VP, Performance Creative and Operations

TAG - The Aspen Group•Chicago, IL

3d•$225,000 - $250,000•Onsite

About The Position

The Aspen Group (TAG) is a leading retail healthcare business support organization. As a VP, Performance Creative and Operations, you will hold an executive leadership role with enterprise-wide accountability for the creative engine behind our paid media program. This role is crucial for driving growth by defining AI-powered performance creative, setting organizational standards for creative development, scaling, and evaluation. You will operate as a strategic peer to senior commercial, brand, and marketing leaders, with direct visibility to the C-suite. The primary challenge is to significantly increase creative output, engineered for performance from the outset, leveraging AI as the solution. You will architect and lead a hybrid model of internal creatives and external AI-native designers, build the necessary systems and team, and own the results, including budget and resourcing decisions. The work produced will directly influence customer acquisition.

Requirements

12+ years in performance creative, creative strategy, or performance marketing with clear accountability for measurable outcomes
8+ years in a senior leadership role, including experience leading through managers across creative, strategy, or production functions
Demonstrated experience operating at the executive level, including regularly presenting to and influencing C-suite stakeholders
Deep hands-on experience with paid digital channels, particularly paid social and paid search, and creative best practices across each
Demonstrated ability to build creative testing frameworks that generate actionable signal at scale
Fluency with AI creative tools (generative image, video, copy) and a concrete point of view on deploying them at production scale
Experience building or managing a hybrid internal/external creative model, including AI-native vendors or freelancers
Comfort reading and interpreting performance data; you find the story in the numbers and use it to drive creative and business decisions
Proven track record influencing resource allocation, organizational design, and technology investment decisions at an executive level

Nice To Haves

Background in retail, retail healthcare, or another appointment- or location-based business model
Experience managing creative simultaneously across multiple distinct brand identities and geo-targeted markets
Track record building or scaling an in-house performance creative function from an early stage, including standing up the team and operating model
Experience managing agency and production vendor relationships for high-production formats such as CTV or digital video
Proven ability to use AI as both a design tool and a production accelerator, with examples of measurable output improvement

Responsibilities

Build and Lead the AI-Powered Creative Model: Architect a hybrid creative organization (internal strategists/designers and external AI-native designers/production resources), select and evolve AI toolsets for generative design, video production, copy variation, and asset adaptation, use AI as a design tool, production accelerator, and testing multiplier, build guardrails and quality standards for AI output, and stay ahead of the AI creative landscape to advise the C-suite on future adoption and investment decisions.
Own the Creative-to-Performance Feedback Loop: Partner with paid media leads and commercial leadership to translate performance signals into creative direction, build a closed-loop system from brief to launch to iteration to ensure creative learnings compound, compress creative production cycles while maintaining quality with a velocity-first mindset, and establish review cadences for speed and rigor.
Build Scalable Testing Architecture: Develop and own the creative testing roadmap across concept, variable, format, and audience dimensions, leverage AI to expand testing volume, build SOPs, briefs, and production workflows for consistency and speed, and maintain a living research library of hooks, angles, and formats for accessibility and actionability.
Translate Brand into Performance Across Multiple Brand Identities: Serve as the senior bridge between brand positioning and conversion-optimized creative across a portfolio of distinct consumer brands, develop creative principles and guardrails for fast, on-brand execution, build creative that works across the full consumer journey, and manage creative simultaneously across national and geo-targeted local campaigns for multiple brands.
Multi-Channel Creative Leadership: Own creative strategy and output across paid social (Meta, TikTok), paid search, digital video, display, and CTV, develop platform-specific creative native to each channel, balance high-production and lo-fi approaches (including AI-generated formats), and manage agency, AI design vendor, and production vendor relationships with accountability for vendor spend.
Executive Leadership and Organizational Influence: Operate as a member of the senior leadership team and a strategic peer to senior executives, serve as the executive voice for performance creative in C-suite and executive stakeholder conversations, build and develop the performance creative team (hiring, coaching, organizational design), own resource allocation, vendor strategy, and technology investment decisions, and frame creative recommendations in terms of business outcomes and ROI, holding the function accountable to metrics.
Data Fluency, Not Just Creative Instinct: Define and track creative KPIs (hook rate, hold rate, CTR, CVR, cost per appointment), use data to challenge assumptions and build the case for creative investment, and find the story in the numbers to drive creative decisions, including AI-generated creative performance.