Molson Coors quadruples creator engagement after ditching TV-style approval process

September 13, 2026 · Digiday

Molson Coors began reworking its approval process in March with creative agency Movers+Shakers and its new consultancy group, The Shake Squad, moving away from the brewer's TV-era workflow for legal and marketing sign-off. Evan Horowitz, CEO and co-founder of Movers+Shakers, said senior marketers who came up in a TV world often carry a broadcast mentality built for talking at customers, while today's market runs on hundreds of simultaneous conversations across platforms. The new system splits legal decisions into three lanes, fast-track, needs-a-conversation and hard no, with legal embedded in the process from the start. "We've moved mountains so much faster than we were before, because we had our legal team involved in the process the entire way," said Stauffer. Since the rollout, which now covers 230 marketers across more than 100 brands including Miller High Life, Fever Tree and Zoa energy drinks in the US and Canada, engagement with Molson Coors' creator content has quadrupled, though Stauffer declined to say how that translated commercially.

Brands still routing creator content through campaign-style legal sign-off lose speed to competitors already publishing and reading audience signals in real time. Movers+Shakers points to e.l.f. Beauty, grown from 220 million to 1.5 billion in value over seven years without a traditional ad agency, as the model this framework aims toward. Media budgets for organic and creator work often move on faith because ROI proof is hard to produce, a gap that agencies with sharper measurement can close for clients, and Molson Coors' three-lane legal system offers one template for testing brand signals across more than 100 brands at once.