At least according to LinkedIn… (so it must be fucking true, right?)
Every few weeks another “Creative Strategist” role appears in my LinkedIn feed. Not because I’m actively searching for one. The algorithm has simply decided this is who I am. And every time I make the same mistake. I click, hoping this will be the one that actually resembles the discipline I fell in love with. Maybe this company is genuinely looking for someone to uncover insights, challenge assumptions, shape creative direction and solve meaningful business problems. Instead, I find another job description asking for someone to manage Meta campaigns, optimise ROAS, improve click-through rates, brief creators, write social copy, analyse dashboards and report on performance. Occasionally they’ll sprinkle in a line about “creative thinking”, usually somewhere between stakeholder management and proficiency in Asana.
The title says Creative Strategist. The responsibilities say something entirely different.
// Now, before anyone gets defensive, this isn’t a criticism of those jobs.
They’re valuable. Businesses absolutely need people who understand paid media, social, CRM, performance marketing and digital optimisation. These are specialist disciplines that have become increasingly sophisticated over the last decade. The problem isn’t the work. The problem is what we’ve started calling it.
THIS WASN’T ALWAYS THE JOB.
// Creative strategy didn’t begin inside Ads Manager.
Long before social media, before Google Analytics and certainly before TikTok, creative strategy emerged from the world of account planning. The strategist wasn’t there to optimise campaigns after they’d been made. Their job was to help shape what got made in the first place. They immersed themselves in human behaviour, searching for tensions, contradictions, motivations and insights that could unlock better creative thinking. Their contribution wasn’t another variation of the headline. It was understanding people well enough that the creative team had something genuinely interesting to say. Strategy existed to make creativity more meaningful. Not more efficient.
That’s an important distinction because somewhere along the way we’ve confused effectiveness with optimisation.
WE’VE STARTED CONFUSING SPECIALISATION WITH STRATEGY.
// They’re related. They’re not interchangeable.
Today we have paid media strategists, social strategists, CRM strategists, lifecycle strategists, SEO strategists, creator strategists and performance marketers. Every one of those roles deserves respect because every one requires genuine expertise. But they’re specialists in a channel, a platform or a capability. Their role is to maximise performance within an existing system. A Creative Strategist, on the other hand, should be questioning the system itself. They’re asking whether the positioning is distinctive enough. Whether the proposition is compelling. Whether the audience has been defined properly. Whether the insight is actually insightful. Whether the team is solving the right problem before spending six weeks polishing the wrong answer.
Those aren’t execution questions… They’re strategic ones.
PERHAPS THE TITLE HAS JUST BECOME MORE ATTRACTIVE.
// Who wouldn’t want to be called a strategist?
Let’s be honest. “Creative Strategist” sounds better than “Paid Media Manager“. It sounds broader than “Content Lead“. It implies influence. It suggests you’re helping define the direction of the work rather than simply executing it. That’s probably why we’ve seen the title spread so rapidly across marketing. Recruiters like it. Candidates like it. Businesses like it. Everyone wins.
Well, almost everyone.
// The only thing that loses is the meaning of the words themselves.
MY ISSUE ISN’T WITH THE PEOPLE.
// It’s with the advertising industry.
Most people with “Creative Strategist” on their LinkedIn profile are doing exactly what they’ve been hired to do. This isn’t an attack on them. It’s an observation about the way our industry has gradually redefined one of its most interesting disciplines. We’ve taken a role that once revolved around human insight, strategic thinking and creative direction and quietly turned it into a catch-all title for anyone working somewhere between content, paid media and performance marketing. That’s not because those disciplines aren’t important. It’s because we’ve become lazy with language.
And for an industry that prides itself on the power of words, that’s quite the irony.
PERHAPS THE BIGGEST LOSS ISN’T CREATIVITY.
// It’s strategy.
When every execution role becomes a strategy role, strategy slowly loses its meaning. It becomes synonymous with optimisation. We stop asking bigger questions because we’re too busy measuring smaller ones. Should we be making this campaign at all? Is this actually the problem worth solving? Is there a more interesting opportunity we’ve completely overlooked? Those questions don’t usually appear in a dashboard, but they’re often the ones that determine whether a brand grows, stagnates or disappears altogether.
Perhaps that’s why I keep clicking on those job ads. Not because I’m looking for work. Because I’m still hoping to find someone looking for a Creative Strategist.
Not just someone responsible for making ads perform a little better.
Someone responsible for making the work worth creating in the first place.
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PS: Clarity is easy to talk about and surprisingly difficult to create. If your team is currently navigating complexity, competing priorities or strategic drift, I’d be happy to have a chat.
💀🖤
Cheers,
DANIEL JACOBS
http://bjornfox.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denialjacobs/
Melbourne, Australia
THE CREATIVE STRATEGIST 