What Molson Coors Changed to Move at Creator Speed.

Molson Coors did not fix its creator content by finding better creators.

It fixed the approval process that sat in front of them.

That is the useful part of a story Digiday reported on 11 September: the brewer has replaced a TV-era approval workflow with a legal framework that sorts decisions into three lanes, and it says engagement with its creator content has quadrupled since the work began in March. The number is the company’s own, and it deserves a careful read. The shape of the change is the thing worth studying, because it is the change most brands need and almost none make.

We have argued for a long while that a social media approval system should match scrutiny to risk rather than run every post through the same queue. Molson Coors is a rare example of a large company doing exactly that, describing the before and the after, and putting a figure on the result.

What Molson Coors actually changed

According to Digiday, the company started working on the new approach in March with Movers+Shakers, its creative agency, and that agency’s new consultancy group, The Shake Squad. The change was then scaled to 230 marketers across more than 100 brands in the US and Canada, from Miller High Life to Fever Tree and the Zoa energy drink range.

Justine Stauffer, senior director of creative effectiveness at Molson Coors, told Digiday the revamp covered how both the legal and marketing teams work with creators. The old process treated creator content like a TV spot: a tight brief, a long sign-off chain, one high-stakes deliverable at the end.

The new one treats it like what it is, a stream of small posts going into feeds that move daily.

The three legal lanes

The centre of the change is a framework Molson Coors calls “freedom within a framework”, built with its legal team. Every potential decision goes into one of three lanes:

• Fast-track: pre-cleared, ship it.
• Needs a conversation: a real question, so talk it through.
• Hard no: off the table, and everyone knows why in advance.

Stauffer’s line to Digiday was that “we’ve moved mountains so much faster than we were before”, and her explanation is the part to copy. Legal was involved in the process the whole way, so the lawyers came to understand the ecosystem and how consumers behave in it. They stopped being a gate at the end and became authors of the rules at the start.

Why a lane beats a queue

A single approval queue treats a lo-fi behind-the-scenes clip and a claim about product strength as the same kind of risk. They are not, so the queue slows everything down to the speed of its riskiest item.

Lanes fix that by making the risk decision once, up front, instead of post by post. Most content takes the fast lane because most content was never risky. The conversation lane catches the genuinely new question. The hard no removes a whole category of argument, because nobody pitches what everyone knows is banned.

The effect on a team is not just speed. A marketer who knows the boundaries will make more, closer to the moment, which is where creator content earns its keep.

The post stopped being the unit

The second change Digiday reports is that Molson Coors put less weight on the individual post and stopped treating organic social as if each piece were a campaign.

Evan Horowitz, CEO and co-founder of Movers+Shakers, framed the question the company now asks as who the audience is, rather than which platform or which creator is best. In practice that means a post is allowed to be one signal in a stream, and a weak one is data rather than a failure to be investigated.

This is the mindset shift that makes the lanes hold. If every post is a campaign, every post deserves a committee. If a post is one of hundreds, the committee is the problem.

Creators, influencers and the looser brief

Stauffer and Horowitz draw a line that most brands blur: influencers are about community and reach, creators are about craft. The distinction decides how you brief.

A creator, in their telling, gets a much looser brief, which Digiday notes is something a company like Molson Coors had to get comfortable with. That is the honest bit. A loose brief feels like lost control to a marketing team raised on TV production, and it only works when the legal lanes have already drawn the real boundaries. The brief can be loose because the framework is not.

That is the pairing to notice. Loosening briefs without a framework produces anxiety and rewrites. A framework without looser briefs produces fast approvals of dull content. Molson Coors did both.

The quality bar moved too

The third change is about what counts as good. The Shake Squad built a training framework for the whole organisation, tailored to each brand’s drinker groups, using insight into what those groups actually see in their feeds every day.

Digiday reports that this is what got the company comfortable with lo-fi content that does not look polished, and Stauffer said the business had to define quality in this channel very differently from its other channels.

We would put it more bluntly. A production bar imported from television is not a quality standard on social, it is a tax. It slows the post, raises its cost, and often makes it perform worse, because it looks like an advert in a feed full of people.

What the number does and does not tell you

Quadrupled engagement is a strong claim, so read it carefully. It is Molson Coors’ own figure. Digiday does not say what engagement was measured, against what base, or across which of the 100-plus brands, and Stauffer declined to say how it translated commercially.

Horowitz also has a view worth reporting as his: he told Digiday that big companies under-allocate to organic and creator social because they cannot prove it drives return, while competitors allocate on faith and see it on the back end. That is an agency founder’s argument for more of the thing his agency sells, which does not make it wrong, but it is not evidence.

What survives the scepticism is the direction. A large, cautious, heavily regulated category rebuilt its approval process, and the company that did it says the content got materially more engagement. That is consistent with everything we see when a workflow stops fighting the feed.

What good looks like

Copy the operating change, not the beer brand. For most teams it comes down to five moves:

1. Get legal or compliance into the room at the design stage, not the end.
2. Write the three lanes down with real examples of what sits in each, and revisit them monthly.
3. Push everything that has never caused a problem into the fast lane by default.
4. Separate organic and creator content from campaign work, with its own brief shape and its own quality bar.
5. Judge the stream, not the post, and use the misses as signal.

If you want a starting structure rather than a blank page, our social media approval process template is built around the same lane logic, and it exists precisely because the queue-for-everything model is the most common constraint we find in brand teams.

How NBK thinks about it

Most brands that come to us believe they have a content problem. When we map how a post actually travels from idea to published, the constraint is usually the approval system: too many hands, no risk sorting, no pre-agreed boundaries, and a quality bar borrowed from another medium.

Better content ideas cannot fix that. They queue behind the same gate as everything else and arrive late. The Molson Coors story is worth writing about because a company with 230 marketers and 100-plus brands has said in public that the operating fix worked.

The lesson scales down. A brand with one social manager and one approver has the same problem in miniature, and the same three lanes solve it.

Next step

If your team is posting regularly but the good ideas keep arriving a week late, the approval route is the first thing to look at. NBK’s workflow and ops consulting starts by mapping that route, finding where it stalls, and rebuilding the lanes so the content can move at the speed of the feed.