When At Play Creative partnered with DC Comics to develop DC Fan Family, the creative challenge was straightforward: how do you introduce the next generation of fans to iconic characters and stories without alienating the parents who grew up with them? The answer was a platform built around shared experience, comic-themed activities, projects, and storytelling that parents and children could explore together. It worked because it was grounded in something true about the DC brand, that these characters have always been about more than entertainment. They carry meaning across generations.

But here is what I have seen consistently across franchise brands, at DC, at Disney, at Hasbro, and in financial services at enterprise scale: the creative is rarely the problem. The problem is what happens before the creative brief is written.

Most franchise brand failures trace back to the same root cause. Individual teams, agencies, and licensed partners are each executing against their own interpretation of the brand. Nobody is wrong exactly, but nobody is fully aligned either. The result is a brand that shows up differently depending on where you encounter it, inconsistent in tone, inconsistent in visual language, and disconnected from the core strategy that is supposed to anchor all of it.

Franchise brand stewardship is not about policing creative. It is about building a shared understanding of what the brand stands for, deep enough that every partner, every team, and every execution ladders back to the same foundation without being told to.

That requires three things most organizations underinvest in:

A clear and specific brand framework that goes beyond logo usage and color palettes. Style guides that tell partners what to do visually are necessary but not sufficient. The brand framework has to articulate meaning, the emotional territory the brand owns, the stories it is allowed to tell, and the ones it is not.

Creative governance that is built for scale. When a franchise operates across dozens of licensed partners, retail channels, and product categories, consistency cannot depend on individual relationships or manual review. It requires systems, approval workflows, and clear decision rights that make brand-right execution the path of least resistance.

Leadership that holds the standard without killing the creative. The best franchise creative directors I have seen operate less like gatekeepers and more like creative translators. Their job is to help partners understand the brand deeply enough to innovate within it, not to approve or reject executions from a distance.

The brands that get this right do not just look consistent. They feel consistent. Consumers may not be able to articulate why, but they know when a brand has a center and when it does not.

That gut feeling is the whole game.