Creative Manager Jobs in Encinitas, CA (NOW HIRING)

4AM Media owns and operates 3 DTC brands across health, cleaning, and pets. Last year we spent over $40M across paid media scaling our own products. We're not an agency. We're operators supply chain, creative, custom funnels, media buying, analytics, and customer service all happen under one roof.

We're hiring a Direct Response Creative Strategist to be the connective tissue across all 3 brands, the person who takes a product, an angle, or a competitor teardown and turns it into the offer, funnel, landing page, and ad creative brief that the rest of the company executes against.

You'll report directly to the CEO (eventually transitioning under our Director of Performance Marketing) and work as a peer to the media buyers, creative manager, supply chain, and dev team. Your job is to close the gap between "we have an idea" and "we're running profitable traffic against it."

This is the highest-leverage seat in the building when you do it well. You're the one generating new hypotheses and new ideas pulling from research, customer language, competitor work, and your own pattern recognition. When the dev team is asked to build a new funnel, you've already mocked it up and written the copy. When a product launches, you've already decided the offer structure, the upsells, the LPs, and the angles that go to market.

Our growth comes from four motions. The Creative Strategist is core to all of them:

1. New angles. You generate the angle, write the landing page, and brief the ad creative to match. One person owning the whole angle end-to-end.

2. New funnels. You mock up the funnel, write the copy, hand it to dev to build, and write the creative brief that feeds it. Whether it's a fresh idea or a reverse-engineered competitor funnel, you're the one who scopes it, sequences it, and writes it.

3. New product launches. When a new product is ready, you build the offer, the funnel(s), the LP(s), and the ad creative brief so supply chain, dev, creative, and media buying have everything they need to ship the launch.

4. Competitor teardowns. You're constantly watching what's working in our categories. Competitor ad libraries, top-performing funnels, winning angles. You translate what you see into testable copy and creative briefs.

You are, first and foremost, a great direct response copywriter. Long-form sales copy, advertorials, video scripts, hooks, headlines, ad copy, email, SMS you can write all of it, and you can write it at the level that actually converts paid traffic.

• You understand the psychology behind a purchase decision and you know how to translate it into hooks that stop a thumb, copy that earns the click, and pages that close the sale
• You know the difference between brand copy that feels good and direct response copy that actually moves units
• You write for the customer, not for the brand team's preferences

Every brief and every page you ship is grounded in evidence. You run an active research loop across:

• Customer reviews on Shopify, Amazon, and TikTok Shop
• Support tickets and survey data
• Competitor ad libraries on Meta and TikTok
• Comments on social
• Reddit (subreddits where your customer actually lives)
• Category trend monitoring
• AI-assisted synthesis of all of the above

You know what customers actually say, what they actually want, and what specific language moves them. You can point to evidence for every angle you propose.

You don't just write copy you build the artifacts the dev team needs to ship. Landing pages, funnels, PDPs, quizzes, offer pages, upsells, post-purchase flows. You mock them up in Claude Design (or comparable AI design tools), Figma, Webflow, Notion, on paper, whatever works, with real copy in place, so dev can build directly from your prototype instead of guessing.

This is a hard requirement. The Creative Strategist who only writes copy and hands off to someone else to design it without some kind of design direction is the wrong person.

Every ad creative that goes live starts with a brief you wrote.

• The angle, the hook, the proof points, the visual direction, the call-to-action
• The hypothesis (what we're testing and why)
• The success criteria (what good looks like at what spend)
• The reference material (customer language, competitor work, prior winners)

You're not handing the creative team a vague concept. You're handing them a brief they can execute against with confidence.

You're accountable for the performance of the creative we ship. Primary metric is contribution margin and nMER on the spend driven by your work, but you understand how hook rate, hold rate, thumb stop, CTR, CPC, conversion rate, AOV, and new customer % all feed that goal.

• When ads underperform, you diagnose the why, file the learning, and ship the next iteration
• The media buyer team should never be the first to notice a creative cohort is fading. You catch it first
• You translate soft numbers into the next test, not into excuses

You're fluent in AI creative tools and you have a clear point of view on what AI does well and where human judgment is still required.

• You use AI to multiply throughput on briefs, variations, ad teardowns, research synthesis, and rough cuts
• You build workflows that get the team more output per hour without dropping quality
• You're not afraid of AI replacing your role. You're using it to make your role bigger

The media buyer team is your closest peer group. You're aligned on what's being tested, why, and what the next move is.

• You bring hypotheses to the table; the buyers know how to deploy them
• When a buyer has a hypothesis, you turn it into an executable creative and LP plan
• This relationship is the difference between creative being a bottleneck and creative being a weapon

• 5+ years writing direct response copy for DTC ecommerce: long-form sales pages, advertorials, video scripts, ad copy, hooks at scale
• Proven creative against meaningful paid media spend. You've written work that drove measurable performance against $1M+/month in Meta or Google acquisition spend
• Strong fluency in Meta Ads Manager and the metrics that matter for performance creative: hook rate, hold rate, thumb stop, CTR, CPC, CPM, conversion rate, AOV. You can navigate the platform without help
• Demonstrated research process across customer reviews, surveys, support data, competitor ad libraries, Amazon and TikTok Shop, Reddit, and AI-assisted synthesis
• Working understanding of consumer psychology and how to apply it through copy and visuals
• Hands-on prototyping ability. You can mock up landers, funnels, PDPs, quizzes, offer pages, and upsells in Claude Design, Figma, Webflow, or similar. Not pixel-perfect designs, but functional prototypes with real copy that dev can build from
• Active use of AI in your creative workflow, with a clear POV on what it does well and where it falls short
• Hyper-organized. You run multiple concurrent angles, funnels, and tests across 3 brands without dropping balls. You have systems for tracking what's in production, what's shipping this week, and what's queued
• Self-starter, no handholding. You walk into a startup environment and build. You figure out what's missing and either build it or flag what you need. The wrong person needs a manager to assign them tasks. We're hiring a builder
• Strong written and verbal communication. You can hold your own in a strategy conversation with the CEO and a tactical conversation with a buyer in the same hour
• Proactive remote operator. You take initiative to connect with the in-office team and other remote teammates. You don't wait to be looped in you loop yourself in

• Treating the role as copy only or strategy only. You own the full loop.
• Letting briefs go out that aren't grounded in evidence
• Bringing problems without proposed solutions
• Waiting for direction rather than building
• Working hours that look busy without output that backs them up
• Operating without a plan for how AI fits into your workflow

• You report directly to the CEO. No agency middle layer, no creative bureaucracy
• You're the central node. Product, supply chain, dev, creative, and media buying all depend on your output to move. The role is built for someone who likes that kind of leverage that actually makes the company grow
• You work on our brands, not clients. Every dollar of contribution margin your work drives goes back into the company you work for
• Three brands, not thirty. Real depth on each one. Uou'll know the customer, the unit economics, and the winning angles cold
• You're hands-on across the entire funnel. Hook to LP to upsell to post-purchase. You see and shape the whole thing, not just one slice of it
• You stay in the work. This isn't a role where you write Jira tickets and manage handoffs. You're researching, writing, mocking up, briefing, and iterating. Every day
• Real growth path. Crush this role and the path expands into senior creative leadership, expanded brand coverage, or operator roles across the business

This role is remote. The growth team is primarily in San Diego, but the right Creative Strategist can be effective from anywhere as long as you bring proactive communication and tight async habits. You'll need to connect frequently with the in-office team and other remote teammates, share work in progress early, and never be the one teammates have to chase. Remote works for builders. It doesn't work for people who go quiet.

• New angles are shipping faster, hitting performance targets at a higher rate, and the buyers can point to your work as the unlock on multiple winners
• At least one major new funnel architecture you mocked up and wrote is now a control across at least one brand
• At least one new product launch went to market with the offer, funnel, LPs, and creative brief you built and it scaled profitably
• Multiple competitor angles you reverse-engineered have been turned into our own winning tests
• Your AI-assisted workflow has materially increased throughput compared to where the team is today
• Revenue has increased because the volume and quality of creative and landing pages going to market is materially higher than it is today and the CEO trusts your judgment on what to test next