Advise on current paid social trends — formats, platform shifts, and what's working now versus six months ago.
Recommend channel strategy — where and how brands should show up across paid social.
Adapt big brand campaigns for paid — determine what changes, what gets cut, and what gets re-shot or re-cut for feed vs. story vs. in-feed native.
Improve how creative teams get briefed — tighter, more performance-informed briefs that still protect brand integrity.
Advise on testing and creative automation — structure creative testing at scale (variants, hooks, iteration speed) without it becoming chaos.
Creative or content strategy background with hands-on paid social experience (Meta, TikTok, Google Display, YouTube) — you speak both languages fluently. Not a strategist who hands off to media, and not a media buyer dabbling in creative.
In-house experience at a brand, not agency-only — you've operated close to the business and the numbers, not at arm's length through an agency model.
A track record of owning or heavily influencing paid social creative strategy — not just executing against someone else's brief. We're looking for evidence of ownership, not just production.
Experience producing hundreds of ads per month — confirmation that you've operated at real scale, not boutique volume.
Comfort being both strategist and translator — you can talk brand with a CMO and shot lists with a creative team, sometimes on the same day.
You've sat inside a brand's marketing org and felt the tension between "this needs to look right" and "this needs to perform" — and you've built the muscle to resolve that tension instead of picking a side. You can look at a hero campaign asset and immediately see the six ways it needs to fragment for paid social, and you can sit across from a creative team and turn "the CTR is soft" into a brief they can actually act on.