Centralising brand and creative control makes sense. But when every request goes through one team, that team stops leading and starts sorting.
Social line: Your central team was set up to protect the brand. How much of their week is spent forwarding requests instead?
Somewhere in most global entertainment brands there's a team of very talented people who spend most of their week sorting requests.
They were brought in to protect the brand, keep titles consistent and make the big creative calls. Instead, their days are filled with small approvals, chasing and deciding what to look at next.
Nobody planned it that way. It happened one reasonable request at a time.
Centralising was the right call
It's worth being fair to the centre. Bringing creative and brand control into one place makes a lot of sense.
Titles look the same everywhere. Off-brand work drops. Budgets go further because work isn't being made twice in different countries. Talent and partner commitments are easier to protect when one team holds the keys. Very few people who lived through the alternative want to go back to it.
Then everything starts coming back
The trouble starts when every request, change and sign-off has to go through that one team. Big decisions and small ones join the same line. A major creative call waits behind a minor local tweak, simply because it arrived later.
The central team isn't slow. It's just being asked to do everything. And as the amount of content grows, the line gets longer.
What it does to the people at the centre
The cost isn't only delay. It's what happens to the team itself. People hired to lead end up triaging. The thinking time that made them valuable gets squeezed out by sorting and approving. Over time, that leads to burnout and the best people starting to look elsewhere.
We've sat in that seat. We know how it feels to answer requests from every direction while the biggest launch of the year gets closer.
Going back isn't the answer
When the queue gets bad, some teams wonder if they should hand control back to local markets. That usually swaps one problem for an older one.
What works is being much clearer about what the centre needs to touch, and what it doesn't.
- Write down what the centre owns. Brand rules, master assets and the big approvals. Everything else is up for discussion.
- Agree what markets can change on their own. If the rules are clear in advance, most small requests never need to come back.
- Route by risk. Routine changes move quickly. Big ones get proper review. They don't share a queue.
Control is a set of rules, not a route
The hardest idea to let go of is that control means everything passing through you. It doesn't. Real control is setting the rules clearly enough that the right things happen without you needing to see them.
That frees the central team to do the job they were hired for.
