Direct-Marketing Static Ad Designer - Contractor to Hire

About Scaling.com

Scaling.com helps established business owners 10x their companies in three years or less. Our marketing speaks to experienced entrepreneurs who have already built successful companies and are looking for a fundamentally different path to growth.

About This Engagement

We are building an initial roster of two contractors who can turn direct-marketing ideas and performance signals into static ads that stop the right person, communicate quickly, and earn action.

This is not a request for someone to make an attractive image after receiving a finished concept. We need designers who understand the design, art direction, marketing, and copywriting behind a winning ad—and who can use AI to create more range and speed without lowering the taste bar.

You will work inside the same performance-fed creative system as the direct-marketing video team. The difference is the medium: you turn winning hooks, proof, and offers into visual concepts that can be tested at scale.

Our Standard: A-Players Only

We would rather work with one phenomenal creative than a bench of mediocre executors. You cannot create a Michelin-star meal by adding more fast-food workers. We select for exceptional judgment, craft, ownership, and the ability to improve the system around the work.

Direct-Marketing Experience Is the Filter

You have designed and art-directed static ads for Meta or another measurable paid channel, and you can prove that your work produced results. You understand that the image, headline, proof, body copy, and CTA are one persuasion system. You know the difference between decorating copy and building a visual argument.

You can look at a winner and identify what likely drove the result, then build new concepts around the mechanism rather than cloning the layout. You understand why meaningful visual diversity matters: platforms and audiences do not reward a feed full of nearly identical templates.

What Your Direction and Weekly Workflow Look Like

You will not receive a finished design brief. You will be proactive.

Each week's ticket system gives you current deliverable topics, performance context, brand constraints, and a few dozen successful or emerging hooks drawn from hundreds of angles tested every week. You determine how the message should become visual.

Select and redesign the strongest hooks.

You identify the hooks and angles most worth developing, then turn them into distinct visual concepts that align with the brand while creating enough range to test different directions at scale.

Search the 10+ TB library with AI.

Using AI connectors and plugins through ChatGPT, Claude, and our AI-enabled content database, you search more than 10 TB of keynotes, podcasts, social posts, trainings, courses, modules, testimonials, and other source material for proof, quotes, numbers, imagery, and brand-relevant context. You verify what AI retrieves before it enters an ad.

Hands-on experience building and operating these connections is required. We are not hiring a prompt operator to generate bad ads and call it scale. You use AI to translate the best hooks into editable Figma concepts, build real layouts and components, explore materially different visual directions, and produce variations faster inside the design tools you already know. AI makes you faster at work you are already excellent at; it does not replace design judgment, art direction, or copy sense.

Delegate the production work.

You should be heavily comfortable delegating roughly 80% of the mechanical work to AI: research, retrieval, image exploration, background work, resizing, compositing setup, layout exploration, and version production. Your time belongs on conversion strategy, concept, art direction, copy hierarchy, taste, and final quality control.

Create meaningful variations.

Each winning hook should produce multiple visual directions and useful variations across headline, opening statement, proof, imagery, hierarchy, format, composition, and CTA. We are testing concepts, not superficial color swaps.

Refresh and repackage winners.

You may rebuild a stale ad whose body still works, pair a proven hook with stronger proof, turn a testimonial into several visual concepts, or repackage an old winner for a new audience or format. The goal is constant reiteration, refreshing, and extension of what the market has already validated.

Follow the signal.

You review performance with the paid-marketing and creative teams, identify what actually drove the response, and feed that learning into the next week's tickets and concepts.

The Visual Standard

Think MasterClass. Our audience runs serious companies, and the quality of the creative is part of the proof. But you also have to know when "poor" taste is part of the strategic tactic: when a deliberately raw, native, disruptive, or imperfect visual will outperform polished brand design.

You obsess over the conversion angle, words, emotion, type, story alignment, negative space, and where the eye lands. You are excellent at hierarchy, typography, composition, imagery, and art direction. You know the rules well enough to break them deliberately, and you can explain why the exception should improve attention or conversion.

Requirements

You Should Be

• A designer with a proven portfolio of static direct-response or performance-marketing ads. (And you need to be able to prove it with your results.)

• Strong across design craft, art direction, direct marketing, and copywriting; you can defend a decision in terms of audience and response, not personal preference.

• Fast without becoming repetitive, with the ability to explore multiple visual languages rather than one signature template.

• Demonstrably experienced connecting ChatGPT or Claude, AI connectors, plugins, and design-generation tools to Figma or an equivalent professional design workflow; you can show editable concepts and variations, not just generated images.

• Comfortable working with founders, business education, thought leadership, coaching, or complex B2B offers; direct experience is a plus.

• Reliable with deadlines, responsive in collaboration, and meticulous about file organization and editable source delivery.

This Engagement Is Not

• A brand-only design engagement in which success is measured primarily by aesthetic approval.

• A production-design role that requires every concept and layout to be dictated in advance.

• A fit for someone who submits unreviewed AI imagery, inaccurate proof, or generic template variations.

• An expectation that one contractor must cover every style. We are intentionally beginning with a small roster to create range and redundancy.

• A technical designer who does not understand the offer or direct marketing.

Working Model

• Initial Need: Two contractors

• Location: Remote

• Engagement: Contract, beginning with a paid trial project or defined first batch

• Scope: Ongoing batches may be offered based on quality, speed, reliability, creative range, and performance

• Compensation: Project or retainer structure finalized according to scope, capacity, and experience

• Creative Lead: Raleigh Norton, Head of Content and Executive Producer

• Collaborates With: Paid marketing, copy, and the broader creative team

• Primary Tools: Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud or equivalent design software, ChatGPT or Claude, AI connectors and plugins, and the image-generation or design tools best suited to the concept

• Source Files: Editable working files and organized exports are required

How to Apply

Send three to five static ads that best demonstrate direct-marketing judgment. For each, identify the audience, offer, angle, work you personally owned, and measurable result.

Include a short explanation of your AI-enabled workflow: what you delegate, which connectors and tools you use, your typical turnaround time, weekly capacity, preferred engagement structure, and rates.

Shortlisted contractors will receive a paid trial brief. We will evaluate the strength and range of the concepts, clarity of the hierarchy, accuracy, speed, organization, marketing logic, and quality of the reasoning—not only the finish of a single image.

Benefits

• This position is a contract to hire full-time