Head of Creative Strategy

Head of Creative Strategy

Function: Brand & Creative | Performance Creative | Creative Strategy

Reports to: CEO

Location: Remote (UK,Europe, anywhere!)

Hours: Full-time, approximately 40 hours per week

HQ: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Compensation: €90,000 – €100,000 per year

Bonuses: Performance bonus tied to KPIs, discussed based on experience

Main Responsibility:

Leading our creative strategy department and raising the bar on how we research, think, and produce performance creative, so results are predictable and replicable across every client.

Our Core Values

1. Own The Outcome Take full responsibility for every result - the wins, the losses, and everything in between.

2. Truth Before Comfort Say what needs to be said, even when it's difficult. Honesty is how we get better.

3. Invested In The Result Feel genuine pride when clients win and real accountability when they don't.

4. Never Stop Learning Stay curious, innovate constantly, and never settle - the best teams never stop improving.

Background

Adfluent B.V. Is a start-up founded in June 2023. We work with direct-to-consumer brands only, and over the past 12 months we've grown to a lean team of sixteen, scaling fast as we expand our portfolio with new launches through 2026 and beyond.

This is our first ever Head of Creative hire. Creative strategy currently sits under our Head of Performance, and we're carving it out into its own department for the person who can own it and take it to the next level. You would be building this function, not inheriting a finished one: setting the standard for how we research, think, and produce performance creative, and shaping the systems the whole team runs on.

For the right person this is a rare opportunity. You get to build a creative department from the ground up inside a fast-growing ecommerce agency, own the creative output across every client, and be a big part of the growth story from here. Reporting to our CEO and working as a peer to our Head of Performance, you own what creative gets made and the thinking behind it, while they own media buying and what happens to it in the ad account.

The measure of success is not a single great campaign. It is predictable, replicable results across every client, driven by the research methods and internal frameworks you build, rather than by a few standout strategists or lucky concepts.

We're looking for a senior creative leader who has run a creative strategy team before, holds a high bar across a whole department rather than just producing great work themselves, and builds the systems that make winning creative repeatable.

Main Accountabilities:

• Lead the creative strategy department end-to-end: manage all Creative Strategists, plan capacity, and develop the team through 1:1s, trainings, and brainstorm sessions that raise the creative bar.
• Own the research standard and build the internal frameworks that capture, store, and model insight, so strong strategy becomes repeatable across clients instead of dependent on individual talent.
• Own the internal strategy sign-off: agree the direction before strategists execute, then let them write and ship their own concepts. Hold and keep raising one creative quality bar across every strategist and every client.
• Decide which concepts and scripts get produced for each client each cycle, using the in-account signal from the Head of Performance and media buyers as an input.
• Own the SOPs, workflows, and AI adoption that make strategists more effective and efficient, cutting production time so more hours go to research and thinking.
• Drive collaboration and innovation between the creative and performance departments so insight and ideas flow both ways.
• Stay hands-on on the biggest or hardest accounts, and join client calls to present or steer creative direction where the strategy needs backing.
• Push back on clients when their creative thinking is off, defending strong strategy with clear reasoning to protect the hit rate.

Success in 6 Months:

• Creative performance is predictable and replicable across clients: a hit rate above 20% across accounts, and at least one Adfluent creative in the top-3 spenders for the majority of clients.
• Research runs to a consistent standard and insight is captured in internal frameworks the whole team pulls from, rather than living and dying in individual strategists' heads.
• The strategy process is measurably faster and more consistent through SOPs, workflows, and AI, freeing strategists to spend more time on research and thinking.
• Strategists are visibly developing through your 1:1s, trainings, and brainstorms, and the creative and performance departments are genuinely collaborating.
• One quality bar is held across every strategist and client through the internal sign-off, with weak strategy caught before it runs, not after it has lost money in the account.

Attitude: You,

• Take complete ownership of creative performance across the agency, the wins and the losses alike;
• Are a builder: you turn what works into frameworks, SOPs, and systems so results compound and repeat instead of being reinvented every cycle;
• Hold a high bar and keep raising it, giving direct, specific feedback without finger-pointing. You're kind, not nice;
• Are genuinely invested in whether the work performs in the ad account, not just whether it ships;
• Stay curious and innovate constantly, especially with AI, to make the team faster and sharper;
• Can lead and develop a team, not just do great work yourself;
• Can self-manage and prioritise in a fast-paced agency environment with multiple clients at once;
• Are all-in on one focus. We're not looking for a one foot in, one foot out mentality.

Experience & Skills:

• Proven experience leading creative strategy for direct-to-consumer / ecommerce brands on Meta and TikTok, ideally in an agency environment.
• Deep expertise in performance creative and what makes a high-performing asset, using a modular framework (hook-body-CTA), across UGC, static, motion graphic, and high-production content.
• A track record of building repeatable systems: research methodologies, insight frameworks, SOPs, and documentation that make a team scalable rather than people-dependent.
• The ability to take product, brand, and customer data and translate it into differentiated angles and scripts that perform and hold to long-term positioning.
• Strong command of AI tools for research and scripting, and a genuine drive to innovate on both speed and quality.
• Excellent, direct communication skills. You can lead a team, present to and push back on clients, and have the hard conversations.
• Strong organisational skills and the ability to run strategy across multiple clients simultaneously.

The Benefits of Working at Adfluent B.V.

• The chance to build and own a department from day one. As our first Head of Creative, you set how creative strategy is done at Adfluent and grow with the agency as we scale.
• Although we're still small, we have the ambition to stay lean and grow vertical with our clients, not horizontal. This means we work with a small portfolio of clients to ensure we get them the best results. We're early in our journey with a huge amount of opportunity to learn and progress.
• Start-up sensibilities. You have the rare opportunity to work with a small but rapidly expanding group and have a huge impact on how we do things.
• Remote working. We're a modern business so working from home or abroad is no issue at all. But you're more than welcome at our office in Amsterdam too.
• This is a full-time commitment. Both contractor and full-time employee work for us, but we're not looking for a one foot in, one foot out mentality.