Molson Coors ditches its TV-era workflow to move at creator speed, quadrupling engagement

Justine Stauffer, senior director of creative effectiveness at Molson Coors declined to share how that engagement translated commercially, but said that the revamp was scaled to Molson Coors’ 230 marketers across more than 100 brands in the U.S. and Canada, from Miller High Life to Fever Tree and all the Zoa energy drinks in between. 

Evan Horowitz, CEO and co-founder at Movers+Shakers, said Molson Coors’ original problem is common: senior marketers came up in a TV world. And that mentality trickles down to their junior marketers.

“Now the world has changed so much,” Horowitz said. “This whole ecosystem is so much more complex, and the brands that are still coming from a TV-centric playbook — it’s a broadcast mentality — and I use that pun intentionally. They’re talking at customers and not really understanding the reality, which is that there’s these hundreds of conversations happening. That requires just a fundamentally different viewpoint on how you think about brand building.”

The three pillars of Molson Coors’ new creator marketing strategy 

First, Molson Coors has a new “freedom within a framework” system with its legal team, which sorts potential decisions into three main lanes: a fast-track lane, a needs-a-conversation lane, and a hard no. 

“We’ve moved mountains so much faster than we were before, because we had our legal team involved in the process the entire way, they understand the ecosystem better, they understand how consumers operate in this space,” Stauffer said. 

The second pillar of the new Molson Coors strategy is all about putting less weight on individual posts, and no longer treating organic social like a “high-stakes TV campaign.”

“There’s no best platform, best creator, it’s: ‘who is the audience that this brand is trying to reach’?” said Horowitz. 

Stauffer and Horowitz distinguish between influencer and creator: influencers are about community and reach, while creators are about craft. This helps determine how to write briefs — a creator can get a much looser brief, which is something a company like Molson had to get a bit more comfortable with. 

For big companies like Molson Coors, it’s also about getting over the creator measurement gap. 

“Marketing budget allocations have not shifted nearly as fast as consumer attention has. We see a lot of big companies are under allocating their dollars to organic social, creator social, etcetera, because they can’t prove that it’s driving ROI, while their competitors are allocating that on faith, and then they see it on the back end,” said Horowitz.

Horowitz and his team helped Molson think about measurement differently, as well as the content being measured. 

“It should be experimental. It should be this place where we can test and learn and look at signals, and learn about our communities, and really build our brands from the fans for the feed,” Stauffer said. 

It should also reflect the consumer. The Shake Squad helped build an organization-wide training framework tailored to each brand and their different “drinker groups,” powered by insights that showed Molson Coors how each brand showed up on those groups’ social feeds. 

“We could see what a core drinker that drinks Miller Lite, what’s in their feed every day,” Stauffer said. This culture-first approach helped shape their content briefs — they even learned to accept the power of lo-fi when it comes to engaging social media marketing that feels authentic and not too polished. 

“We really needed to be thinking about how we defined the quality of content in this space so much differently than we think about other channels,” Stauffer said.  

The last, and perhaps most important, part of a successful new social strategy for a company valued at more than $7 billion is trust. Trust in The Shake Squad’s advice and trust that a 21-year-old company (Molson and Coors merged in 2005, but the two separate companies have been around for hundreds of years) could drastically shift its marketing strategy, that it could be more agile and responsive. 

Molson Coors’ in-house marketing team worked closely with The Shake Squad for months, taking its research, advice, and expertise and applying it directly toward developing this new approach. 

Horowitz said marketing execs approached the collaboration with a humility that not all large companies have, which made the process smoother and more experimental. Stauffer said that humility led to a complete rewiring: less guardrails, less handwringing, more focus on culture-driven content.

Perhaps the future sees a Molson Coors marketing strategy shaped more like e.l.f., the beauty brand Horowitz brings up that Movers+Shakers helped grow from 220 million to 1.5 billion and become the number one brand, according to their own internal numbers, across Gen Alpha, Gen Z, and millennials in seven years. 

The social-first brand doesn’t have a traditional marketing agency, only occasionally dabbling in TV ads for buzz. “They’ve fully flipped the playbook,” said Horowitz.