Navigating Creative Fragmentation in Brand Building

Tom Roach on balancing compete needs in the digital era of brand building

Introduction

In contemporary brand management, one of the most pressing challenges is balancing the demand for creative consistency with the operational pressure to produce an ever-growing content volume. Marketers are increasingly required to deliver distinctive, recognisable brand assets that support long-term memory and equity, while simultaneously meeting the short-term performance expectations of digital platforms. This dual requirement has exposed a structural tension in how brands are built and maintained, especially in a landscape dominated by algorithm-driven content distribution.

Tom Roach, writing in December 2024, provides a sharp diagnosis of this issue. He characterises the modern marketing environment as caught between what the evidence tells us works—repeated, consistent brand storytelling—and what platforms such as Meta, Google and TikTok demand: a continuous stream of fresh, often ephemeral creative content. According to Roach, the industry is not only facing media fragmentation, which has been discussed for decades, but a growing problem of creative fragmentation—a term for the disjointedness that arises when brands must produce high volumes of content without a unified creative framework.

This article builds on Roach’s framing to explore the strategic implications of this dilemma. It examines how brands can maintain consistency while scaling content production, and considers how organisational structures and creative approaches must adapt to ensure coherence without sacrificing agility or effectiveness.

The Shift Towards Platform-Centric Execution

The traditional approach to brand building prioritises a limited number of well-crafted, consistent creative executions designed to build memory structures over time. However, digital platforms like Meta, TikTok and Google have introduced a fundamentally different dynamic. These platforms are structured to reward frequent content refreshment, rapid iteration, and format-specific creativity, often pushing brands away from the long-term strategies that underpin effective brand equity development.

Tom Roach points out that these platforms assert that advertising “fatigues” quickly, with Meta reporting that conversion rates on performance ads can drop by as much as 60% after just four exposures. As a result, brands have significant pressure to continually produce new assets, not necessarily because consumer attention demands it, but because the platforms' algorithms do. This introduces a cost to creative consistency. Brands that fail to meet this content demand risk decreased reach, poorer performance metrics, and higher media costs due to lower algorithmic favourability.

Meta’s data supports this shift. Campaigns using 20 or more creative executions see significantly improved outcomes, including 32% lower cost per acquisition and 9% greater incremental reach. The algorithms prioritise diversity in content because it improves engagement and facilitates the discovery of new audiences. These mechanisms reward advertisers who create at scale and tailor their content specifically for platform-native consumption.

Roach highlights that while these incentives favour short-term performance and higher content volumes, they directly conflict with the evidence for brand growth strategies that rely on consistency, emotional resonance, and repetition. This divergence between platform-centric execution and evidence-based brand-building practices is at the heart of the current creative dilemma. Brands are increasingly required to operate with two competing logics: one optimised for algorithms and short-term outcomes, the other for memory, meaning and long-term effectiveness.

Understanding Creative Fragmentation

Creative fragmentation refers to the disjointed, uncoordinated nature of the creative assets that brands now produce in response to the content demands of digital platforms. It is distinct from media fragmentation, which describes the proliferation of channels and touchpoints through which content is delivered. While media fragmentation is well understood and extensively analysed, creative fragmentation, where brand messaging and execution lose coherence across formats and platforms, has received far less attention.

Tom Roach identifies this as a growing and under-recognised problem. He notes that while media planning has evolved to account for multiple touchpoints, creative development has not kept pace. Brands may produce dozens or even hundreds of pieces of content for a campaign, but often without a unified creative strategy or precise brand anchoring. The result is a diluted brand identity, where assets do not work together to build consistent associations over time.

Grace Kite’s concept of “lots of littles” reinforces this view. She argues that effectiveness increases as more touchpoints are layered in, but only if the content is orchestrated in a coordinated way. This implies a need for strategic control across content variations, ensuring each contributes to a larger, cohesive whole. Without this, the multiplying assets risk becoming disconnected fragments, undermining the very synergies multi-channel campaigns are meant to create.

Roach adds that many of the compromises brands currently make, such as using TV-led cut-downs for social formats, only exacerbate the problem. These assets often lack the necessary fit for the platform and may fail to meet even basic quality standards such as aspect ratio, early branding, or subtitling. In a context where quantity is being prioritised, the coherence and recognisability of creative execution have become critical vulnerabilities. Creative fragmentation is, therefore, not simply an operational issue but a strategic risk to brand consistency and effectiveness.

4. Evaluating the Trade-offs: Quality vs Quantity

As brands adapt to the rising demand for digital content, they face a growing trade-off between producing sufficient volume and maintaining the quality and coherence of their creative work. The push for scale, primarily driven by platform incentives, often results in compromised quality through hastily adapted assets or insufficient alignment with brand guidelines. Tom Roach critiques this practice directly, noting that many brands rely on “cut-downs” of TV executions for social media, which are frequently unfit for purpose. These adaptations may secure short bursts of attention but seldom contribute meaningfully to long-term brand memory or performance.

In-house creative teams are often stretched too thin to respond adequately to this demand. Roach points out that even well-resourced internal studios struggle to deliver the volume of assets platforms require to avoid algorithmic penalties related to ad fatigue. As a result, deadlines are missed and campaign effectiveness is undermined, not because of strategic misalignment, but due to executional overload.

Third-party evidence supports these observations. Realeyes, a company focused on attention analytics, has highlighted how extreme the scale challenge has become. In one example, a brand produced 87 creative variations in a single day. In another case, a global cosmetics firm requested analysis of millions of creative assets/volumes that cannot be managed without automation and artificial intelligence. Yet despite the effort, Creativex reports that a significant share of digital media spend is wasted on assets that fail basic creative checks. According to their data, 35% of the spend goes behind ads with no clear branding in the initial seconds, and 32% of ads are of an unsuitable length, frequently the result of recycling long-form video for short-form platforms.

These figures underline a central tension: scaling content to meet platform demands often undermines the qualities (clarity, consistency, relevance) that make creative effective.

5. Strategic Solutions: Scalable Ideas and Platform Fit

One way to resolve the tension between consistency and content fragmentation is by using scalable creative ideas/concepts flexible enough to adapt across formats and platforms while remaining rooted in the brand’s identity. Unlike traditional ‘big ideas’ designed primarily for television or print and later repurposed for digital, scalable ideas are built to be modular and native to multiple environments from the outset. They allow for high creative volume without sacrificing coherence.

Tom Roach suggests that this approach enables brands to retain the benefits of long-term brand building while meeting the short-term performance requirements imposed by platform algorithms. Notably, scalable ideas can support both emotional resonance and executional diversity. They offer a structured yet adaptable creative framework, enabling brands to respond to the demand for fresh content while maintaining recognisable assets and consistent messaging.

McDonald’s provides a strong example. The ‘Raise Your Arches’ campaign and the recent McRib launch demonstrated how a singular creative idea could be expressed across various digital formats. The McRib campaign used hints, glitch-style visuals, and native social media cues to generate engagement without straying from core brand codes. Despite the executional diversity, each asset felt part of the same campaign ecosystem.

Paddy Power offers a different but equally effective model. Without a single campaign line, the brand relies instead on a highly distinctive tone of voice, visual language, and comedic framing to unify its content. Its output is often designed for social platforms, yet remains unmistakably on-brand. According to Roach, this ability to make high-volume, platform-first content that doesn’t compromise identity is critical to modern brand success.

These examples illustrate that brand consistency no longer requires uniformity. With a strong strategic foundation and clear creative guidelines, it can scale content production without diluting brand value.

6. Organisational and Operational Implications

The shift toward high-volume, platform-fit creative content is a strategic and operational challenge. Brands must reconsider how their marketing functions are structured and how creative work is sourced and managed. Traditional hierarchies, where television-led campaigns and creative direction flowed from a lead agency, are becoming less relevant in an environment where content needs are more immediate, varied, and platform-specific.

Tom Roach raises essential questions about who should now lead the development of core campaign ideas. If a campaign is primarily executed through vertical video or social-first formats, social and content specialists, rather than traditional ad agencies, may need to take the lead. This has implications for how briefs are written, who is included early in the planning process, and how creative oversight is managed across partners.

To meet the demand for scale, brands are increasingly turning to generative AI tools. Platforms like Jellyfish and PencilPro allow for rapid content production and adaptation, allowing overstretched teams to create multiple creative variants quickly. Roach also references the role of measurement tools like Creativex and Realeyes, which help assess quality at scale and flag misaligned or ineffective assets. These technologies are not replacing creative teams, but augmenting them, allowing consistency and fit to be maintained even as production volume increases.

Conclusion

Brand building today requires moving away from reliance on a few polished, high-investment campaigns toward a model that supports scalable, connected executions across many platforms. Tom Roach’s analysis clarifies that while brand fundamentals, distinctive assets, emotional relevance, and consistency remain vital, they must now be applied in a fragmented, algorithmically driven environment.

To succeed, brands must rethink how they plan, produce, and evaluate creative. The goal is not simply to increase output, but to ensure that even in high volumes, each asset contributes meaningfully to a coherent brand narrative.

Reference: Brand building must adapt to the age of creative fragmentation