The landscape of media buying has drastically changed over the years.

Gone are the days where you can throw up a photo on a white background and scale your Facebook ads profitably.

Especially with iOS 14.5, data attribution has been impossible to understand or track.

The competition online is higher, so creative has been pushed to the front of importance.

The media buyer used to do all of the targeting, now the creative does the targeting.

The creative assets are the main lever of media buying now.

A new role has emerged that is vital to the success of the ads online.

Creative Strategist.

This is a unique, new role that hasn't really been defined in DTC until recently.

My friends at Motion, sponsoring this newsletter, put together an incredible resource to teach you how to become a creative strategist.

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I have been saying we need to bridge the gap between data and production for a long time.

Goodo Studios does that, but now we actually have some definition to this every changing landscape of media buying and advertising.

I want to jump into what a Creative Strategist is and how you can become a better one.

Everyone should understand creative strategy at least at a high level because this is what will help you build brand and authority around your company.

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1. What a creative strategist is not?

A creative strategist is NOT a media buyer.

A media buyer is responsible for setting up ad campaigns on the ad platforms, and collecting, organizing, and interpreting the ad data.

A creative strategist is not the one in charge of ad spend or the technical side of running campaigns on each ad platform.

2. Become a translator

Up until about a year ago, there was no separation between the creative production and media buyer.

Over time, creative production has become more complicated and important, and a gap has been formed between creative and media buyers.

That gap is now filled with the creative strategist.

Ultimately, a creative strategist is a translator between the media buyer and creative production.

The strategist looks at the ad data and figures out why ads perform well or not.They then take those insights and create new production to test new ads.

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Build a feedback loop between data and creativeRun effective Creative Sprint cycles with your teamEliminate guesswork from your creative process

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3. Coming up with ideas

There are a diverse amount of factors to test in ads.

Creative formatsInfluencersAd TypesOffersAd placementsLanding page pathsProduct categories

Within each category, there are many options to test and play with.

The creative strategist is trying to find the perfect combination of each of these factors to create winning ads.

A creative strategist has to look at each factor and see how they can have different options to play with in the ads.

For example, in the offers section, you could say "$30/month" or you could say, "As little as $1/day."

The price is the same, but the offer is different.

Different offers might create different behaviors.

Same with certain influencers.

Maybe you have Charles and Tina as influencers, but Tina outperforms Charles in the ads.

Try having Tina in more ads - do you continue to see the same success?

You can go through each category above and find hundreds of tests for your ads.

That is first job of a creative strategist.

4. Curate strategies

One of my favorite books is Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon.

Kleon talks about looking at other people's work and creating from what has already been created.

You shouldn't steal intellectual property, but you can find inspiration from what other brands do.

A creative strategist is always watching what other brands are testing to see if those strategies could work for their own brand.

A curator is a powerful person in a world full of information overload.

The creative strategist has to curate and synthesize ideas into a hypothesis to test for the ads.

5. Briefing

As I said last week when I was talking about briefing creators for TikTok, writing about what you want in an ad is DIFFICULT.

The creative strategist must understand production and be able to get the ideas from their head and onto a brief so the production team can execute what the strategist wants.

Briefing is the hardest thing to do, because there can be so many nuances that you assume in your head but aren't translated well onto the brief.

Briefing is where many media buyers fall short because they are so focused on data that they don't have the time to write out a brief on what they need.

This gap is why creative strategists are essential within your media buying ecosystem.

I suggest making your briefs visual with much detail on what you want and don't want.

Goodo Studios uses Milanote to do our briefs but I know other teams use Notion. I think Milanote is better visually and makes more sense for creative production.

6. Check the data

The creative assets have been made, sent to the media buyer, and run as ads.

The media buyer and creative strategist look at the data together.What is working and what isn't working?

The creative strategist comes up with a hypothesis, and then the cycle goes back to the beginning.You constantly look at the data and translate that into creative production to test again.

The creative strategist keeps the creative production engine moving, so you are constantly testing.