Creative Strategy
We're a creative strategy agency in London building lightweight, actionable plans for video, paid media and always-on content.
56% of an ad's performance comes down to the creative itself: not the targeting, bidding or budget.
Our creative strategy process builds actionable plans for video, paid media and always-on content. Pressure-tested against your KPIs, your audience and bespoke to the channels they actually use.
Creative Strategy: the blueprint for high-impact content
When Sunday Treat started out we focused purely on content production, and we learned something fast: however good the work looked, it wasn't going to get the results our clients needed unless the right thinking happened before anything got made. That's why creative strategy is now where every project begins. As a creative strategy agency in London, we research your audience, your competitors and the wider landscape, then work out the tone, format, scripts and talent that will really resonate with the people you need to reach.
A big part of that is channel strategy. The same creative strategy won't work across every channel: an asset that wins on TikTok can dive on YouTube, because each platform has its own audience behaviour and its own native style. So every video marketing strategy we build starts with a proper channel plan. The campaign message stays consistent everywhere it shows up, while each individual asset gets shaped for the platform it will run on.
And we don't do any of it in isolation. The best strategy work is collaborative, so we build it with your team rather than presenting at you. Because one campaign is never the whole story, we also pair the creative concept with a video content strategy that keeps things working long after launch.
Our Creative Strategy Framework
Three layers every engagement moves through: campaign KPIs, audience listening, and creative that earns attention.
Defining Campaign KPIs
Every project starts with an honest conversation about what success actually looks like. Is this a brand awareness play where reach and watch-through matter most? A performance campaign where cost per acquisition is the number that counts? An always-on content programme where we're judged on engagement rate and creator retention over quarters, not campaigns? We translate those ambitions into a tight set of campaign KPIs (usually 3 to 5 metrics) that the whole team agrees on before a single storyboard gets drawn.
Social Listening & Audience Analysis
Before we propose creative, we spend time listening. Which conversations are your audience already having? What formats are they actually engaging with on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts right now? Where are your competitors visible, and where are they leaving space? We use social listening tools, platform insight data and good old-fashioned time spent scrolling to build an audience analysis that's specific enough to be useful, rather than the generic personas every deck seems to default to.
Creative Conception & Channel Optimisation
Now the fun part. Creative concept development takes the KPIs and the audience insight and turns them into territories: not one safe idea, but three or four with very different points of view, so there's something to react to. Once we've landed the direction, we plan channel optimisation: which platforms host the hero asset, which ones get native cut-downs, which need platform-specific creative built from scratch. The same campaign often behaves like four different campaigns once you respect how each platform works, and that's planned from day one rather than bolted on in post.
Every brand now has the same AI tools, the same targeting, the same advantage on campaigns. The thing that's left is the only real lever: the creative itself. Nielsen put 56% of a campaign's sales impact down to the creative, and we know creative better than anything else at Sunday Treat.
Creative strategy in action
TaxZap launched in the UK as a completely new name in a crowded fintech space, with a target we set together: 15,000 new customers at a £40 CAC. The creative strategy came first. One platform, "No More Accountants", then different versions of the same ad for different audiences: a cleaner was served the cleaner version, a Deliveroo rider got the rider version, a plumber got a plumbing pun. It ran for six months across London Underground OOH, Meta, X and YouTube, with geofencing linking the two: pass the Tube ad at Liverpool Street, then open Instagram and meet the version built for your demographic. See the case study →
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FAQs
Strategy that's uniform across all platforms while the actual assets are very different, each one optimised for the platform it runs on. The campaign message feels consistent everywhere; the executions never feel copy-pasted.
As soon as possible, well before you create the assets themselves. The earlier the better, always. Strategy decisions shape casting, formats, channels and budgets, so the later it starts, the more it costs to be wrong.
Very. It's a symbiotic relationship: we need your insights to build reliable insights of our own. We work with your team (and your other agencies where relevant) so the strategy fits what your brand is doing on a broader scope, not just this one campaign.
Creative strategy is the thinking that happens before anything gets made: researching your audience, your competitors and the wider landscape, then deciding the tone, format, scripts and talent that will resonate with the people you need to reach. It is where every Sunday Treat project begins. Where a content strategy agency plans what to post, creative strategy decides what to make and why.
Yes. The campaign message stays consistent everywhere, but each asset is built for the platform it runs on. What works on TikTok is very different from Instagram or Facebook, and what works on TV is very different from an email CRM. The common mistake is falling for one hero asset and forgetting it has to land across every channel your audience actually uses. That channel-by-channel planning is built into every video marketing strategy we make.
Creative strategy is led by Gulliver Moore, our co-founder and managing director, working alongside the team that produces the work, so the people who set the direction stay involved through the shoot. Gully and the team have delivered creative strategy for brands including Revolut, Lipton, HelloFresh and TaxZap.
Our Lipton SLURP Squad campaign passed 149 million impressions, and the TaxZap launch detailed above was built around an ambitious customer-acquisition target in a crowded fintech market. The pattern across clients like Revolut, HelloFresh and TaxZap is consistent: we lead with the thinking, then build creative that delivers against it.
A creative agency tends to focus on making the work and a media agency on where it runs. Creative strategy sits before both: it sets the core idea and how it adapts across channels, so the concept and the media plan come together instead of being handed between teams. And because we produce the work ourselves, the strategy stays realistic about what can actually be shot and delivered.
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