There’s long been a disconnect between brands’ above-the-line campaigns, pored over for months by creatives and agencies, and the performance advertising being pushed out online.

It’s a mismatch brands are grappling with, as more companies move their budgets into social media and platform updates necessitate a targeted approach to creative.  

In this gap, marketing jobs are changing. While two to three years ago you’d be unlikely to hear about performance creative marketers, it’s now an area businesses are investing in.  

But what is the role, why is it important and – in a difficult job market – who’s getting the job?  

The job

Titles for this kind of role include performance content lead, paid media creative strategist and more.  

The difference between a performance creative and a creative “in the traditional sense” is this role is data and processes driven, explains Joseph Fitzgibbon, founder of recruitment business Growth & Company.  

“You’re not planning a yearly or seasonal campaign,” he says. “[You’re] running a factory that is throwing out vast amounts of creative to drive Meta.”  

Over half of marketers say campaigns ‘too focused’ on performance

One business currently hiring for this role is Fyxer AI, the fast growing AI email assistant startup. The firm describes the role as the bridge between performance and creative, owning the process from insight and ideation to execution and scale. The focus is on channels like Meta, Google and YouTube.

Fyxer AI brand director Lucy Squires performance creative as a unique role.

“Part strategist, part creative, part analyst. You need to understand the nuances of each platform, love consumer psychology, and get excited about speaking to real barriers and triggers in ways that genuinely stand out,” she explains. 

At Fyxer AI, the team buys its media and produces its creative in-house, meaning it needs a “constant stream” of high-quality content to fuel these “performance engines”.  

Fitzgibbon has seen many businesses looking to hire this type of marketer, from startups and scaleups, all the way to more traditional, larger companies building their understanding of growth marketing and “rethinking” how their teams are set up to be “more commercial”.  

Why are brands hiring?

A quick LinkedIn search shows brands like make up giant Charlotte Tilbury, period tracker Flo and broadcaster UKTV are all hiring marketers in performance creative roles.  

“This role has exploded, because paid media has fundamentally changed,” says Squires.

Algorithms have evolved and targeting is more specific, especially since Meta’s ‘Andromena’ update rolled out in October. The update signalled a big shift in how Facebook and Instagram ads work, accommodating greater capacity for large volumes of creative. 

As the targeting is more precise, the creative assets need to be more varied.  

“For companies running CAC [customer acquisition cost]/LTV [lifetime value] models, the quality of the user you acquire is everything and that quality is increasingly shaped by creative,” adds Squires.   

It seems like this type of role will only continue to gain momentum.  

“Gone is the old world built from top-down TV ads. The new world is built ad by ad, story by story, across every platform,” she argues. “Today, brands are shaped by the hundreds of micro-moments that capture attention, shift perception and build purchase intent.”  

Who’s it for?

Lisa Crane, talent acquisition lead at Foundation Partners – which is working with Fyxer AI – has seen huge demand for creative strategists in 2025.

One candidate, anecdotally, had around 30 recruiters reach out in just a week. It’s a growing focus for businesses, but the quantity of people with the experience to meet demand isn’t matching up yet.

Squires describes people who would do well in this role as growth marketers who are “deeply performance-minded”, but have a genuine love for creative.  

The job market for brand-focused roles is much smaller than in previous years, as businesses eye up shorter-term results and new styles of performance marketer. This performance creative hybrid could be a transferable career path for brand marketers struggling in the current market, particularly if they come from a “commercial brand management background”, Squires suggests. 

“For example, in FMCG brand managers can spend a huge amount of time analysing Kantar or IRI data and using those insights to drive creative direction. That’s similar muscle memory,” she says.  

‘Wait-and-see mode’: What’s the state of marketing recruitment?

However, Fitzgibbon argues it’s less likely a pure creative marketer would land one of these roles, especially without upskilling.

“It’s quite different and people struggle to adapt to the reality,” he says.  

If someone’s spent 20 years building brand platforms, adapting to the fast pace of Meta, for example, could be difficult but not impossible. It’s a fast-paced job, iterating creative work within minutes and hours.

“You’re not informing one quarterly campaign, you’re influencing 50–200 creative assets every month, across multiple platforms, each with their own rules and rhythms,” says Squires.  

Among performance creative roles, Fitzgibbon is seeing people who are quite young earning “a lot of money”.  

“Some of these roles are very, very well paid,” he reports. 

While the people clinching these jobs are often in their early 30s and don’t have a huge amount of experience, as Fitzgibbon explains, all their experience is in performance creative.