By Boris Aleksandrov
I spent twelve years at BACARDÍ, working inside the traditional campaign model. Campaigns were developed centrally, a set of assets was produced and approved, and markets took those assets and ran them. The campaign was a unit of work. Everything we planned, budgeted, briefed and measured was organised around it.
The model felt like it was working, and for good reasons. Brand teams kept control of how the brand appeared. Agencies received clear briefs with a defined scope. Markets got a package of approved assets rather than a blank page. Leadership could see the brand managed consistently across regions. Nobody in that arrangement had an obvious complaint.
Then I looked at what happened to the content after it was produced.
We mapped our master assets against the versions running across twelve markets, and asked a question nobody had put that plainly before: how much of what we made ever reached a consumer? Almost half of it never did. Those assets had been briefed, produced, cleared by legal, approved and stored, and no member of the public saw them.
We blamed everything except the model
Once the company could see how much content was going unused, it went looking for a cause. The briefs were too loose. Production over-delivered. The assets were hard to find. The agency built things nobody asked for. Markets ignored what they had been given.
Every one of those explanations pointed at the content. None of them pointed at the system that produced it, which is where the answer was.
Campaign thinking is built around control, predictability and a set of outputs decided in advance. You choose what to make, you make it, you approve it, you distribute it. In a large organisation, that structure holds because everyone benefits. Brand teams protect the brand, and campaigns give them a gate to guard. Agencies are staffed and priced around campaign briefs. Leadership gets a plan it can forecast against. Anything that disturbs the arrangement reads as a threat to brand consistency.
What consumers require from a brand now runs against all of it. Different formats, different channels, different audiences, different moments, and a rate of change that a fixed set of assets cannot follow. When an approved campaign represents the official version of the brand, changing that campaign starts to feel like damaging the brand rather than serving it.
That instinct gets the trade wrong. A locked campaign does not protect a brand’s point of view. The rigidity of the campaign limits when and where that point of view can reach anyone, which is how a company ends up with half its content in storage while its markets improvise around the gaps.
What I could see and could not fix
BACARDÍ is where I first understood this from the inside, and nothing about my time there changed as a result. The campaign model was not something one person in a brand digital role could rewrite. Agency contracts written around campaign scopes, production budgets committed at the start of the year, an approval structure designed to protect finished work, and a planning calendar that assumed the campaign as the unit of everything held it in place. Each of those pieces made sense on its own. Together they made the model very difficult to argue with, and I did not have a credible alternative to propose.
So I left with the observation and no answer to it.
Seeing a different model
The answer turned up after I joined Storyteq and moved into creative automation, on the other side of the relationship, working with people doing the job I used to do. Brands including Heineken, Nestlé and Mentos treat content as a system rather than as a series of finished campaigns, and the brand survives the change intact. Guidelines still apply, the point of view still holds, and the content reaches more places, faster, at a fraction of the cost.
I am not arguing for less brand discipline. I advocate for a system that puts a disciplined brand in front of people while the moment is still alive.
What replaces the campaign model
Think in parts rather than finished executions. Instead of commissioning a fixed set of completed assets, build modular content: backgrounds, products, talent, scenes, messages, calls to action. Components that recombine across audiences, channels, formats and moments. The aim is not a smaller volume of work, but content that stretches across more of what the year requires.
Build a design system that supports creative automation. Modular components pay off only when an organisation can assemble them at scale. Design systems and creative automation together let a team vary scenes, backgrounds, products and messages quickly, with brand rules governing how the pieces fit. Producing a large number of relevant variants stops being a separate project each time. Automation should enforce the brand system rather than route around it.
Connect performance to creative elements. Knowing that campaign A outperformed campaign B tells a brand very little it can use. The more useful question is which creative choices drove the difference: the product shot, the opening, the background, the message, the call to action, the format. Once performance data attaches to individual elements, every round of production teaches the next one something specific. Produce, measure, understand, recombine, produce more parts. A content operation built that way improves with each cycle instead of starting fresh every time.
Choose partners who work this way. None of this survives contact with a production ecosystem that still runs on campaign logic. Look for partners who combine original creative development with the technology and operations needed to scale it, so that creative, production, technology and optimisation stop being handled as separate worlds with separate contracts.
Give content leaders an operational mandate. Content operations cannot stay in the back office of brand marketing. When content and ops teams sit apart from brand leadership, the organisation settles into a tug of war, with brands asking for control and consistency. At the same time, operations are measured on speed, scale and efficiency. Someone has to own the system that joins those things, and owning it means holding enough authority to change how content is produced, deployed and optimised rather than executing a system somebody else designed.
Put AI where your brand already lives. Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey found that 70% of CMOs treat becoming an AI leader as a critical goal for this year, while only 30% report mature AI readiness, with an average of 15.3% of budget going into AI. Marketing teams are buying the technology faster than they are building what it needs to work inside. Adding more tools widens that gap. An AI model working outside your brand context, your guidelines, your content library and your workflows will dilute the brand and add noise. AI needs to sit in the same place your strategy, guidelines, content and workflows already live, close enough to the brand system to inherit its rules. Working that way lets a brand move at the speed AI allows without giving up the context, consistency and judgment that make the brand its own.
The brand stays consistent. The system should not
Traditional campaigns are finished as an operating model, and not because brands have stopped needing big ideas, a distinctive point of view or strong creative direction. They need all of that as much as they ever did. Delivering it now depends on a system that keeps pace with the speed, variety and learning that modern content demands, and the campaign model was never built to do that.
