Creative Strategist

Lantern is looking for a Manager, Creative Strategy (Paid Social) to lead the development of high-performing ad creative concepts, briefs, and testing roadmaps for multiple healthcare startup clients across Meta, TikTok, and YouTube. This role is ideal for a performance-minded creative strategist who can turn insight and data into thumb-stopping, conversion-driving concepts across video and static formats.

You will sit at the intersection of paid media and design, partnering closely with Lantern’s paid social, brand messaging and design team members to translate business goals, customer and competitive insights into clear creative hypotheses, briefs, and iterative test plans. You’ll work directly with our startup CEO clients and growth leaders, helping them define their brand and performance narratives while owning the creative strategy that powers effective full-funnel paid social campaigns.

What you’ll do

• Lead creative strategy for paid social across a portfolio of DTC digital health clients, with a core focus on Meta, TikTok, and YouTube ad formats (UGC, short-form video, statics, carousels, and shorts).
• Develop clear creative briefs, storyboards/scripts, messaging architectures, and ad concepts rooted in audience insights, product and service positioning, conversion goals and client brand standards / feedback.
• Build and own structured creative testing roadmaps (hooks, formats, angles, offers, CTAs), in partnership with Lantern Account Directors and paid social channel leads.
• Analyze performance data, AI-enabled creative analytics tools, internal creative format best practices, and competitive ad libraries to identify winning creative patterns and generate actionable insights that inform the next round of concepts and briefs.
• Collaborate closely with designers, editors, copywriters, and UGC creators and AI design tools to bring briefs to life and ensure outputs are on-strategy and on-brand.
• Partner with paid social media managers to ensure tight feedback loops between media performance and creative iteration, optimizing toward CAC, ROAS, and LTV targets, while ensuring client feedback is incorporated.
• Develop full-funnel creative frameworks that support prospecting, retargeting, and retention, including select landing page and advertorial angles in partnership with CRO leads.
• Champion creative best practices by platform, including native storytelling for TikTok, feed and Reels for Meta, and short-form video for YouTube.
• Create clear, compelling narratives in client-facing presentations that communicate what was tested, what worked, what didn’t, and what is recommended next.
• Help refine and standardize Lantern’s creative strategy playbooks, templates, and processes across clients to help cross-pollinate learnings across other Lantern team members responsible for creative strategy and continuously improve the creative “center of excellence” at Lantern.

About you

• 2-4 years of experience in performance-focused creative strategy for paid social, ideally in an agency environment working across multiple clients.
• Deep understanding of creative best practices and performance levers on Meta and TikTok; experience with YouTube and other social/video platforms is a strong plus.
• Proven track record developing winning concepts, briefs, and test plans that improve CAC/ROAS and scale spend efficiently.
• Comfortable translating data into creative direction—able to look at performance dashboards and quickly identify what to scale, iterate, or cut.
• Hands-on experience partnering with media buyers, creatives, brand and CRO teams to drive full-funnel performance.
• Strong understanding of DTC and/or digital health customer journeys and how to craft messaging for different funnel stages.
• Excellent written communication and copywriting skills; able to write clear briefs, scripts, hooks, and client-ready summaries.
• Highly organized, with strong project management skills and the ability to manage multiple clients, deadlines, and test streams concurrently.
• Scrappy, entrepreneurial mindset with comfort operating in fast-paced, test-and-learn environments.
• Health and wellness or digital health experience is strongly preferred.
• Experience working with DTC businesses is required, with healthcare specific startup DTC experience preferred.
• Strong project management, attention to detail, and a no-task-too-small mentality

How you’ll work at Lantern

• Work directly with Lantern’s senior growth leaders while owning the creative strategy workstream for select client accounts.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to founders and marketing leaders, helping them understand how creative drives performance and what is required to scale.
• Contribute to a culture of rigorous testing, clear communication, and a high say/do ratio across the broader Lantern team.