Head of Performance Creative Strategy

Fora•New York City, NY

8d•Onsite

About The Position

Fora is looking for a Head of Performance Creative Strategy to own the creative side of advisor acquisition: the concepts, angles, and formats that make people stop, click, and sign up. This isn't a production design role. It's a strategy role. You diagnose why creative is or isn't working, generate a pipeline of testable concepts, direct the people and AI tools that produce the assets, and turn performance data into the next round of hypotheses. There's no creative strategy function here yet. No team, no playbook, no inherited process to work around. You get to build this department the way you think it should be built, which is rare at a company already spending at this scale. This is a role for someone with leadership experience who still loves the craft. This is a leadership seat that is hands-on. You'll write the briefs and ship the work yourself, and build out from there as you prove what creative returns. You'll partner closely with the Growth Marketing Managers (who own channel testing and scaling) and the Creative Studio (design and copy) to make sure every channel has a steady stream of creative that's built to perform, not just built to look good. You should be excited to use AI tools as a core part of how you work, for concept generation, asset variation, and creative performance analysis, not as a side experiment.

Requirements

At least 3 years owning creative strategy for performance and direct-response marketing. You think in hooks, angles, and formats, not just campaigns.
A track record of running structured creative testing programs, with the ability to isolate what changed and why a test won or lost.
Comfort translating ambiguous performance data into concrete creative direction and briefs that other people (designers, copywriters, AI tools) can execute against.
Genuine, hands-on fluency with AI creative tools (e.g., research, data analysis, image/video generation, copy generation, rapid variant production) as part of your daily workflow. You should be able to walk us through where it sits in your process, and just as importantly, where you've decided it doesn't belong.
You've managed or mentored a team of creatives, and you're willing to do the work yourself until there's a team to hand it to.
Experience making ads for elevated brands. You've worked where taste is part of the job, and you know the difference between creative that converts and creative that converts while quietly cheapening the brand.
Strong collaborator instincts. This role only works in tight partnership with the Growth Marketing Managers, Creative Studio, and Data, and you should be energized by shared ownership rather than needing sole credit.
An eye for craft, but a strategist's mindset first. You care more about what makes an ad convert than about producing the asset yourself.
High ownership mentality. You treat creative performance as yours to drive, not a brief to hand off and wait on.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience in subscription or marketplace growth marketing.
A mix of agency and in-house experience. Agency gives you range and speed, in-house gives you accountability, and this role needs both.
A genuine interest in travel. You don't need category experience, but you should care about what we're selling.
You've built a creator or UGC program inside a real constraint. Regulated, licensed, or compliance-heavy categories count for extra here.
You've stood up a creative strategy function where none existed before.

Responsibilities

Set the creative direction and build a quarterly plan against it, collaborate with the Creative Director, Copy on and brief ads yourself until the team is built out.
Own the creative strategy direction for advisor acquisition (tone, pacing, and the guardrails that keep the work recognizably Fora as volume scales) and the persona set concepts are built against. Named audiences with a real buying context, not demographic buckets.
Own the testing system. Build the roadmap of concepts and angles tied to channel and audience hypotheses rather than a queue of asset requests, the framework that makes tests readable (hypotheses, isolated variables, decision criteria), and the library of learnings that keeps the team compounding instead of re-testing the same ideas.
Turn performance into the next round. Read results by concept, angle, and format, hold a clear point of view on what to scale, iterate, or retire, and translate that into the next set of briefs.
Brief and ship. Work with the Creative Studio (design, copy) to turn concepts into shippable assets across static, video, and emerging formats. The Studio doesn't report to you, so this runs on the quality of your briefs and the relationship, not on authority. Until there's a team, you're writing those briefs yourself.
Partner with the channel owners. Work with the Growth Marketing Managers on channel-specific needs, knowing what a winning ad looks like on each platform rather than repurposing one asset everywhere, and collaborate on the hooks and messaging that carry past the click so the ad and the landing page make the same promise.
Design the creator and UGC program. Fora hasn't run creator creative yet, because anyone speaking on the brand's behalf can be mistaken for a credentialed travel advisor, and no one has owned solving it. Work out what a compliant creator engine looks like here, including whether Fora's own advisor community is the answer, and build the briefs and formats that make it repeatable.
Use AI as core infrastructure. Keep finding new ways to use it to increase productivity without decreasing quality.
Do the work, then resource it. This is a hands-on seat, not a delegating one. As the work outgrows one person, you make the case for support and bring on contractors and freelancers before full-time roles.