-screen copy in clean, native-sounding English
- Producing your own concepts with current-generation video and image models
- Directing AI actors and presenters for testimonial, UGC, and problem/solution formats
- Building for testing — several angles per offer, structured so results are readable
Iteration
- Reading performance data — hook rate, hold, CTR, CPA — and deciding what gets made next
- Post-mortems on what lost, not just victory laps on what won
- Tracking model releases and telling the team what actually changed and whether it matters
Requirements
The strategic half
1. You've done real marketing work. You can explain why one hook beats another. You know the difference between a problem-aware and a solution-aware buyer and why that changes the first three seconds. If "angle," "awareness level," "hook rate," or "lead type" are new terms, this isn't the right role yet.
2. Native-level written and spoken English. Non-negotiable. You'll be writing hooks, scripts, VO, and on-screen text for a US consumer audience. Copy that is grammatically correct but subtly foreign-sounding does not convert. There will be a live conversation as part of the process.
3. Comfort with performance data. You don't need to be a media buyer, but you should be able to look at a creative report and form an opinion about what to make next.
The execution half
4. Obsessive attention to detail. The most common reason we kill AI creative is that it almost works. Warped hands. Garbled on-screen text. A product label that changes between shots. Lip-sync drift. Physics that feel two degrees off. A face that morphs at second six. If you don't catch these instinctively, you'll struggle here.
5. Hands-on with current-generation video models. Actively working with several of: Kling, Veo, Seedance, Runway, Hailuo, Wan, Luma. We care less about which you prefer than whether you can articulate why you'd route a given shot to a given model.
6. Image and character pipeline. Nano Banana, GPT Image, Seedream, Midjourney, FLUX, Ideogram for typography. Character consistency across shots matters more to us than any single beautiful frame.
7. AI presenter / UGC actor tooling. HeyGen, Creatify, Arcads, Captions or equivalent — including voice cloning and lip-sync cleanup.
Why the execution half still matters in a strategy role: depending on how the team shapes up (see below), hands-on production may become a small part of your week. But you need to have done it. You can't brief, QC, or lead people doing work you've never done yourself — and an AI creative brief is only useful if the person writing it knows what the models can and can't actually do.
Nice to Have
- Editing in CapCut / Premiere / Resolve/other AI Tools
- ElevenLabs or equivalent for VO, plus basic sound design
- ComfyUI or multi-model API routing (fal.ai, Replicate)
- Meta / TikTok Ads Manager hands-on
- Experience briefing or managing editors, UGC creators, or freelancers
The Team Structure — Read This Before You Apply
Our creative org chart is deliberately unfinished, and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Today this role spans the whole pipeline: research → angle → script → prompt → edit → deliver.
That is not permanent. The likely split as we grow:
- Strategy & concept — research, angles, hooks, scripts, briefs, performance analysis
- Production — prompting, generation, editing, QC
You could land on either side. The most likely outcome for a strong hire is that you keep strategy and hand execution to a pod of prompters and editors that you brief and lead.
We're telling you this up front because we'd rather hire someone energized by an unfinished org chart than someone who needs a fixed job description. If you want a hand in designing what this creative team becomes, that's genuinely on the table. If you need clean lanes from day one, this will frustrate you.
Hours & Trajectory
This can be full-time. If you're the right person and you're ready, we'll start you full-time.
If you're currently employed and want to test the fit first, part-time (10–20 hrs/week) works too and scales up from there. Tell us which you're after — neither answer counts against you.
Path: Creative Strategist → Lead Strategist → Creative Director, running a pod.
This Is Not For You If
- You're an AI video enthusiast without marketing experience. The tools are the easy part.
- English is a second language you're still developing. No judgment — this role is writing-heavy and it won't work.
- You want to be handed a brief and render it.
- You've never had to explain why an ad didn't work.
- You need a finished org chart and a fixed role definition.
Pay: £17,821.00-£35,642.00 per year
Application question(s):
- Please provide link(s) to 2+ creatives you have personally created
- Write three hooks (one sentence each) for this offer: a $99 A/C tune-up for a home services company in Phoenix, targeting homeowners in July. Three distinct angles, not three rewrites of one. Write them yourself - we will ask you about them live.
Work Location: Remote
