How we built a 50+ person creative team

Hey guys,

Creative is one of the biggest levers you can pull to grow a brand in 2026. And the best operators I know all have one thing in common: an A-player creative team behind them.

Creative isn't a linear game, it's a power law. A great concept doesn't beat a good one by 10%. It beats it by 10x. So the difference between A players and B players is enormous.

And today I'm pulling back the curtain on how we built our 50-person team at Adcrate. The roles that matter, the questions I ask, and the mistakes we've made along the way so you don't have to.

Prefer to watch this on YouTube?

Let's get into it :)

But first, here's what I've found interesting this week:

• We just dropped a FREE 6-week course on Claude Code + Codex for Facebook ad makers

• This guy built and AI to increase his 'luck surface area', pretty wild use case

• You can now make Claude more concise with it’s responses, it leads with the result and only gives full detail when you ask

How to hire the 4 roles behind every great creative team

Before you hire anyone: know when it's the right time

A common question I get is when to actually start hiring. Short answer: not as early as most people think.

If you're spending < $50k/month on ads, there's massive value in learning to sell your own products first. Making ads yourself teaches you what "good" looks like when you eventually hire an agency, a strategist, or a freelancer. You can literally start with founder ads for free.

Pick up your phone, walk down the street, and talk about why you started. Some of those become the highest-performing assets in an ad account.

The right time to hire is usually when ads are eating a lot of your time but you know you're still not making enough.

Don’t spend $10K/month on a creative agency if you're spending $10K/month on ads. Better to hire a part-time strategist for $2K and put the other $8K into ad spend.

1. Creative strategist

The creative strategist role is by far the hardest of the four to hire for. All of them are hard, but this one especially.

You need someone who understands psychology, trends, the organic feed, pattern recognition, research, copywriting, and ad account data.

Where we find them: most have come through my personal brand, but you don't need a following. Posts on X and LinkedIn get more reach than you'd expect.

What we've been leaning into hard the last six months is bounties. When I post about hiring, I put a $5,000 referral fee on the post. If we're going to spend $100K+ on this role, $5K to find the right person is a no-brainer.

Here’s an example:

What to look for: the hardest skill to train is copywriting. It's the backbone of direct response and it takes reps to get good at. We've actually found some of our best strategists in copywriting forums and trained them on the rest.

The other thing is obsession. The strategists who become top performers at Adcrate think about ads 24/7. One of our best opened her first call with "this might put you off, but I'm obsessed with messaging." We spent the rest of the call riffing on messaging together. I offered her the job on the spot.

AI fluency is a non-negotiable now. If someone isn't using Claude, Cowork, Parker every day, they're not going to cut it.

💡 Questions that separate the great from the average:

• Where do you go to learn about creative strategy?

• What's your favourite ad library to swipe from?

• What's working in ad accounts right now?

If they say Motion bootcamp or Dara Denney, fine. But I want to hear more niche stuff. "If you know, you know" answers.

Trial task: Always run a trial task - ours is unpaid: write a script and explain who you wrote it for and why. You can tell if someone has chops within three to four lines.

Location: all our strategists are in the West (UK, US, Canada). English-first matters for this role because it's so copy-heavy. There absolutely are successful strategist that are not from the west, this is just what we’ve found works for us.

2. Video editor

Editing is a volume game. We've hired 25 video editors over the years, and this is the role where you have to grind through the most applicants.

In one recent hiring round we hired 5 editors and rejected 554. It's not uncommon for us to go through 100 trial tasks to find one top editor.

Where we find them: Indeed and OnlineJobs.ph. Some of our best editors are in the Philippines. We never stop hiring for this role - there are multiple posts running at any given time.

What to look for: storytelling, not polish. I'm not looking for the most technically skilled editor. I'm looking for the one who can take a folder of raw footage and turn it into an ad that tells a story. That's the hardest thing to train and the thing that separates good editors from great ones.

Trial task: we give them a folder of footage plus a couple of our top ads and say "turn this into an ad." Minimal instruction on purpose. I want to see how they think.

Here’s what ours looks like:

Location: Asia mostly (Philippines), some Eastern Europe. All work on UK time zone so they overlap with our strategists for faster feedback loops.

One additional hire worth considering: an AI animation specialist. Once you have 5+ editors and you're running AI animation ads at volume, having one person specifically focused on Higgsfield, different models, and turning scripts into visual stories pays off.

All 20 of our editors can make basic AI animations, but the more complex claymation, longer story arcs, and unusual visuals benefit from a specialist.

3. Media buyer

I look for two things in a media buyer: the ability to diagnose, and the ability to read creative.

Diagnostic ability: when CPA spikes or ROAS drops, can they root cause it? Can they look at the account, form a hypothesis, and know what to change (or not to change)? Sometimes the best thing to do in an ad account is nothing, and I want a media buyer who knows that.

Reading creative: more and more of media buying is done by Meta's AI. The value of a top media buyer in 2026 is being the bridge between the performance and creative team. Can they connect account numbers to creative angles? Can they surface ideas the creative team should test next?

Traditionally there's a big gap between performance and creative teams. A media buyer who closes that gap is worth their weight. I shared our structure for sharing our structure across the two teams this recently.👇

Where we find them: LinkedIn, referrals + bounties (same playbook as the strategist role), and Upwork.

Location: some of our best media buyers are in Eastern and Central Europe. North Macedonia has been a great source.

Vetting: get them to audit an ad account via Loom or on a live call. If you're a small team and not confident reading ad accounts yourself, get them to audit yours, then send the Loom to a media buyer friend for a sanity check. That'll tell you if they have a real pulse on 2026 media buying.

One last thing: structural restraint. Modern ad accounts are simpler than they used to be. Don't over-engineer structure, and know when NOT to make changes.

4. Creator co-ordinator

This is the most under-hired role in creative teams. And it's costing you.

Here's the mistake I see constantly: strategists are doing all the creator comms, invoices, content reviews, admin. That's not what a strategist should be doing. Every hour they spend on comms is an hour they're not doing strategy.

If you're a CMO or founder reading this, ask yourself: how can I get my strategist spending as much time as possible on actual strategy? Everything else needs to be delegated.

We brought in our first creator coordinator 3 years ago. We now have four. They own:

• Communication with creators

• Content reviews

• Creator sourcing (one of ours is dedicated to scrolling TikTok and Instagram for new creators)

• Admin (invoices, questions, all that)

Our strategists don't touch creator comms anymore. They brief. The coordinator takes it from there. Make sure you’re protecting your strategists time.

Utilisation rate tip: get your strategists to fill out a quick sheet at the end of each week showing how many hours went to strategy vs. everything else. I guarantee there's time going to things they shouldn't be doing. That's a signal you need to hire.

What to look for: good communication (creators can be flaky), proactive (won't just use templates), organised (they'll be running multiple creator group chats simultaneously).

Scaling: don't just add more of the same

One last thought before we wrap.

When your creative team is working, the instinct is to keep adding more of the same. Another strategist, another editor. That works up to a point.

But there's a point where the smarter move is to bring in different creative sources. Different agencies, freelancers, even different types of creators. Not just for capacity, but for perspective. Even if your internal team feels diverse, you only have diversity within the parameters your team believes about ad creative.

A Meta employee once described this to me as different rivers flowing into your ad account. Internal team is one river. Agency is another. Freelancers, creators filming, customers filming, all different rivers. The more diverse rivers feeding your account, the better position you're putting it in.

If you want the full walkthrough of everything above, here's the YouTube video.

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See you next week,

Alex

P.S. If you're spending $100k+ monthly on paid social and want help implementing ugly ad strategies like these, my team at Adcrate is accepting applications to work with us. Check out our case studies at adcrate.co.