Creative Leaders Are No Longer Building Campaigns. They’re Building Brand Universes.

The hero TV spot, chopped into social cutdowns, has stopped working. Social used to be where the asset went to die a polite death. That model delivered consistency at the cost of relevance, and in a feed shaped by creators, comments, and culture moving in real time, that trade-off has become harder to defend. Irrelevance now compounds faster than consistency can protect. The brands keeping pace are rebuilding around a single coherent idea that can behave differently in every place it shows up, and the creative leaders running them have stopped thinking like campaign approvers.

Santi Lucero is the Global Chief Creative Officer at Samy Alliance, the social-first creative network behind influencer and brand work for Unilever, L'Oréal, Barilla, and Doritos across more than 50 markets. With over two decades in the industry, Lucero has held senior creative roles at JWT, Mother Buenos Aires, Publicis Spain, and Fallon London, and most recently led creative strategy for Meta's Creative Shop across Spanish-speaking Latin America. He also co-founded GiFlyBike, an electric bike startup that raised more than $650,000 in three days of crowdfunding. His view is that the work of a creative leader is system design, and finished campaigns are what falls out of it.

"If advertising wants to have any chance of creating a connection, it still needs a strong central idea, rooted in a strong and unique insight, and executed in a disruptive and creative way," says Lucero. The line lands as a defense of fundamentals in a moment when many in the industry are happy to declare them dead. The central insight remains the engine, but the architecture it has to power has changed.

From slogans to systems

The shorthand Lucero uses for the new model is the "universe": a brand defined by a small set of non-negotiables that govern what it stands for, how it looks, and how it behaves. Once those rules are set, the brand can show up natively across every place it lives without losing its shape. The reframe may sound subtle, but it changes the question that creative leaders are trying to answer.

"Today, that idea has to behave more like a universe than like a slogan or a campaign only. The question is no longer 'how do we adapt the campaign?' but 'how does the brand behave here?'" Lucero says.

That shift acknowledges something most brand teams already know on an operational level. Different surfaces have different physics, and forcing a single execution to cover them all produces work that is slightly wrong everywhere.

"TikTok needs speed, intimacy, and participation. Retail needs clarity, visibility, and conversion. Influencers need room for personal interpretation. A physical activation needs to be memorable in the real world. The idea has to survive all these forms without becoming rigid," Lucero explains.

Global clarity, local intelligence

The universe framework is also where global brands resolve the tension that has defined cross-market creative for two decades. Centralize too hard, and the work loses the local texture that makes it land. Fragment too much and the brand stops meaning anything coherent across markets. Lucero argues the way through is to stop treating consistency and centralization as the same thing.

"The mistake many brands make is confusing consistency with centralization. They build systems that are so controlled that they remove the local texture that makes work resonate. The opposite mistake is too much fragmentation when every market does something different and the brand starts losing meaning," Lucero says.

The way through is to be precise about what travels and what does not. Universal human tensions, the insight at the heart of an idea, can travel almost anywhere. The cultural specifics of how those tensions get expressed almost never can. The brands getting it right know exactly which layer they protect at the center and which they hand to local teams.

"What normally travels well globally is the human tension of the idea. The right model is global clarity with local intelligence," Lucero notes.

Ideas now flow up the channel ladder

Brands no longer have full control of their own ideas. The most interesting work is originating from comments, fan reactions, memes, and creator interpretations, and then climbing the channel ladder back up into paid media and broadcast. The traditional agency setup, with strategy in one building, creative in another, social in a third, and production in a fourth, was designed for top-down distribution. Catching ideas as they rise from a comment thread requires structure built for two-way flow.

"The best ideas are the ones that can start from any touchpoint. An idea can begin with a user comment, then become an interaction with a community manager, then turn into a meme, and maybe even become a TVC later. To make that happen with every discipline separated is almost impossible," Lucero says.

That same dynamic is changing how brands think about the role of fans and communities inside the creative process. Audiences expect to participate in shaping the work, and the companies that build pathways for that input are turning organic moments into something the brand can scale. Teams routing every decision through central approval watch those moments evaporate.

The volume problem and the guardrails

Letting ideas flow from any direction sounds liberating, but then the operational reality hits. A brand universe expressed across dozens of touchpoints generates more output than most creative organizations were built around, and the standard response is to reach for tighter control. Lucero argues the answer is the opposite: a clearer set of rules about which assets define the brand, which assets maintain its presence, and which respond to culture in the moment.

"I usually ask myself, or ask the team, one question. Why the hell are we doing this asset? What role is it playing in the ecosystem? If you cannot answer that immediately, then probably that asset should not exist," Lucero says. Every asset has to earn its slot.

The second part of managing volume is recognizing that the standard for "good" has shifted. Rough production gets a pass from audiences. Anything that seems engineered to manipulate them, though, does lasting damage.

"Standards today depend less on perfection and more on truthfulness. People forgive roughness much faster than they forgive inauthenticity. So maintaining standards is not about making everything over-polished. It is about protecting the brand's voice, relevance, and integrity across volume," Lucero adds.

The new mandate for creative leaders

Campaigns still matter inside this model, but their job has narrowed. Lucero treats them as moments of focus, fame, or business acceleration, all sitting atop an always-on ecosystem. The expectations placed on creative leaders have widened in the same motion, and the role looks almost nothing like it did a decade ago.

"The role is moving away from simply approving campaigns and more toward designing universes. Creative leaders now need to think like brand builders, editors, cultural interpreters, and system designers at the same time," Lucero says. The job description is broad on purpose. The skills that used to define a CCO, taste and creative judgment, are still required. They are also no longer sufficient.

The companies building real creative durability over the next several years will be the ones that treat their teams as systems to be designed. That is where the universe framework stops being a metaphor and starts behaving like an operating advantage. Every quarter spent running waterfall campaigns hands more ground to the brands that have already moved.

"The winners will not be the ones producing more content just because. They will be the ones with the ability to stay culturally relevant without losing coherence and disruption," Lucero concludes.