For decades, large consumer brands became very good at producing advertising in a particular way. A campaign was developed, refined through multiple teams, reviewed by legal, polished by production and eventually released into the market. The process made sense when a television commercial or national campaign might carry millions of dollars in media spend and represent the brand for months.
Creator marketing operates under very different rules.
Molson Coors recently discovered just how different those rules need to be. The beverage company has been overhauling the way its marketing and legal teams work with creators, moving away from what it describes as a TV-era approach toward faster approvals, looser briefs and more room for experimentation. The company began developing the new model in March 2026 with Movers+Shakers' consultancy The Shake Squad. Since then, Molson Coors says engagement on its creator content has quadrupled.
The interesting part is not simply the increase in engagement. It is what Molson Coors had to change internally to get there.
Creator Marketing Was Running Through a System Built for Television
Large organizations naturally build processes around risk. When a campaign has a significant budget behind it and will appear across television, retail and other major channels, multiple rounds of approval are understandable. Brand teams need consistency, legal teams need compliance, and senior marketers need confidence that what eventually reaches millions of people represents the company correctly.
But applying that same process to creator content creates a problem.
Social platforms move quickly. Trends emerge and disappear within days. Creators build audiences partly because their content feels native to those environments, not because it looks like a television advertisement squeezed into a vertical screen.
Molson Coors found itself confronting that mismatch. Movers+Shakers CEO Evan Horowitz described the legacy approach as a "broadcast mentality": brands were accustomed to talking at consumers while social media had become an environment where hundreds of conversations were happening simultaneously.
The problem, then, was not that Molson Coors lacked creators. It was that the organization around those creators had been designed for another media era.
That distinction matters for many established brands. Adding creator marketing to a media plan does not automatically make the company creator-native. If every TikTok still needs to move through a workflow designed for a national TV commercial, the channel may change while the operating model stays exactly the same.
Molson Coors Created "Freedom Within a Framework"
One of the most interesting changes happened between marketing and legal.
Instead of treating every creator decision as something requiring the same level of scrutiny, Molson Coors introduced what it calls a "freedom within a framework" system. Potential decisions are divided into three lanes: things that can be fast-tracked, things that require a conversation and things that are simply not allowed.
That sounds like a process change, but strategically it is more important than that.
Creator marketing needs speed, but a company operating more than 100 brands across the U.S. and Canada cannot simply remove controls. Molson Coors has to manage regulatory requirements, brand safety and, for alcoholic beverages, the additional responsibility of marketing only to legal-age consumers.
The solution was not less governance. It was clearer governance.
Legal teams were brought closer to the creator ecosystem so they could understand how consumers and creators actually behave on these platforms. Once the boundaries were clearer, marketers did not need to repeatedly solve the same approval problem from scratch.
This is a useful model for established brands trying to move faster. Speed does not always come from eliminating process. Sometimes it comes from deciding in advance where the process is actually necessary.
Stop Treating Every Social Post Like a Super Bowl Ad
Molson Coors also had to become more comfortable with something large brands often find difficult: allowing individual pieces of content to matter less.
A major television commercial can justify weeks or months of development because the company is making a large concentrated bet. Social content works through a much larger number of smaller bets.
Molson Coors now treats organic and creator social as a place to test, learn and gather signals rather than expecting every post to behave like a high-stakes campaign.
That changes the economics of creativity.
If every creator post has to be exceptional, perfectly polished and capable of justifying itself through immediate ROI, experimentation becomes difficult. Brands naturally become conservative because the cost of getting something wrong feels disproportionately high.
But if social becomes a continuous learning system, an individual post can succeed in several ways. It might generate engagement, reveal something about the audience, expose a cultural behavior the brand can build around later, or simply provide information about what not to repeat.
The portfolio matters more than the perfection of every individual asset.
That is closer to how creators themselves operate. They publish, observe what resonates and adapt. Brands trying to participate in the same environment need some version of that feedback loop.
Creators Need a Different Kind of Brief
Another important change involved creative control.
Molson Coors and Movers+Shakers make a distinction between influencers and creators. Influencers may primarily offer community and reach, while creators are being hired for their ability to make content.
That difference should affect how they are briefed.
If a brand chooses a creator because that person understands a particular format, audience or cultural niche, then handing them an overly prescriptive script can remove much of the reason for hiring them.
Molson Coors has therefore become more comfortable giving creators looser briefs.
This is one of the persistent contradictions in creator marketing. Brands want the authenticity and audience understanding of creators, but they often try to control the output using the same rules they apply to conventional advertising.
The result can be technically correct content that feels immediately like an advertisement.
Creator expertise is partly distribution expertise. A good creator understands what their audience watches, what it ignores, how quickly an idea needs to land, which formats feel natural and what level of production fits the feed.
Brands still need to define what must remain true about the product and positioning. But everything else does not necessarily need to be dictated.
"Good" Content Looks Different in the Feed
Molson Coors also had to rethink its definition of production quality.
For a company accustomed to highly polished advertising, accepting deliberately lo-fi content can feel like lowering the standard. On social platforms, however, polish is not always the same thing as effectiveness.
Molson Coors' Justine Stauffer said the company needed to define content quality differently for social than it does for other channels. The company has become more willing to embrace lo-fi creative when it feels more authentic to how people actually consume content in their feeds.
That does not mean brands should make bad content. It means quality is contextual.
A beautifully shot 30-second commercial may be excellent television creative and poor TikTok creative. A creator filming something quickly on a phone may look less expensive while fitting perfectly into the surrounding content.
The mistake is evaluating both through the same creative standard.
For brands, this requires a subtle shift. Brand consistency should come from recognizable ideas, positioning and behaviors, not necessarily from making every piece of content look visually identical.
The Audience Comes Before the Platform
Molson Coors has also moved away from looking for a universal answer to questions such as which platform or creator performs best. Instead, it starts with the audience a particular brand needs to reach.
That matters for a company with a portfolio stretching from Miller High Life and Coors Light to Fever-Tree and ZOA Energy. The people, occasions and cultural environments surrounding those brands can be very different. A creator strategy that works for one cannot simply be copied across the portfolio.
The Shake Squad helped Molson Coors build training around different "drinker groups," including understanding what actually appears in the feeds of particular audiences. That information then feeds back into briefs and creative decisions.
This turns creator selection into something more useful than follower matching.
Instead of asking which creator has the largest audience, the brand can ask which creator naturally participates in the culture and conversations its customers already care about.
Creator marketing becomes more effective when it is part of that understanding of the consumer rather than a separate media tactic.
The Hardest Problem May Still Be Measurement
There is an uncomfortable reason many large companies continue to underinvest in creator and organic social: the return is harder to prove.
Television and digital performance marketing have established measurement systems. Creator content often influences awareness, conversation, search, consideration and cultural relevance in ways that do not fit neatly into a last-click attribution model.
Molson Coors itself is a useful example of that tension.
The company says engagement has quadrupled since introducing the new approach, but it has not disclosed how that increase translated into commercial performance. That distinction is worth preserving. Higher engagement indicates that the content is connecting more effectively on social platforms, but it does not by itself prove incremental sales.
The challenge is therefore not choosing between engagement and business results. It is developing better ways to understand how the former contributes to the latter.
Creator Marketing Is Becoming an Operating Model
The biggest lesson from Molson Coors may have little to do with creators themselves.
The company did not quadruple engagement simply by finding different personalities or producing more content. It changed how marketing, legal, audience insights, creative standards, briefs and measurement worked around the channel.
The new approach has now been scaled across 230 marketers responsible for more than 100 brands in the U.S. and Canada.
That makes this less of an influencer marketing experiment and more of an organizational change.
For established brands, this is likely to become increasingly important. Consumer attention has fragmented across creators, communities, platforms and formats, but many marketing organizations still operate around structures developed when a relatively small number of large campaigns could create mass reach.
Creator marketing exposes that mismatch particularly clearly because culture can move faster than an approval chain.
Brands cannot participate effectively in that environment simply by adding creators to the end of an old campaign process. The process itself has to change.
The BeyondB Perspective
At BeyondB, we see a broader distribution lesson in Molson Coors' shift. Modern brands increasingly operate across channels where speed, participation and constant experimentation matter as much as campaign polish.
That requires more than moving budget from television to creators. The organization behind the marketing has to move too.
The strongest brands will still protect positioning, legal boundaries and quality. But they will become much clearer about where control is essential and where creators, teams and platforms need room to work differently.
Molson Coors' experience is a useful reminder that when distribution changes, the operating system behind the brand eventually has to change with it.
