Creative Strategist - Ecommerce Performance Marketing (Remote)

Direct Response Creative Strategist 4AM Media owns and operates 3 DTC brands across health, cleaning, and pets. Last year we spent over $40M across paid media scaling our own products. We're not an agency. We're operators supply chain, creative, custom funnels, media buying, analytics, and customer service all happen under one roof.

We're hiring a Direct Response Creative Strategist to be the connective tissue across all 3 brands, the person who takes a product, an angle, or a competitor teardown and turns it into the offer, funnel, landing page, and ad creative brief that the rest of the company executes against.

You'll report directly to the CEO (eventually transitioning under our Director of Performance Marketing) and work as a peer to the media buyers, creative manager, supply chain, and dev team. Your job is to close the gap between "we have an idea" and "we're running profitable traffic against it."

This is the highest-leverage seat in the building when you do it well. You're the one generating new hypotheses and new ideas pulling from research, customer language, competitor work, and your own pattern recognition. When the dev team is asked to build a new funnel, you've already mocked it up and written the copy. When a product launches, you've already decided the offer structure, the upsells, the LPs, and the angles that go to market.

The 4 ways this role drives growthOur growth comes from four motions. The Creative Strategist is core to all of them:

1. New angles. You generate the angle, write the landing page, and brief the ad creative to match. One person owning the whole angle end-to-end.

2. New funnels. You mock up the funnel, write the copy, hand it to dev to build, and write the creative brief that feeds it. Whether it's a fresh idea or a reverse-engineered competitor funnel, you're the one who scopes it, sequences it, and writes it.

3. New product launches. When a new product is ready, you build the offer, the funnel(s), the LP(s), and the ad creative brief so supply chain, dev, creative, and media buying have everything they need to ship the launch.

4. Competitor teardowns. You're constantly watching what's working in our categories. Competitor ad libraries, top-performing funnels, winning angles. You translate what you see into testable copy and creative briefs.

What you'll ownDirect response copywriting (the core)You are, first and foremost, a great direct response copywriter. Long-form sales copy, advertorials, video scripts, hooks, headlines, ad copy, email, SMS you can write all of it, and you can write it at the level that actually converts paid traffic.

You understand the psychology behind a purchase decision and you know how to translate it into hooks that stop a thumb, copy that earns the click, and pages that close the saleYou know the difference between brand copy that feels good and direct response copy that actually moves unitsYou write for the customer, not for the brand team's preferencesResearch and customer intelligenceEvery brief and every page you ship is grounded in evidence. You run an active research loop across:

Customer reviews on Shopify, Amazon, and TikTok ShopSupport tickets and survey dataCompetitor ad libraries on Meta and TikTokComments on socialReddit (subreddits where your customer actually lives)Category trend monitoringAI-assisted synthesis of all of the aboveYou know what customers actually say, what they actually want, and what specific language moves them. You can point to evidence for every angle you propose.

Mockups and prototypesYou don't just write copy you build the artifacts the dev team needs to ship. Landing pages, funnels, PDPs, quizzes, offer pages, upsells, post-purchase flows. You mock them up in Claude Design (or comparable AI design tools), Figma, Webflow, Notion, on paper, whatever works, with real copy in place, so dev can build directly from your prototype instead of guessing.

This is a hard requirement. The Creative Strategist who only writes copy and hands off to someone else to design it without some kind of design direction is the wrong person.

Creative brief ownershipEvery ad creative that goes live starts with a brief you wrote.

The angle, the hook, the proof points, the visual direction, the call-to-actionThe hypothesis (what we're testing and why)The success criteria (what good looks like at what spend)The reference material (customer language, competitor work, prior winners)You're not handing the creative team a vague concept. You're handing them a brief they can execute against with confidence.

Performance accountabilityYou're accountable for the performance of the creative we ship. Primary metric is contribution margin and nMER on the spend driven by your work, but you understand how hook rate, hold rate, thumb stop, CTR, CPC, conversion rate, AOV, and new customer % all feed that goal.

When ads underperform, you diagnose the why, file the learning, and ship the next iterationThe media buyer team should never be the first to notice a creative cohort is fading. You catch it firstYou translate soft numbers into the next test, not into excusesAI as a force multiplierYou're fluent in AI creative tools and you have a clear point of view on what AI does well and where human judgment is still required.

You use AI to multiply throughput on briefs, variations, ad teardowns, research synthesis, and rough cutsYou build workflows that get the team more output per hour without dropping qualityYou're not afraid of AI replacing your role. You're using it to make your role biggerPartner with the media buyersThe media buyer team is your closest peer group. You're aligned on what's being tested, why, and what the next move is.

You bring hypotheses to the table; the buyers know how to deploy themWhen a buyer has a hypothesis, you turn it into an executable creative and LP planThis relationship is the difference between creative being a bottleneck and creative being a weaponWhat we need you to bring5+ years writing direct response copy for DTC ecommerce: long-form sales pages, advertorials, video scripts, ad copy, hooks at scaleProven creative against meaningful paid media spend. You've written work that drove measurable performance against $1M+/month in Meta or Google acquisition spendStrong fluency in Meta Ads Manager and the metrics that matter for performance creative: hook rate, hold rate, thumb stop, CTR, CPC, CPM, conversion rate, AOV. You can navigate the platform without helpDemonstrated research process across customer reviews, surveys, support data, competitor ad libraries, Amazon and TikTok Shop, Reddit, and AI-assisted synthesisWorking understanding of consumer psychology and how to apply it through copy and visualsHands-on prototyping ability. You can mock up landers, funnels, PDPs, quizzes, offer pages, and upsells in Claude Design, Figma, Webflow, or similar. Not pixel-perfect designs, but functional prototypes with real copy that dev can build fromActive use of AI in your creative workflow, with a clear POV on what it does well and where it falls shortHyper-organized. You run multiple concurrent angles, funnels, and tests across 3 brands without dropping balls. You have systems for tracking what's in production, what's shipping this week, and what's queuedSelf-starter, no handholding. You walk into a startup environment and build. You figure out what's missing and either build it or flag what you need. The wrong person needs a manager to assign them tasks. We're hiring a builderStrong written and verbal communication. You can hold your own in a strategy conversation with the CEO and a tactical conversation with a buyer in the same hourProactive remote operator. You take initiative to connect with the in-office team and other remote teammates. You don't wait to be looped in you loop yourself inWhat disqualifies youTreating the role as copy only or strategy only. You own the full loop.Letting briefs go out that aren't grounded in evidenceBringing problems without proposed solutionsWaiting for direction rather than buildingWorking hours that look busy without output that backs them upOperating without a plan for how AI fits into your workflowWhy this role is differentYou report directly to the CEO. No agency middle layer, no creative bureaucracyYou're the central node. Product, supply chain, dev, creative, and media buying all depend on your output to move. The role is built for someone who likes that kind of leverage that actually makes the company growYou work on our brands, not clients. Every dollar of contribution margin your work drives goes back into the company you work forThree brands, not thirty. Real depth on each one. Uou'll know the customer, the unit economics, and the winning angles coldYou're hands-on across the entire funnel. Hook to LP to upsell to post-purchase. You see and shape the whole thing, not just one slice of itYou stay in the work. This isn't a role where you write Jira tickets and manage handoffs. You're researching, writing, mocking up, briefing, and iterating. Every dayReal growth path. Crush this role and the path expands into senior creative leadership, expanded brand coverage, or operator roles across the businessRemote, with intentThis role is remote. The growth team is primarily in San Diego, but the right Creative Strategist can be effective from anywhere as long as you bring proactive communication and tight async habits. You'll need to connect frequently with the in-office team and other remote teammates, share work in progress early, and never be the one teammates have to chase. Remote works for builders. It doesn't work for people who go quiet.

What success looks like in 12 monthsNew angles are shipping faster, hitting performance targets at a higher rate, and the buyers can point to your work as the unlock on multiple winnersAt least one major new funnel architecture you mocked up and wrote is now a control across at least one brandAt least one new product launch went to market with the offer, funnel, LPs, and creative brief you built and it scaled profitablyMultiple competitor angles you reverse-engineered have been turned into our own winning testsYour AI-assisted workflow has materially increased throughput compared to where the team is todayRevenue has increased because the volume and quality of creative and landing pages going to market is materially higher than it is today and the CEO trusts your judgment on what to test next