The limits of control: Eugene Healey on the problem with modern brand building

Eugene Healey has a problem with how brand building works right now. Not because marketers aren’t working hard enough, but because the systems they’re working inside were built for a media world that no longer exists.

Marketing was once held together by centralised media and a belief that control reduced risk. Long planning cycles, layered approvals and big, singular campaigns made sense when attention was predictable and audiences largely moved together. But that logic breaks down in a landscape shaped by algorithms and endless creative demand, where brands are expected to show up everywhere, all the time.

Healey spends his time thinking about what happens when those old structures collide with reality. Drawing on experience advising global brands including Google, Spotify and Red Bull, as well as years teaching brand management at the University of Melbourne, he has become increasingly focused on the growing gap between how brands are organised and how culture actually moves.

In this conversation ahead of his session at Content Summit Australia, Healey unpacks why command-and-control models are buckling under the weight of volume, speed and fragmentation; why “approval” has quietly become marketing’s biggest bottleneck; and what it takes to build brands when control is no longer an option. 

For marketers feeling the pressure but struggling to name the problem, his diagnosis is confronting, and difficult to ignore. 

Content Summit Australia (CSA): At CSA, you’ll be talking about how the old ways of brand management were shaped by a monolithic media world that no longer exists. What defined that monoculture?

EH: Some of it was simply the fact that you had 85 per cent of the population tuning into the same three TV channels every night. The total addressable market was in the palm of our hands, in a very small number of channels. We knew where everyone was going to be. 

Media consumption was centralised. Everyone was watching the same things. We had a shared, cultural lingua franca to build off; everyone was watching the footy, everyone was watching Blue Heelers. Everyone was eating the same media diet, which meant we all effectively understood the same references. It was easy for us to centralise media spin, but also cultural spin. There were more middle-of-the-road ideas available. 

Now what we have is basically the complete opposite. We still have people watching a shedload of stuff, but the things that they’re watching are so distributed. There are more people watching YouTube now than broadcast television in Australia. But unlike broadcast TV, what you’re watching on YouTube is very different from what your neighbor, your kids, your co-workers and friends might be watching. 

Try to have a conversation with your colleagues about the TV that you’re watching. There’s nothing! There’s one TV show a year. Maybe we’re all watching The White Lotus this year. If you’re an upper middle class professional or in the creative services, maybe that works. 

The monoculture allowed us to construct marketing campaigns in a specific way. We were able to approach them in a very linear fashion, where we would spend a long time building or ideating the campaign and testing it in artificial markets like focus groups. 

We would run it all the way up the chain. We’d have your manager, your manager’s manager, the chief operating officer, the board signing off on that piece of creative. 

And then you would go and launch that creative with a big fuck-off media spend that made the whole thing too big to fail. Then you’d fragment it down into your outdoor, your print, your whatever. That was the cadence. You planned, you created, you bursted it out. And it was relatively predictable. You had all these metrics that were effectively proof of delivery and that were fine for that point in time. 

Now the options have gotten so much more diverse. You can’t buy attention in the same way you had before. Everyone talks about attention spans getting shorter. But there’s research that states that attention spans have not changed at all – in fact, they’re slightly longer. 

The difference is that when you were a 14-year-old kid, and you turned on the TV and you were bored, your options were to go out and graffiti a train. Now you have access to the entirety of human knowledge and entertainment at your fingertips. The options are just so much better. 

So if you can’t entertain in very channel-specific ways… it doesn’t matter how much you spend, attention isn’t something that you can buy. Obviously, as people like Byron Sharp and Les Binet have explained, you do need to spend a lot of money on marketing to get it everywhere. But the quality of the creative needs to be looked at from a different perspective as well. 

CSA: Is there a part of you that yearns for the monoculture, or are you glad it’s dead?

EH: I’m agnostic about it. There were good things about the monoculture. It gave us a shared language and a shared identity, but it trampled over local and regional differences. You’d have more in common with someone in New York than you would with your own neighbors. 

I don’t comment on that. I just think it makes marketing much more difficult. Because now, consumers are moving further and further into their own reality bubbles. That leaves less ideas that live in the middle.

CSA: Are there things you’ve personally struggled to unlearn about how the industry used to work? Any old habits or beliefs that you found hard to let go of?

EH: I used to believe that a brand was a story. It had characters, it had before-and-afters, and it was trying to lead you somewhere. It was trying to create a particular type of meaning. But that only works for a linear, monocultural, monolithic media environment that I just don’t think we’re in right now. 

Brands are now built like mosaics – tiny little fragmented bits of attention, scraped across a million different touch points. The job is to create consistency in the aggregate, while recognising that all these touch points have to be radically different in tone, style, personality and form to be fit for the platforms they need to work on. 

CSA: Right. And you can’t tell a ‘story’, because there’s no linear progression through those touch points.

EH: Exactly.

CSA: Why do you think that the command-and-control structures at brands have become so misaligned with how creativity actually works today? And do you think they can be re-aligned?

EH: I think they have to be. The command-and-control structure was a marriage between a political process that happened to align with the media environment: ‘Okay, sure, it can take six to 12 months to come up with a creative campaign, but that’s fine. We’re centralising it and we’re only making a few outputs. There are only a couple of things that need to be approved.’ 

A friend of mine used to work at a superannuation brand where the CEO said, ‘I want to approve every single radio script that goes out.’ And I know that sounds absurd, but a really significant number of companies still operate like that.

Command-and-control worked because it allowed us to run things up the chain. But now, with the number of outputs brands are expected to run across all these channels… Meta is saying, ‘Give us 200 pieces of ad creative a week or we’ll punish you. Even if your creative is good, we’ll punish you. We want that amount of variety for the system.’ 

The amount of creative output that an Australian brand alone has to make would be comparable to what a global brand would have created 20 years ago. 

How can you maintain a command-and-control structure when there are that many decisions to be made? That’s the conversation that I have with a lot of brands. They’re like, ‘Our approval processes can’t keep up with the system that we have in place to approve things.’ Bottlenecks abound. It’s not a creative production problem. 

And the problem is only going to get worse because creative production is getting easier and faster, but the internal approval systems for that creative haven’t changed at all. That is the heart of the crisis. We’re asked for more, we’re creating more, but our system still rewards doing less and de-risking things.

CSA: Let’s take the CEO of that superannuation company: What would you say to him so he stops needing to approve every radio script that goes out?

EH: You’ve already lost control. This media environment does not reward control and does not even allow you to facilitate control. 

Control worked when you had a limited number of channels and outputs. You had the entirety of your brand in the palm of your hand: Five channels, 10 pieces of creative that go out every couple of weeks, ruthlessly aligned to the brand guidelines. That’s fine, if you show up in a very limited number of contexts. 

But when you have to show up across all of these contexts, your brand can’t show up in this brand guideline form every single time. Sometimes it has to show up as an influencer. Sometimes it shows up as a brand collaboration, a partnership, a community or a fandom activation. Creator marketing is the most extreme example of that, but it’s not the only one. Your brand is mediated through third parties now. 

So you’ve already lost control. You can try to reassert control by sitting across the platforms where you can still exercise that control, but which have a dramatically declining share of viewership. Or you can accept that you’ve lost control and work within that, moving from a model that is about control to a model that is about orchestration – from a master-slave relationship to a parent-teenager relationship, I like to say.

Even luxury cannot control brand associations like it has in the past. Why are Loewe and Jacquemus doing better than Louis Vuitton? Because one brand has understood what it means to relinquish a certain amount of control – of the brand, of who wears the brand, of how the brand shows up in context – while still following classical brand building techniques: Distinctive assets, awareness plays versus consideration plays, etc. 

It’s not that we need to throw out brand fundamentals. But we need to acknowledge that the media environment has changed dramatically, and work within those constraints.

CSA: Is there a middle ground between the old way, where you control everything, and just relinquishing control completely? Where do you find the balance?

EH: That’s the skill. There’s no silver bullet for this. That is the skill set: How do I acknowledge that I have lost total control? That my messages are delivered across an increasingly complicated set of channels, ecosystems and partnerships that are mediated through third parties as well? How do I orchestrate all of this information so that it still delivers a consistent message in the aggregate, while acknowledging that the personality, style, tone and form is radically different?

That’s why I call it a mosaic. The brand has to make sense as an individual message, but it also has to make sense when you step back and look at it. As I said, the fundamentals have not changed: 50 per cent of brand is being remembered, and the other 50 per cent is being remembered for the right thing. But the way that you do that has changed. 

The skill set now is orchestrating amongst chaos. And the gap is growing between the brands that understand how to orchestrate amongst the chaos, and the brands that don’t.

Want to hear more from Eugene? He’ll provide practical guidance for marketers looking to create fluid brand building structures at Content Summit Australia. 

Across two days and three dedicated content tracks at Brisbane Powerhouse, Content Summit Australia brings together marketers, strategists and creatives to talk all things content, from brand storytelling and strategy to social, video, design and audience engagement.

Early bird tickets are on sale now until 31 January 2026, or sooner if they sell out. Secure your spot now.