Senior Creative Lead / Head of Creative

About us

Creative Milkshake is a remote-first performance creative agency. We make scroll-stopping short-form ads for some of the world’s most exciting DTC brands on Meta and TikTok - high-volume, fast-moving, and built to convert.

We’re a close-knit team of ~34 people spread across the Netherlands, the Philippines, South Africa, Spain, and beyond. We’ve recently joined the Fieldtrip group alongside inBeat, which means we’re growing - in ambition, in capability, and in the complexity of clients we work with.

Our Amsterdam studio is the creative heart of our production operation. Over the next 1–2 years, we’re expanding from UGC-first content toward elevated branded formats, this role is central to holding the quality bar as we scale.

The role

We're looking for a Senior Creative Lead / Head of Creative to own creative quality at Creative Milkshake, from brief to final ad. You'll be the golden thread across Creative Strategy, Production and Post-Production: the person who sets the creative standard, helps every team understand what "great" looks like, and makes sure it shows up in everything we send to clients.

This is a senior leadership role with real creative authority, one step below Director. You'll own the output of the Creative Strategy, Production, and Post teams and be a visible creative voice with clients. We want someone with the gravitas to hold the bar and the adaptability to build on how we work today, not replace it.

Our team is young, kind and very close. Many of them are used to either close direction or to hearing that the work is great. A big part of your job is raising the standard in a way that builds confidence and autonomy, so people want to do better work rather than fear being corrected.

What you'll do

Own the creative quality bar

• Approvals: Be the final creative eye on storyboards, raw footage and final edits before work reaches clients

• Give specific, hands-on feedback that people can act on: what to change, why, and what better looks like

• Build and maintain our "what good looks like" library, creative checklists and review standards, so quality does not depend on one person

• Spot recurring patterns (weak hooks, storyboards that will not shoot, editing habits) and fix them at the root

Lead Creative Excellence

• Lead the teams: Work with the team leads to set direction, coach, and build their creative judgement

• Create a culture of ownership where people bring problems up early and are trusted to make good decisions

• Run regular creative reviews and inspiration sessions that give everyone a shared language for quality

• Help us grow the team and raise the skills bar as we scale

Bridge strategy, production and post

• Make sure what strategy writes can actually be shot, and what production shoots gives post what it needs

• Translate creative strategy into briefs production can walk into the studio with

• Partner with the Managing Director and Operations on processes, tools and handoffs between teams

• Use AI and smart tooling to remove admin so people can spend their time on the craft

Turn performance into creative direction

• Read paid social performance well enough to guide the team on what to test, iterate and drop

• Hold strategists to a high standard on how they use data in their briefs and learnings

• Keep a current, critical relationship with TikTok, Meta and emerging short-form formats

Be a creative voice with clients

• Present creative rationale with calm authority, including on calls with our more complex and high-profile clients

• Back the team's work in the room, and constructively challenge when a client direction will not perform

• Help us win and grow accounts as we move toward more proactive pitching

Shape our creative identity

• Define and document Creative Milkshake's creative point of view: the formats, instincts and signatures that make our work recognisable

• Guide creative excellence from UGC-first into elevated social-first content, and approve how we present ourselves externally

Who you are

We're not filtering on job titles. The right person might be a Creative Director, an Associate Creative Director, a Head of Creative or Content, or a senior creative producer. What matters is what you've done and how you lead.

• You have 7+ years in creative with some leadership across social-first, performance or content work, at an agency, a DTC brand or a production house

• You have great taste! You know when something works well, and how to explain it.

• You are fluent in production: you know what a storyboard needs to say for a shoot to go well, and you can give feedback that production and post can turn into action

• You understand paid social and creative performance well enough to guide a team and challenge their thinking, even if you are not a data specialist

• You have led teams and developed people, ideally mixing experienced and early-career talent

• You can tell a good ad from a great one in seconds, and explain the difference in a way that helps the person who made it

• You carry yourself well in front of clients: confident, warm and credible, with strong opinions held without ego

• You have real conviction and presence, and you are adaptable. You bring a point of view without being set in your ways about how creative is done

• You have high EQ and give honest feedback without damaging confidence or relationships

• You are comfortable with ambiguity and pace. We're building systems while operating at volume

• You're fluent in English; working hours within about 3 hours of CET

You'll thrive here if...

• You love the craft of short-form content and get genuinely excited about what makes someone stop scrolling

• You want to build a team's confidence and creative instinct, not just approve work

• You enjoy being the bridge between strategy, production and post, and fixing how teams work together

• You like a close-knit, kind, fast-moving culture where people care about the work

• Helping a studio step up from UGC to elevated social-first content sounds like the right moment to join

This role isn't for you if...

• Your experience is only in strategy or performance marketing, with no real production or editing exposure

• Your creative background is mainly brand identity or traditional advertising rather than social-first content

• You prefer a hierarchical, top-down leadership style or a fully built machine to operate in

• You're set on one way of doing creative and find it hard to adapt to a new team and context

What we offer

• A senior role with real influence at a growing agency in the Fieldtrip group

• Competitive compensation, reviewed yearly

• Creative Milkshake stipends (mental health, healthcare and internet)

• Time off: 21 days PTO plus 7 paid sick days, and a company closure over the end-of-year period

• Maternity/paternity leave

• Long service incentives (from 2 years)

• Remote-first, with regular contact with our Amsterdam studio