What Is Creative Strategy? A Practical Explanation From Our Work

Creative strategy is a set of written decisions made before any filming: exactly who we are talking to, which problem or desire we are touching, what the message is, what proof will convince them, and in which format and platform we reach them. It is the bridge between a business goal like “we need more orders” and the video that actually appears on screen.

Without it, every video is a separate guess. The designer has one idea, the writer another, and the media buyer tries to sell whatever they were handed. With it, every piece of content serves the same goal, and you know in advance how you will judge whether it worked.

Why creative strategy now matters more than targeting

A few years ago, a media buyer’s main job was choosing the audience: age, area, interests. Today the ad systems at Meta, TikTok and Google do much of that work automatically, and the content itself steers the algorithm toward the right people. A video that speaks to a mother looking for a school will tend to reach mothers looking for schools, because they are the ones who engage with it.

This is exactly what Wave’s founder, Jawdat Al-Azizi, saw while working as a media buyer before becoming a creative strategist: same budget, same targeting, and the difference between a winning ad and a losing one was the content. The full story is in from media buyer to agency.

The five questions it answers

1. Who exactly is the customer? Not “people aged 18 to 35,” but a real person: what they do, what worries them, what makes them delay buying.
2. Which moment do we catch them in? When they feel the problem, when they compare options, or when they are ready and need a final push. Each moment needs different content.
3. What is the one message? A single sentence on why they should choose you. If you need three sentences, you are not there yet.
4. What is the proof? A customer experience, a visible result, a comparison, a testimonial, a guarantee, or the product in action.
5. Which format, and where? A person talking to camera, a product video, customer-style content, a story, or a static design. And on which platform, because a Snapchat audience is not a Google audience.

What creative strategy actually produces

The output is not a long presentation. It is a practical brief that the writer, videographer, editor and media buyer can all work from without coming back with questions. Ours includes:

• The business goal and the number we will measure, such as cost per conversation or cost per lead.
• A customer description and their top three objections.
• The core message in one sentence.
• The angles we will test, each with one or more video ideas. We explain how we find them in content angles.
• Notes from competitor analysis: what is overused and what is missing.
• Formats, platforms and an initial budget split by goal.

How it differs from a content plan and design

People often mix the three up. Creative strategy answers what we say, to whom and why. The monthly content plan answers when we publish what. Design and production answer how it looks. Order matters: start with design before strategy and you get beautiful, consistent content with no direction. The strategy later becomes a publishing schedule, covered in how we build a monthly content plan tied to sales.

Strategy decides what we say. The plan decides when. Production decides how.

Example: a private school during enrollment season

Say a private school in Amman wants enrollments for next year. The first request from management is usually “we need a video about the school.” Instead of filming a building tour, we go through the five questions:

• Customer: parents of a child entering kindergarten or first grade, worried about class size and their child getting lost in the crowd.
• Moment: the comparison period, months before enrollment.
• Message: “Your child will be known by name.”
• Proof: a teacher talking about her students by name and detail, and current parents describing daily communication.
• Format: short, natural-looking reels on Instagram and Facebook with an interest form, plus Google search ads for terms like “private schools in Amman.”

That brief produces several videos, each touching the same message from a different side. We judge them by cost per interest form and by how many of those parents booked a school visit, not by views. When it is time to scale, we know which video to push, because a clear number separates them.

The message comes from parents’ real worry, not from the school brochure. And content that touches a real feeling often travels on its own: some of our ads have passed 20,000 shares and 8,000 comments, and a share is a sign the message hit something people wanted to pass on.

How we handle this at Wave

Creative strategy is the first stage of every engagement: a session with the client team, analysis of the account and competitors, and a look at current sales numbers. We come out with a brief of about two pages that answers the five questions, lists the angles to test, and names the number we will judge by. Every script we write afterwards has to trace back to that brief. Each month we update it based on what the numbers taught us, so the strategy stays alive instead of sitting in a drawer.