A creative strategist decides what ads to make and why: the angles, the hooks, the creators, the briefs, and what the data says to do next. Editors make the ads; the strategist decides which ads are worth making. Most of the job is finding and combining footage that already exists.
A creative strategist decides which ads get made and why. They read the performance data, pick the angles and hooks to test next, brief creators and editors, and decide what happens after the results come in.
Editors make the ads. Strategists decide which ads are worth making.
A large part of the job is finding footage. Before a strategist can brief "test the skeptical-to-convinced angle with three creators", they need to know those takes exist, where they are, and which three to use. In most teams that means hours in Drive folders or asking an editor who remembers.
When footage is searchable by what's said and shown, the brief changes. It stops being a description ("a skeptical creator") and becomes three links to three specific takes. The strategist spends the saved hours on more angles, which is the actual job.
Let's say a strategist sees that "problem in the viewer's words" hooks are winning. She searches every take where a creator describes the problem before the product, finds 12 across 9 creators, briefs 4 new variations by lunch. No shoot, no Slack thread.
No, but they need to know what's in the footage. The best strategists I worked with knew the library better than the editors, because they were the ones searching it every day.
The media buyer runs and scales the campaigns. The creative strategist decides what goes in them. I do creative strategy, not ad operations, and the two are different jobs even when one person does both.