Head of Performance Creative

About the Company

Our client, founded in 2019 is an 8-figure eCommerce company redefining comfort-focused socks for everyday people. What began with non-binding socks has expanded into compression socks and ankle socks to support all-day comfort, better fit, and real-life needs.

Serving customers across North America, the client combines functionality, style, and innovation in a category that has traditionally lacked modern branding and product development.

The client values employees and invests in company culture through coaching, team events, company dinners, benefits, and a collaborative remote and in person work environment.

Role Overview

The Director of Performance Creative role based in Toronto or East Coast, reporting directly to the Chief Marketing Officer, owns the creative strategy and systems that turn customer insights and ad performance data into scalable winning content across Meta, AppLovin, YouTube, and emerging channels. This role blends direct response expertise with strong creative instinct and production leadership, shaping not just what gets made, but how it gets made across UGC, branded content, VSLs, and short- and long-form video.

This person is responsible for building the testing frameworks, briefing standards, content structures, and production systems that improve creative quality, increase output velocity, and drive efficient CPA and ROAS performance. Working closely with strategists, producers, editors, creators, and media buyers, this role ensures the creative team is producing performance-driven content with clear direction, accountability, and scalability.

Responsibilities

- Own performance creative strategy across Meta, AppLovin, YouTube, and emerging channels, ensuring creative stays anchored to proven ad account signals and scalable buying triggers.

- Sit above the Creative Director and Creative Strategists, determining what gets made and why (strategy, frameworks, direction, and brief quality), while partnering with the Creative Director/Producer who run day-to-day production operations.

- Lead the discovery and development of new creative formats, production styles, messaging angles, creator systems, and content frameworks that push the client's advertising and brand presence forward.

- Define the client's core performance messaging hierarchy by funnel stage, including guardrails for brand constraints (empathy-first tone, outcome-based framing, and avoiding restricted medical or symptom language).

- Build and enforce channel and funnel-specific performance creative frameworks that reliably produce winners.

- Maintain a monthly creative testing roadmap with explicit hypotheses (what's being tested, why it should work, and what success means), including creative mix targets (new concepts, iterations, refreshes) and fatigue prevention through planned rotation.

- Own the creative brief standard for performance creative, and review and approve 100% of strategist briefs before production begins, ensuring every brief includes insight, hook/angle, proof plan, offer framing, constraints, and success metrics.

- Run the weekly performance-to-creative feedback loop with the creative team, translating results into iteration directives (what changes, what stays, and why) and ensuring learnings are documented and reused.

- Own the creative testing roadmap, balancing innovation with iteration by introducing new concepts while scaling and refreshing proven winners.

- Enforce persona discipline by preventing off-strategy concepts and "cool ideas" not supported by data or structured hypotheses, and by keeping creative aligned to proven pillars (comfort, fit-for-all-legs, non-digging feel, everyday confidence, gifting, patterns, bundles).

- Partner cross-functionally with the CMO and leadership on targets (MER/AMER, contribution margin, NCAC), with CRO/UX to align landing pages and PDP narrative to ad promises, and with Product/Operations on inventory, releases, licensing constraints, and merchandising priorities.

- Lead and develop the performance creative team through clear expectations, feedback, coaching, and performance management, and recommend capability gaps and hires/partners as needed.

- Get into the weeds where needed on brief review, performance analysis, iteration planning, and coaching to keep the engine disciplined and moving fast.

Who They're Looking For

- Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Advertising, Communications, Business, Journalism, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

- 5+ years in performance creative / growth creative in DTC ecommerce, with 3+ years leading and developing teams.

- Proven ability to build a performance creative system (frameworks, testing roadmaps, feedback loops, and documentation) that improves CPA/ROAS through better hooks, angles, and messaging execution.

- Deep expertise in Meta performance creative, plus experience adapting winning structures to other paid channels (AppLovin, YouTube, Amazon Ads, emerging placements).

- Exceptional briefing and creative direction skills, including setting messaging hierarchy, defining proof stacks, and creating clear guardrails that prevent strategy drift.

- Hands on experience with on set production, nice to have if specific to DTC/ecom.

- Strong analytical ability to translate performance signals into specific iteration directives and to set success criteria for tests.

- Strong communication and stakeholder alignment skills across Creative, Media Buying, CRO/UX, and leadership.

- Familiarity with modern collaboration and project management tools, including Notion, Slack, and Asana.