Lead Creative Strategist (Paid Ads) in Manchester

For fifty years, the biggest sportswear brands on earth have been selling you plastic. They did it because plastic is cheap, and they spent billions on marketing to make sure you never asked what you were wearing.

Nero exists to end that. We make premium men's activewear from natural fibres only. Ten years from now there will be a generational brand that took this fight to the incumbents and won. It's going to be built by a small team of people who were in the room early, and who were hungry enough to outwork companies a thousand times their size. We are hiring for that room.

The Role

Every winning ad Nero has ever run was written by the founder. Every concept, every hook, every script. We're hiring someone to take creative strategy off his hands, and the brief is simple: be better than him. Beat his ads. Beat his hooks. Find the concepts he hasn't thought of.

This is a paid-performance role with a brand problem attached. Your ads need to hit CPA and ROAS targets at scale, that's the job, and you'll be measured on it. But we don't want the DTC creative playbook everyone else runs. We want ads that make the brand bigger every time they're seen.

What you'll own

The concept pipeline

• Generate a constant stream of new ad concepts, hooks, angles, formats, stories and kill the ones that don't work fast
• Bring the big swings: brand-building ideas that are funny, provocative, or culturally sharp, and still convert
• Use our performance data to know what's working, why, and what to iterate next

Scripts and briefs

• Write the scripts yourself. Every one. Voiceover, on-screen text, shot-by-shot
• Brief our video editors every week with enough clarity that the first cut is close
• Brief creators and influencers so what comes back actually converts, not "post about us," but a real brief with hook, structure, and proof points
• Help hire and build a team of talented video editors & graphic designers.

The testing engine

• Run the creative testing cadence with the founder, what ships, when, in what volume
• Own the reporting: what won, what lost, what we learned, what's next
• Hit a weekly shipping cadence without the quality dropping

The bit that matters most

• You come to the founder with concepts he didn't ask, proactively thinking for new ways to grow and expand the Nero audience.

What good looks like in 30 days

• You've written and shipped at least 30 net new concept ads.
• At least one of your concepts is a top-five spender on the account
• You've beaten one of the founder's best-performing ads head to head

What this role becomes

This role becomes Head of Creative Strategy, potentially Creative Director. You'll own the whole creative engine, paid, organic, creators, with the editors, producers, and strategists under you. We're going to be three times bigger than we are now; the question is whether you grew into that seat or we had to hire above you.

Who is this for

• You've run creative strategy for a DTC brand spending real money on paid social, and you've got ads you can point to that scaled
• You write. Not "manage copywriters", you write, fast, and your first draft is good
• You're brand-obsessed. You know why Liquid Death works, why most DTC ads are forgettable, and you have opinions about it
• You use AI constantly, for brainstorming, for first-draft scripts, for variations, and then you make it yours. The tool isn't the point; the taste is
• You have something to prove
• Performance bonus, paid quarterly, tied to what you control: winning ads shipped, concepts that scale past profitable spend thresholds
• Equity, vested, transparent, explained in full at offer stage
• Two fully paid team retreats a year
• Fast, real progression