Five CMOs Agreed On One Thing: Control Kills Creativity.

What Uber, Twitch, and State Farm Learned About Letting Go.

The Old Way of Marketing Was Control

Brand guidelines. Approval chains. Message discipline. Legal review. For decades, marketing departments built systems to ensure every piece of communication matched corporate standards. The assumption was straightforward: consistency requires control, and control requires oversight of everything carrying the brand name.

That model made sense when brands controlled distribution. Television commercials, print ads, and billboards went through internal processes because companies owned those channels. The brand decided what ran, when it ran, and how it looked.

The model breaks down when distribution shifts to platforms brands don't control, featuring creators brands don't employ, reaching audiences who can smell corporate interference from miles away. The CMOs interviewed by Contagious throughout 2024 and 2025 converged on a shared conclusion: the brands cutting through are the ones willing to let go.

Twitch: "There's No Such Thing as a Captive Audience"

Rachel Delphin, CMO of Twitch, frames the shift in attention terms. Audiences have infinite options. They're never trapped. If content feels inauthentic or overly controlled, they leave.

"If you want to be a brand that actually reaches people, you've got to be entertaining. There is no such thing as a captive audience; they've always got other places to go," Delphin told Contagious.

The implication for brand partnerships is direct. Creators succeed because audiences chose them. That choice reflects a relationship built on the creator's voice, style, and authenticity. Brands that impose control on creator partnerships undermine the exact qualities that made those creators worth partnering with.

Delphin describes what effective brand collaboration looks like: "The best brands are putting the influencers in the driver's seat, giving them the creative brief and asking 'What do you want to do?' or 'How would you tell that story?'"

The inversion is complete. Instead of brands directing creators to execute brand ideas, brands ask creators how brand ideas should be executed. Control flows to the party with audience relationship rather than the party with budget.

State Farm: Relevance Problems Require Different Solutions

Alyson Griffin, Head of Marketing at State Farm, distinguishes between awareness and relevance. State Farm has no awareness problem, it's the largest insurer in the United States. Everyone knows the brand exists. The challenge is making people care.

"State Farm is the largest insurer in the US, we don't have an awareness problem at all. We have a relevance issue," Griffin told Contagious.

Relevance can't be achieved through controlled messaging pushed at audiences. It requires participation in culture on culture's terms. For State Farm, that meant partnerships with creators who could make an insurance brand feel current rather than stodgy.

Griffin's guidance on those partnerships reflects the same principle Delphin articulated: "The truth is if you box a creator in then why are you spending the money?"

The logic is circular and inescapable. Brands partner with creators for their cultural credibility. Controlling creator output destroys cultural credibility. Therefore, controlling creator output destroys the reason for the partnership.

Uber: Youth Audiences Are Experts At Ignoring Advertising

David Mogensen, VP of Global Marketing at Uber, identifies generational skill in avoiding commercial messages. Young consumers have developed filtering capabilities that render traditional advertising invisible.

"There's probably never been a generation that is better at ignoring advertising than today's youth," Mogensen told Contagious.

The observation has strategic consequences. If conventional advertising doesn't reach the audience, unconventional approaches become necessary. And unconventional approaches often require ceding control to collaborators who understand the audience better than the brand does.

Mogensen also advocates for consistency within campaigns, a different application of the same principle. Rather than constantly refreshing creative, he argues for finding what works and repeating it. "I'm increasingly of the view that consistency is one of the things that we undervalue."

The combination suggests a framework: control less at the execution level while controlling more at the strategic level. Let creators interpret the brief. But maintain the brief itself over time rather than chasing novelty.

Unilever: Creative Currency Replaces Creative Control

Esi Eggleston Bracey, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Unilever, articulates the shift most directly. The operating model for marketing has fundamentally changed. What worked before doesn't work now.

"The old way of marketing was control. The new way of marketing is creative currency," Bracey told Contagious.

Creative currency implies something that circulates, content people choose to share, reference, and build upon. Controlled messaging doesn't circulate. It broadcasts. The distinction matters because circulation multiplies reach while broadcast depletes budget.

Brands building creative currency must accept that currency, once released, moves beyond their control. People remix it, re-contextualize it, sometimes mock it. The loss of control is the price of circulation. Brands unwilling to pay that price limit themselves to broadcast reach, which, as Mogensen noted, audiences increasingly ignore.

Why Control Feels Safe But Isn't

Marketing departments default to control because control feels like risk management. Every message reviewed. Every partnership structured. Every output approved. The process creates the illusion that brand risk is being minimized.

The illusion breaks against competitive reality. Brands maintaining strict control produce content that feels controlled, cautious, corporate, forgettable. Brands ceding control to skilled collaborators produce content that feels alive, distinctive, shareable, memorable.

The risk calculation inverts when attention becomes the scarce resource. Controlled content that nobody notices carries more risk than uncontrolled content that breaks through. Playing it safe becomes the dangerous choice when safety means invisibility.

The CMOs interviewed recognized this inversion. Their willingness to let go isn't naivety about brand risk. It's sophisticated understanding that the greater risk lies in producing content audiences ignore.

What Letting Go Actually Looks Like

Ceding control doesn't mean abandoning standards. It means changing what gets controlled and who controls it. The CMO interviews suggest a consistent model across different brands and categories.

Strategy remains controlled. The brand decides what it wants to achieve, who it wants to reach, and what it wants to be known for. These decisions don't get outsourced to creators or collaborators.

Execution gets released. How to achieve strategic objectives becomes the collaborator's domain. Creators interpret briefs rather than execute scripts. The brand provides direction and constraints. The creator provides expression.

Selection becomes critical. When execution is released, choosing the right collaborators matters more than managing their output. Brands invest in identifying creators whose instincts align with brand objectives, then trust those instincts rather than overriding them.

Feedback replaces approval. Rather than pre-clearing every output, brands respond to what collaborators produce. The relationship becomes iterative rather than directive. Both parties learn what works through production rather than planning.

The Organizational Challenge

Most marketing organizations aren't structured for this model. Approval workflows assume the brand controls output. Legal review processes assume time exists for review. Reporting structures assume marketing owns creative decisions.

Shifting to creator-led execution requires organizational change, not just strategic change. Approval authority moves to people who understand creator relationships. Legal review happens earlier (establishing boundaries) rather than later (approving deliverables). Success metrics expand beyond message consistency to include cultural impact.

The CMOs advocating for ceded control have either restructured their organizations to support it or operate in organizations that were built differently from the start. Twitch, as a creator platform, naturally understands creator dynamics. Uber, as a technology company, has organizational flexibility legacy companies often lack.

Brands in traditional organizations face the harder version of this challenge: changing structure while changing strategy. The strategic shift alone won't succeed if organizational design still assumes control as the operating model.

Recommendations

• Distinguish strategic control from execution control. Maintain strong grip on what the brand stands for and who it serves. Release grip on how individual communications express that positioning.

• Select collaborators based on instinct alignment. When you won't control output, choosing the right partners becomes the primary creative decision. Invest selection time proportionate to the control you're releasing.

• Accept that circulation requires relinquishing ownership. Content that spreads gets transformed by the people spreading it. If transformation is unacceptable, circulation won't happen.

• Restructure approval processes for speed and trust. Creator partnerships can't wait for traditional review cycles. Move legal and brand input to the selection phase rather than the approval phase.

• Measure cultural impact, not just message delivery. Controlled campaigns optimize for message consistency. Released campaigns optimize for cultural participation. The metrics must match the model.

Bottom Line: The Brands Cutting Through Are The Ones Willing To Let Go.

Five CMOs from Uber, Twitch, State Farm, and Unilever converged on the same conclusion: control kills creativity in environments where audiences have infinite alternatives. The solution isn't abandoning brand standards, it's relocating control from execution to strategy, from approval to selection, from management to trust.

Brands that master this shift produce content that circulates. Brands that don't produce content that broadcasts into silence.