Junior Performance Creative Alchemist (Creative Strategist in Training) in Cambridge

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Junior Performance Creative Alchemist

(Like a creative strategist - but still levelling up.)

You know how some people can look at an ad and just get why it works?

Why one hook stops you cold... and another gets ignored?

If you've ever caught yourself analysing TikToks for pacing, or screenshotting Meta ads "for inspo," keep reading - because this role might just be your creative home.

At Bright/Shift, we help the brands who deserve to win, the ones improving health, sustainability, and how people live, by turning performance data into creative firepower.

And we're looking for someone who's ready to learn how to do that at scale.

The Mission

We exist to make creativity perform. To use insight, storytelling, and experimentation to build ads that move people and move metrics.

This role learns to do exactly that, sitting where strategy, storytelling, and performance meet. With one advantage most juniors never get: you own live performance data across real ad accounts, and your read on it directly shapes what gets made next. Most juniors analyse ads they had no part in and never find out whether they were right. You'll find out every Sprint.

Where You Fit

Our clients run on a four-week cycles, split into two mini sprints, and a PCA (Performance Creative Alchemist) owns the strategy and the relationship for each one. You're the engine underneath the Sprints team: the person who knows what the data is saying before anyone asks.

Here's the highest-leverage thing you'll do. You make the PCA's first hour of thinking unnecessary. Insight boards built, hypotheses drafted, \"here's what worked and why we think so\" already sitting there before ideation starts, so the PCA is refining and deciding, not staring at a blank page. That blank page is the bottleneck a PCA feels every single week. You're the one who removes it.

You're not fetching and carrying. You're the voice in the room on what the data says and what we should test next, a genuine input into what gets made. The role is built so you grow fast.

The Role

You'll work closely with our Performance Creative Alchemists and Head of Performance Creative. Your job grows across three pillars.

1. Insights

Live in the ad accounts. Learn what's working, what's dying, and why.

• Run daily performance checks. Flag the winners, the losers, and the patterns worth a second look, and share them with the team.
• Own the monthly Bright/Tracking reports for clients, and the internal Top-Performers Report. Learn what actually counts as an \"efficient\" creative, and be able to say why it won.
• Become the team's go-to for anything insight-related.
• Turn what the data says into creative hypotheses, not just charts. Reach for the \"so what\" before anyone has to ask you for it.

Intellectual honesty matters here as much as accuracy. Anyone can pull a CPA. The rarer, more valuable thing is flagging when a result is ambiguous, when a sample's too small to trust, when two metrics tell different stories.

2. Ideation

Turn insight into ideas worth testing.

• Set up ideation boards ahead of ideation week, loaded with insight and light ideation, so brainstorming starts with fuel instead of a blank canvas.
• Bring ideas grounded in data and strategy, not personal taste. Be obsessed with performance, not with what looks good.
• Support script development across ideation and briefing.
• Write hypotheses that turn an idea into a test with a reason behind it, so wins can be repeated on purpose and losses teach you something.

3. Briefing

Help the ideas survive contact with the edit.

• Support PCAs writing clear, structured briefs that editors, designers, and creators can open and execute without coming back with questions.
• Learn what makes a paid social script actually convert: strategically built, on-brand, designed to move someone.
• Learn to give feedback that sharpens creative rather than just marking it.

Underneath all of it, you keep the machine tidy. Ad-hoc tasks delivered on time without chasing. The Notion database of assets and footage links kept current for the team. Claude used to clear the admin and sharpen the thinking, so your headspace goes where it counts. Proactive, clear comms with the Sprints team, so nobody's ever waiting on you to keep moving.

Who You Are

• Obsessed with social ads. How they're made, what performs, why.
• Maybe you've worked in content, creative strategy, or performance marketing. Maybe you've just been nerding out on it in your own time. Both count.
• You love turning data into story, and you're honest when the data doesn't say what you hoped it would.
• You thrive in a fast, idea-driven environment.
• You want to grow fast, not climb slowly.

Who's This For

We're looking for the DNA of a great performance creative strategist, early in the journey.

• You get why ads work. Not whether something looks good, but what made someone stop and act. You find that genuinely fascinating.
• You're comfortable with data and creative with it. You can sit in an ad account and read it, and you care more about what the numbers mean than the numbers themselves.
• You're organised. You're the one who knows where everything is.
• You're proactive. You don't wait to be told. You spot what's needed and bring it.
• You're collaborative. Sprints work because everyone feeds everyone: your insight fuels the PCA's strategy, your setups fuel the room. You're good with people and you like building something together.
• You're hungry. This role rewards someone who wants to rise.

No set number of years required. We care about the instinct and the hunger far more than the CV.

Why You'll Grow Fast Here

Most junior roles teach slowly, because the loop never closes. You analyse ads you didn't make, pitch ideas that vanish, and rarely find out if you were right. The lesson doesn't land.

You're on a small team with no layers between you and people who've done this for years, so you learn by watching them decide, then deciding yourself, then seeing how it went. Every week has something in it you didn't know the week before. Which is why every single person here grows at an exponential rate.

Potential Pathway

This role is built to lead somewhere. The main route is clear:

The PCA path. If you fall for the strategy and the building, the ideation, the briefs, turning insight into ads that win, you grow toward becoming a PCA and owning the client and the build yourself. Most juniors who commit are ready to start running their own workstreams well before they're running their own accounts.

We're straight about how you get there. Progression is earned, not timed. Most people find their feet around the 12-month mark, but moving up depends on two things: you being ready, and the business needing the seat. We'd rather say that plainly than sell you a ladder that isn't there.

What we will commit to: PCA is a real, recurring seat on the Standard side, not a someday-maybe. And we hire juniors to grow them, not to park them.

What Good Looks Like in the First Months

• Your insights are the kind the team builds its strategy on, not a report nobody reads.
• You know the accounts cold, the winning ads, the assets worth repurposing, the moments worth reusing, and you're already the person the PCA comes to when they need a specific one.
• Your ideation setups make the sessions fly.
• You've started supporting on briefs and builds, learning the craft hands-on.
• You're the one who makes the PCAs better at their jobs.

Tools You'll Learn

• Motion, for ad performance analysis. This becomes your home.
• Foreplay, for creative referencing and inspiration.
• Miro, for ideation and Sprint mapping.
• Bright/Tracker and Claude, our AI stack for insight, hypothesis-building, and clearing the busywork. We direct the AI. It doesn't direct us.
• Slack, Notion, and Google Workspace, for collaboration and calm chaos.

What We're Offering

• £26–28k DOE
• Hybrid working: One day a week in our Whitechapel office (or once a fortnight if you're further afield). The rest from a location that works best for you!
• 25 days holiday + bank holidays
• Private healthcare through Vitality post probation
• £400 annual growth fund for learning and development
• A front-row seat to learn performance creative inside a studio that's redefining how creativity and data work together.

TL;DR

You'll find the insight in the numbers, spark the idea in the brainstorm, and turn creative chaos into content that performs. You'll learn to make ads that don't just look great. They work.

If that sounds like your kind of alchemy, we'd love to meet you.