The State of Creative Strategy 2027Runneth MCPMCP Download PDFPDF

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The State of Creative Strategy 2027

Salary, sentiment, and the future of the most important role in performance advertising.

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Employers haven’t adapted to marketing’s new reality

Connor Gross has gotten used to clients asking him to find people who, on paper, probably shouldn’t exist.

Gross has watched budgets shift away from the pure paid-media buyer and toward creative strategists, whose salaries are rising as media-buying salaries decline. The reason, as he sees it, is simple: “the hard work is shifting more towards managing the creative flywheel.”

Gross runs Constant Hire, a recruiting firm for seven-, eight-, and nine-figure consumer brands. The role his firm is asked to fill most often is creative strategist, though what that means depends almost entirely on who’s hiring. It might mean appearing on camera and making UGC, understanding organic social, sourcing influencers, managing affiliates or handling post-production. The title stays the same. The job it describes keeps expanding.

From Gross’s side of the hiring table, the old divisions of marketing labor have stopped holding. Companies still need the same work done. But they’re increasingly reluctant to hire a different specialist for every part of it.

There is, Gross says, a practical limit to this exercise. “There’s not going to be somebody who’s the best in the world at everything,” he told us. If there is, he joked, “oftentimes they’re starting their own company.” When a client hands him one of these hybrid roles, Gross works backward from whatever will be hardest to teach, hires for that and assumes the rest can be learned.

In Brief

Performance marketing jobs are getting broader, fast. The typical performance marketing posting now asks for more scope than this time last year. Work that once sat across separate specialties is increasingly being bundled into the same role.

Titles haven’t caught up to changes in scope. Across more than 1,400 postings, we found more than 900 different job titles. Employers are converging on a broader kind of marketer faster than they are converging on what exactly to call these hires.

Breadth is becoming table stakes. Roles asking for zero to two years of experience demand about five functions on average, compared with three for roles asking for nine years or more. A broad skill set marketers once accumulated with time is increasingly expected early on.

Leverage is the advantage. Practitioners advancing fastest own only slightly more functions than everyone else. What separates them is leverage over people, systems, reporting, and strategic decisions. The career advantage is shifting to those that can create the most leverage with their skillset.

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Judgment needs room to operate

Janae LeVander’s job is too broad for one person. That is, in some ways, the point.

Sophia Beauvoir, Senior Creative Strategist at Readyset, has been thinking about the same problem from another perspective. AI can now handle more of the mechanics of her job, including research and the early work behind a creative flywheel. It can also, she points out, confidently produce nonsense. Someone still has to know the difference, decide what matters and explain the decision to a client. “Only the creative strategist can really talk through it in the way that the client needs to hear it,” she told us.

As Senior Manager of Performance Creative at Caraway, LeVander’s remit stretches from strategy and performance analysis through research, persona testing, and production to managing designers and editors. There is no dedicated project manager, so some of that work belongs to her, too.

The obvious way to excel in a job like that would be to get very good at doing many things very quickly. LeVander has built something different. A system, and the delegation to make that system sustainable.

LeVander and Beauvoir are both figuring out what comes after building breadth. A broad job creates opportunity, but it also creates a fairly obvious problem: there are only so many hours in which to do it. The way forward is not to keep adding more tasks to the job, but to get more leverage from the parts of it that require your particular judgment.

She also has something many creative strategists don’t. Caraway’s leadership understands the function and has invested in it. When changes to Meta required LeVander to rethink how her team worked, she didn’t have to spend weeks arguing for permission. She had the agency to act.

In Brief

Use AI to create capacity. Heavy AI users report higher job satisfaction and more sustainable workloads than moderate or light users. The practitioners getting the most from these tools appear to be using them to make room for higher-value work, not simply to produce more of the same.

Get as close to the evidence as you can. Creative strategists sit all over the org chart, but proximity to performance data gives them something more valuable than a particular reporting line. It gives them evidence they can use to influence what gets made next.

Insist on clarity on what’s expected of you. Unclear scope is much more common among practitioners with ambiguous organizational placement or undefined metrics. When nobody decides where a generalist’s job stops, the easiest answer is everywhere.

Make your output visible. Practitioners in formal, well-defined creative strategy functions report dramatically stronger morale than those doing the work without a clear title or mandate. And 58% still believe they are underpaid relative to their scope. If the job has expanded beyond the title, the case for recognition and compensation has to be built around what you actually own.

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Creative strategy broadens the path to marketing leadership

As a Director of Paid Creative, Joanna Wallace has control issues. “If you’re building a plane and you’re in charge of the wings, perfect wings only get you so far,” Wallace told us. “Nobody’s flying anywhere if the engine’s broken or there are no doors.” In her metaphor, the ad is the wing. The website is the door, and the offer is the engine.

That interest in connecting the pieces also runs through Naomi Peh Haeger’s work. Where Wallace wants a wider view of the customer journey, Peh Haeger values the perspective that comes from learning across products and brands.

Peh Haeger came into creative strategy after moving between brand and growth roles and found a job that let her keep a foot in both. Now the possibilities are multiplying again: creative performance, perhaps, something approaching CMO or eventually an agency of her own. “I feel like I haven’t decided either,” she said when asked whether younger strategists should specialize or remain generalists.

“At a certain level in creative strategy, you realize how little of the funnel you actually control,” she said. “You can make the best ad in the account and it still sends people to a website or an offer you had no say in. So you start wanting a say in all of it.”

Her ambitions have expanded accordingly. Wallace wants responsibility for the website, newsletters, out-of-home and the rest of the funnel. Maybe that eventually makes her a head of creative, a head of marketing or a CMO. She is less interested in the title than in having responsibility for how all the pieces work together.

Alongside her full-time role at Granola, Peh Haeger freelances across different product and brand spaces. The appeal is the opportunity to connect the dots: to learn how performance works in different contexts and bring those lessons to another marketing problem.

In Brief

This is becoming a career, not a way station. 55% of creative strategists say they see this as their long-term career path. Just 7% are already planning to leave, even though nearly three-quarters of the field has five years or less of experience.

The path to leadership is unusually short. Almost 59% of practitioners with less than a year in creative strategy are still individual contributors. Within three to five years, that share has nearly halved. By the ten-year mark, seven in 10 hold a Director-level title or higher.

There is no single job waiting at the top. Practitioners are splitting toward brand and creative leadership, independence, deeper specialization in creative strategy, and growth or CMO roles. The same breadth that accelerates their careers also gives them more than one place to take them.

Wallace wants responsibility for more of the customer journey. Peh Haeger values learning across brands and disciplines. Both build on the range creative strategy has given them — a foundation for several paths into marketing leadership.

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A3. LIMITATIONS

Listing status. 191 postings were open at the time of collection, and 1,219 were closed. All 1,410 are included in skill, title, and function analysis regardless of status, since the report treats postings as a historical record of what employers asked for at the time of hiring, not a live snapshot of current openings.

Company mix. Non-DTC brand 51.6%, Agency 35.7%, DTC brand 12.7%.

Salary disclosure. Only 44.0% of postings disclose pay, and disclosed figures are concentrated in a handful of currencies (predominantly USD, with smaller shares in CAD, GBP, EUR, INR, and AUD). Given the disclosure rate and the mix of currencies and geographies involved, this report does not cite postings-derived salary figures anywhere in the analysis. All compensation statistics in this report, including the salary cheat sheet, come from the practitioner survey’s selfreported bands.

Skill flags. Thirteen skill flags were coded per posting. All skill-breadth statistics in this report are therefore built from the flags: briefing, performance analysis, testing strategy, concept development, copywriting/scripting, creator sourcing, creator management, production, video editing, media buying, project management, people management, and AI.

Geography. Country data is harmonized to standard codes for 92.4% of postings; the remainder includes a handful of unmapped or ambiguous entries (e.g., “Worldwide,” inconsistent country-name formatting) that were left unmapped rather than guessed.

• Founder and owner compensation is understated. The survey captured salary only, not equity. Founder/owner respondents make up 13.3% of the analytic cohort, and their reported compensation should not be read as their total earnings.

• Self-report bias. Ownership-of-responsibility and compensation-adequacy questions rely on respondents’ own account of their role, which may run ahead of or behind how their organization would formally describe it.

• Job postings reflect what employers chose to write down, not the full scope of the role. This report treats that gap as a finding in its own right (see Part 1, “Practitioners do far more than employers ask for”), but it also means postings data should not be read as a complete description of any given job.

• Non-probability sample. Findings describe practitioners reachable through Runneth’s audience and partner network. Directional patterns are likely to generalize; precise percentages should be read as describing this sample.

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