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What a creative strategist actually does in 2026

A full breakdown of Dara Denney's playbook for the role: why creative is the new targeting, the six skills she hires for, the tool stack, how to get hired, and the money math, with a working media buyer's take.

5 Jul 2026 · Source: Dara Denney

Dara Denney has spent ten years as a media buyer and creative strategist and has hired more than a hundred creative strategists. She put out a 29-minute breakdown of what the role actually is in 2026 and how to get paid properly for it. I watched it as someone who does this work, kept the parts that match what I see day to day, and flagged the parts I’d argue with. This is that.

TL;DR

Denney answers the career question underneath all the tactical creative content: what does a creative strategist actually do all day, what separates the ones worth multi-six-figures from the brief-writers, and how do you price it? Her core claims:

1. Leverage has moved to creative. Manual targeting (lookalikes, interest stacks) is obsolete, so whoever decides the ad’s message and look now controls who the ad reaches. That parks the role on the growth team, not the creative team. It is not a vibes job.
2. It is a full role, not a line item. Research, strategy, briefing and concepting, project management, performance analysis. That is 40-plus hours a week for one brand, and hybrid “editor slash strategist” pitches fail.
3. She hires against six testable skills: consumer psychology, an owned research process, hooks and concepting, format fluency, reading performance data, and non-negotiable AI fluency (biggest AI lever: reporting).
4. Process beats inspiration. What gets people hired is a demonstrable process for research, for when performance tanks, and for onboarding a brand, plus genuine customer obsession.
5. The money math is simple. Never charge under $2K/month per brand, so five clients gets you to $10K. Her agency pays $4-5K minimum, $8-10K for leads, and veteran consultants charge $8-10K per brand across three or four brands.

The role: why it has leverage now

The creative is the targeting

In the old Facebook era you targeted manually: lookalikes, interest audiences, intricate stacks. That is now obsolete. Today the algorithm finds your buyer from the ad itself, so the person deciding the messaging and visuals is, in effect, doing the targeting. Denney names the career consequence: that person becomes the most important hire on the growth team.

The definition to memorise

A creative strategist grows businesses by deciding what types of ad creative to run on paid social, based on insight and performance.

Two corrections are baked into that sentence. First, the “creative” in the title does not mean you get to be creative. That is a byproduct. It means you strategise the right creative that grows revenue. Second, because the role is tied to revenue, it sits on growth teams, not creative teams. Her hypothesis: it becomes the highest-paid role on growth teams in the near future, because someone who can demonstrably grow revenue through creative is indispensable.

It’s a whole job

Brands wanting a “video editor slash creative strategist” are, in her words, severely mistaken. The responsibilities for even one brand exceed 40 hours a week. Her best hires did come from creative backgrounds (editors, designers, UGC creators), but the pivot only works when you treat it as a different role, not an add-on. The composite she lands on: part psychologist, part marketer, part data analyst, part creative director, and increasingly part creator.

The five daily functions

1. Research. Reviews, Reddit threads, the content customers organically consume, and competitor ads, mined for insight. (Her anchor: David Ogilvy billed himself as his agency’s research director, not creative director.)
2. Strategy. Angles that drive curiosity for the right customer, targeting the right awareness levels to fill the funnel, a hook toolkit, and clearly defined personas.
3. Briefing and concepting. The briefs, hooks, and copy that guide execution.
4. Project management. Communication and process to keep editors, designers, and creators moving. Unglamorous, load-bearing.
5. Performance analysis. Turning the numbers into learnings you build on next round.

Notice the shape: it is a closed loop where analysis feeds research feeds strategy. The role is the loop, which is why brands get more leverage hiring the strategist who runs it than hiring another asset-maker or a new head of growth.

The six skills she hires for

Before the six, she screens for intrinsic motivation: a little spark that separates people who improve their craft from those writing briefs just to check a box. Then the six. For each, her test is what she runs in interviews and my take is my read as someone who does the job.

1. Consumer psychology

Her test: Can you talk core desires, motivators, and awareness levels, and why people buy? Her live exercise: find organic content in the wild that represents a persona, and explain what is emotionally resonating even when it breaks the problem/solution template.

My take: The one most people fake. The tell is whether you can explain why a piece of content works without reaching for a framework.

2. An owned research process

Her test: A named, repeatable process: customer reviews, Reddit threads, and going straight to a top ad’s comments to find what is driving performance and the nugget for the next iteration.

My take: If your research lives only in your head and gets reinvented every project, that is a habit, not a process.

3. Hooks and concepting

Her test: The scroll-stopping formulas and when to break them, the first-second experience of visuals and audio, and story structures that lead to conversion.

My take: Recreating winning hooks is learnable. Generating them from a blank page is harder. Be honest about which you are good at.

4. Formats that work

Her test: Telling evergreen formats apart from trend arbitrage (right now, AI ads and “yapper” ads). She wants a candidate who can hold that conversation.

My take: The arbitrage windows are real money, but they close. Build on evergreen, treat trends as a bonus.

5. Reading performance data

Her test: Fluency in hook rate, hold rate, and CTR, but held as secondary storytelling metrics under the primary ones: spend, purchases, revenue. Her test case: a 55% hook rate and high CTR with no conversions. Why?

My take: Where a lot of “creative” strategists quietly fall down, and where a media-buying background is a genuine edge.

6. AI fluency

Her test: Non-negotiable in 2026. Not because AI replaces the role, but because refusing to learn it leaves you behind. Her biggest lever is reporting.

My take: Agreed, and reporting is the least sexy and highest-ROI place to start.

Her calibration: master even half of these and you are already ahead of the pack.

The tool stack brands expect

• Motion (creative analytics and reporting). “A non-negotiable.” Disclosed: she is Motion’s chief evangelist, so weight the superlative accordingly. It is genuinely standard, and you can pipe its insights into an LLM.
• Foreplay (swipe file, for saving and categorising ads in the wild). A Motion competitor she still pays for, because she prefers the interface.
• An LLM, or a few (reporting, animations, copy, briefs, mind maps). No single model is best at everything. She splits reporting and animation from copy and briefs across different tools.
• Particl (real sales data on which products and bundles move). Her seriousness signal: a candidate who raised it “automatically moved to the next round.” Strategists attached to growing businesses, not just winning ads, tend to know it.

You don’t need mastery on day one, but walking in able to talk about these gets you taken more seriously.

What actually gets you hired

Process over inspiration. A demonstrable process for research, for when performance tanks (diving into the data and getting the brand back on track), and for onboarding a brand. Process-oriented people scale; inspiration-waiters do not.

Genuine customer obsession. Reading reviews, looking customers up, understanding their day-to-day. She calls it “a little stalkery.” It is the difference between an angle that lands and one that is technically correct.

Degrees carry zero weight. She does not look at where or whether you graduated.

Interview prep:

• Have reference brands ready. A handful whose creative strategy you admire. Never say Nike, Adidas, or Lululemon; they do not do performance marketing, and it is an instant tell.
• Never pitch yourself as a hybrid. You are a creative strategist first who used to edit or design. Know your lane.
• Do the mini-audit before the call. Go into the brand’s ad library, pull two or three concrete opportunities (a creator, a format, a persona, a hook), and bring them. Show the thinking before anyone asks.
• Tell them what they are doing wrong. Her red flag was a candidate who, asked what the agency could do better for a client, said “nothing.” A different perspective backed by your own analysis is the asset. Agreeing is not.

The brands that pay the most are the ones who recognise the strategist is owning the outcome, not just submitting deliverables.

Building a portfolio from zero

• You don’t need paying clients to start. Analyse live ads, break them down, publish the thinking. Her own first agency job came from public funnel breakdowns of brands she wanted to work with, and she says a large share of them reached out.
• Make spec ads and send them. A strategist recently sent her five AI statics and videos for brands her agency runs, with “test these, and if they perform, reach out.” She took the interview immediately.
• Create as a creator to pressure-test hooks and visuals. She has often hired ex-UGC creators because they understand the content landscape.
• Work with a local business or a friend of a friend’s brand to build reps.
• Join communities and invest in your education. Her caveat, and mine, are in the pushback section below.

Paired warning: a lot of strategists arrive with entitlement to a salary their results do not justify. Results first, paycheck ask second.

The money math

Where the first clients come from

1. Your immediate network. The story, tweet, or LinkedIn post: “I’m becoming a creative strategist and I’m just getting started.” Get in early.
2. Publish your thinking on LinkedIn and Twitter. This is a trust-based job. She takes interviews with people whose breakdowns she has already seen.
3. Communities. Foxwell Founders, Discord and Slack groups (where she got her own first gigs), and Sarah Levinger’s Skool. Contribute first, then ask.
4. Smaller agencies and brands are far more likely to take juniors and mentor them.

Where I’d push back

The video is mostly right. A few caveats before treating any of it as gospel:

• The Motion evangelism is disclosed but still colors the “non-negotiable” language. Motion is a fine, standard tool. It is not a law of physics. Learn what it does; don’t confuse the tool with the skill.
• The “you have to pay for education, you can’t intern your way in” section conveniently points at a course she sells. To her credit she says other courses may suit beginners better. But her own origin story, free public breakdowns that generated inbound, undercuts the idea that paid education is required. Publishing your thinking is the part that reliably works.
• The salary bands are her agency’s anecdata, not market data. Useful as anchors, not benchmarks. “Highest-paid role on growth teams soon” is explicitly her hypothesis.
• “AI won’t replace creative strategists” is asserted, not argued, and she has an obvious interest in it being true. The safer version, which she also states, is the conditional one: AI-fluent strategists replace the ones who won’t learn it.
• The 75% blog-response rate is from years ago, a lower-noise era. Directionally right (publish thinking, get inbound), but don’t expect that hit rate now.
• There is no incrementality lens anywhere. Her primary metrics (spend, purchases, revenue) are platform-attributed. The harder question is whether the spend is actually incremental and reaching genuinely new people, rather than milking the warm pool. That is the whole reason I built my Net New Reach framework, and it is the metric I would add to her list.

None of that changes the core, which I would sign my name to: the leverage on a growth team has moved to whoever decides the creative, the role is a real full-time craft rather than a line item, and the way in is to build a demonstrable process and publish your thinking until the work speaks for you.

Written by Keith Ng. Find me on LinkedIn or email keithncs7@gmail.com.