Creative director

Why this role exists

We run paid acquisition for D2C brands across India and the UAE. In 2026, the media buying layer is close to commoditised — Advantage+ and PMax have automated most of the targeting decisions we used to get paid for. Creative is now the primary lever we have over a client's CAC.

Today that lever is owned by nobody in particular. Concepts get made because someone had an idea on a Tuesday, not because a hypothesis needed testing. Winners aren't systematically iterated. Losers aren't diagnosed. We are leaving performance on the table across every account.

This role owns that gap end-to-end: the thinking, the making, and the reading of the numbers afterward. You are not a designer taking briefs from a media buyer. You set the creative agenda for the portfolio and are held to what it produces.

What you'll own

1. Creative strategy (per brand)

• Run a proper research pass on each brand before touching a timeline: category positioning, competitor ad libraries, customer reviews, support tickets, Reddit/comment mining. Messaging angles come from customer language, not brainstorms.
• Build and maintain a creative strategy document per client: audience segments, awareness stages, core angles, offer framing, objection map, do-not-say list.
• Translate that into a monthly creative roadmap — a concept × angle × format × hook matrix, with each production slot tied to a stated hypothesis, not just a deliverable count.

2. Production

• Hands-on editing and design. Video (Premiere Pro / After Effects / CapCut) and static (Figma / Photoshop / Illustrator).
• Write scripts and hooks. Brief and direct UGC creators, founders, and models. Run shoots where required.
• Ship at performance-marketing velocity — net-new concepts plus iteration variants, weekly, across a portfolio of brands. Volume and quality both matter; you'll be judged on the pair, not either alone.
• Enforce naming conventions and asset hygiene so every creative is traceable in reporting. Analysis is impossible without this and it is your responsibility, not the buyer's.

3. Data and iteration

• Live inside creative-level reporting in Meta Ads Manager, Google Ads, and GA4. Build your own pivots in Sheets — you should not need someone to pull numbers for you.
• Diagnose at the right layer: hook rate, hold rate, outbound CTR, CPC, LP CVR, CPA/ROAS, frequency and fatigue curves, spend concentration by creative. Know which metric implicates the hook versus the body versus the offer versus the landing page.
• Maintain a creative test log across all accounts: hypothesis, variable changed, result, decision. One variable at a time.
• Run a weekly winner/loser teardown and convert findings into next week's production queue. Kill decisions are yours.
• Present creative performance directly to clients in monthly reviews.

What we're looking for

Non-negotiable

• 3–6 years in performance creative — agency or in-house D2C. Ads that ran with real spend behind them, not concept work.
• A portfolio where you can attach numbers to the work. "This concept dropped CPA 31% over six weeks and scaled to ₹8L/month" beats a beautiful reel with no context. Work without performance data attached will not be evaluated.
• Genuinely hands-on execution. You cut and design yourself, at speed.
• Fluency in Meta Ads Manager at the creative level. You can build a breakdown, read it, and tell us what to make next.
• Strong written English and Hindi scripting for hooks and VO.
• Comfort with being measured. Your work has a number attached to it every week.

Strong plus

• Multi-category experience (skincare, F&B, apparel, supplements, electronics, jewellery).
• An existing UGC creator network.
• Motion graphics and sound design.
• Working use of generative AI tooling for volume and variant production.
• GCC / UAE market exposure — different CPMs, different cultural framing.

Who this role is not for

• People who need a producer, a designer, and a strategist under them before they can work. You will build that team later; you will not start with it.
• People whose creative standard is awards and brand films. Ours is contribution margin.
• People who experience "this creative is underperforming, we're killing it" as a personal critique.
• People who want to hand off the numbers to someone else.

What success looks like

| Timeframe | Expectation |
|---|---|
| 30 days | Strategy docs live for every active account. Naming conventions and the creative test log implemented across the portfolio. Baseline creative performance mapped per brand. |
| 60 days | Monthly creative roadmaps running for all accounts. First full test cycles closed with documented learnings. Production cadence stable. |
| 90 days | Measurable movement in creative-attributable metrics on at least two accounts. Client-facing creative reviews owned independently. A clear, evidenced case for what the creative team needs to hire next. |

Hiring process

1. Application — portfolio plus performance context (details below).
2. Screening call (30 min) — role fit, scope, expectations.
3. Test task (1day) — we give you a real brand, its ad account data, and its current creatives. You return: a one-page creative strategy, three concepts with hooks and rationale, one fully edited video, and a written call on which existing creatives to kill and why.
4. Deep-dive (60–90 min) — we take your test task apart with you, and walk through past work you've shipped.
5. Offer.