Shopify Creative Directors and Strategists for Ads

Direction is hard to judge from a portfolio, because a portfolio shows what got made, not who decided to make it. Screen for the decisions.

Ask for the brief behind a winning ad. Anyone can show a strong ad. A real creative director can show the brief that produced it, the result, and what the following brief changed because of that result. Without that paper trail, they probably produced the ad rather than directed it.

Check they read results as well as drafts. Good directors move easily between a rough cut and the numbers: how many people watched past the opening seconds, how many clicked, what each purchase cost. They should be able to say why a concept lost, not only that it did.

Ask where the angles come from. The best answer names your own material: product reviews, support emails, return reasons, post-purchase survey answers, sales calls. Other brands' ads are a fair input, but a plan built only on them will make you look like everyone else in the category.

Settle who decides what. Write it down before the first round. The strategist recommends what to make and what to stop; the media buyer controls budget; one person on your side signs off anything that touches offers, claims or pricing.

Make sure they can brief your makers. If you already have an in-house designer, an editor or a studio, the director's job is to brief them well. Someone who only works with their own production team is selling production with direction attached.

Walk away from these. A first deliverable that is a mood board with no customer insight in it. Talk of "viral" ideas with no plan for measuring them. A proposal to redo your brand identity when you asked about ads.

Three jobs sit behind a Meta or TikTok account that keeps improving. Most small Shopify brands pay for two of them and cover the third with whatever time the founder has left.

- Media buying sets budgets, campaign structure and bids, and reports on spend. Platforms automate more of the targeting every year, which pushes more of the work of finding buyers onto the creative itself.

- Production turns ideas into finished statics, videos and edits. It is visible and easy to buy, so it gets hired first.

- Ad creative strategy decides which ideas deserve production at all, and why. This is the role most small accounts are missing, and you can spot the gap from outside: plenty of new ads, all saying the same thing in different colours.

What a good brief contains. One audience, named precisely. One angle: the problem, desire or objection the ad is about. A hook for the opening seconds. Proof, whether a review, a demonstration or a number you can stand behind. The offer, if there is one. And the format and placement it is made for. Leave any of these out and the editor fills the gap by instinct.

How results feed the next round. Each brief states what it is testing, so the result answers a question rather than just producing a winner. Winning angles get new hooks and formats. Losing angles get retired and written into a learning log, so nobody pays to test them again next quarter.

Creative direction is sold as a monthly retainer or per campaign, and the price follows how many decisions you need made. Typical ranges:

Most engagements combine several of these, with the brief at the centre: