Molson Coors rebuilt the approval process behind its creator marketing, trading a TV-style review chain for faster, looser briefs. The work started in March 2026 with The Shake Squad, a new consultancy group inside its creative agency Movers+Shakers, and now covers 230 marketers and more than 100 brands across the U.S. and Canada, from Miller High Life to Fever Tree to Zoa. The company says engagement with its creator content has quadrupled since. Justine Stauffer, senior director of creative effectiveness, declined to say what that meant commercially.
The first change was to legal. Under a system Molson Coors calls “freedom within a framework,” decisions sort into three lanes: fast-track, needs-a-conversation, and 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,” Stauffer said. “They understand the ecosystem better, they understand how consumers operate in this space.” The second was to stop treating organic social like a high-stakes TV campaign. Stauffer and Movers+Shakers CEO Evan Horowitz separate influencers, who bring community and reach, from creators, who bring craft, and creators get the looser brief.
Budgets are the part that has not moved. “Marketing budget allocations have not shifted nearly as fast as consumer attention has,” Horowitz said, describing large companies underspending on organic and creator social because they cannot prove it drives ROI while competitors allocate on faith and see the return later. The Shake Squad built a training framework brand by brand around Molson Coors’ “drinker groups,” using data on how each brand actually showed up in those groups’ feeds. “We could see what a core drinker that drinks Miller Lite, what’s in their feed every day,” Stauffer said. The same data is what got a company with more than 100 brands comfortable with lo-fi.
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