It’s no longer enough for brands to sim­ply exper­i­ment with new plat­forms and insert them­selves into cul­tur­al moments. In order to be supreme­ly rel­e­vant, mar­keters must go as far as relin­quish­ing some cre­ative con­trol and even wait­ing until the last minute as real world events unfold if their ulti­mate goal tru­ly is cre­ative con­tent that will engage users.

Brands that are tru­ly con­nect­ing with con­sumers are those mov­ing at their pace and attempt­ing to under­stand them in unique ways. That’s accord­ing to Lau­ra Desmond, glob­al CEO of Star­com Medi­avest Group, who spoke recent­ly at the Ad Age Dig­i­tal Con­fer­ence.

Fur­ther, Desmond said the so-called “age of empow­er­ment” is dri­ving con­sumers to expect much more of con­tent, dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels and of the media and adver­tis­ing sys­tem over­all. And one way that plays out is through how con­sumers use devices, which is always ahead of brands’ and mar­keters’ abil­i­ty to cap­ture the activ­i­ty, she said. And that means brands and mar­keters must play a game of catch-up. But mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy and data can help.

For his part, David Christo­pher, CMO of AT&T Mobil­i­ty, notes con­sumers sim­ply want con­tent where and when they want it.

“We as mar­keters have to think dif­fer­ent­ly,” he said. “It fun­da­men­tal­ly changed how our brand deals with get­ting our mes­sage out. We just went through the NCAA tour­na­ment and had a large ad cam­paign around [play­ers like Chris­t­ian Laet­tner, Clyde Drexler, Shaquille O’Neal and Julius Erv­ing] and shot all of the con­tent not know­ing exact­ly where to go. We pre­pared it as real-time respons­es as the tour­na­ment unfold­ed.”

Per Christo­pher, the col­lege bas­ket­ball tour­na­ment is a good exam­ple of an event play­ing out before the brand “and we don’t know how it will unfold, but con­tent will live on all these dif­fer­ent places. We may empha­size Twit­ter at some point, etc., but being pre­pared to do this takes an invest­ment in sys­tems.”

Sim­i­lar­ly, Beats CMO Omar John­son said the brand is work­ing on cre­ative with bas­ket­ball play­ers for the NBA Play­offs, but must also play a wait­ing game.

“We don’t want to shoot with losers,” John­son said. “We do some­thing right before the moment in cul­ture so as to be as rel­e­vant as pos­si­ble.”

Anoth­er exam­ple of a brand­ed con­tent jour­ney that began with­out a def­i­nite notion of where it would end is AT&T’s Snap­per­Hero cam­paign, which Christo­pher calls a “first-of-its-kind brand­ed series on Snapchat.”

The cam­paign kicked off in Jan­u­ary as “an influ­encer-dri­ven script­ed series” tar­get­ing mil­len­ni­als “where real-time, imme­di­ate engage­ment meets a fun super­hero uni­verse,” the brand said.

AT&T tapped Snapchat, Vine, and YouTube influ­encers includ­ing Anna Akana, Fred­die Wong, Harley Moren­stein, Jas­meet Singh, Simone Shep­herd and Shaun McBride. These influ­encers actu­al­ly played a “hands-on role in shap­ing the cre­ative direc­tion of the show,” AT&T said.

“By send­ing a call to action to their mas­sive fol­low­ings, influ­encers will build the Snap­per­Hero world around fan input on super­hero iden­ti­ties, ene­mies, cos­tumes, ori­gin sto­ries and plot lines,” the brand said. “The series will then roll out with 12 episodes over a four-week peri­od begin­ning in ear­ly 2015 with all con­tent liv­ing pri­mar­i­ly on Snapchat.”

Action and visu­al effects video team Cor­ri­dor Dig­i­tal act­ed as series direc­tor.

“It was in the buck­et of inno­va­tion, lead­er­ship and learn­ing,” Christo­pher said. “We were try­ing to learn, iter­ate and get to scale. We didn’t know how it was going to go and put our trust in the cre­ators.”

And that’s because in order for the con­tent to be rel­e­vant to mil­len­ni­als, it had to be in the tar­get audience’s voice, he added.

Fur­ther, George Strompo­los, CEO of YouTube con­tent cre­ator and brand net­work Fullscreen, said in a press release, “Influ­encer-dri­ven con­tent like Snap­per­Hero is just the begin­ning of what’s to come in the world of real-time con­tent.”

At the end of the day, @SnapperHero gained about 400 fol­low­ers on Twit­ter and 200 on Insta­gram.

“There’s a clear rel­e­vance thresh­old now,” Desmond said. “‘This brand gets me,’ ‘That cam­paign was great. It spoke to me.’ ‘It’s so cool they tried that.’ The rel­e­vance thresh­old is start­ing to dri­ve the haves and have nots in mar­ket­ing.”

Brands that are tru­ly con­nect­ing with con­sumers are those mov­ing at their pace and under­stand­ing them in unique ways.

“The data and the alche­my of mar­ket­ing proves that when they are con­nect­ed and rel­e­vant, good things hap­pen,” Desmond said.

The “have nots” are the dis­con­nect­ed brands that are “not mov­ing or evolv­ing at the pace of their con­sumers,” she said. “When you get too far away, you’re not as rel­e­vant. That’s death. You’re not going to have a chance to con­tin­ue to ride that wave of growth.”

Fur­ther, mar­keters shouldn’t try too hard with a “shiny new toy” sim­ply because it’s new.

“Smart mar­keters and agen­cies see the new and they know how to con­nect the new to the brand equi­ty to the pur­pose to the con­sumer chal­lenge and if it’s seam­less, it can work,” Desmond said. “If it’s just chas­ing new things, it’s won’t work.”

In addi­tion, as the Inter­net of Things starts to take hold, mar­keters will have to think about watch­es and oth­er devices “that will help us under­stand the world view of what con­sumers are doing,” Desmond added.

When mar­keters and agen­cies invest in their own data man­age­ment sys­tems to get a look at devices, screens and busi­ness data, pub­lish­ers and con­tent providers can be incred­i­bly rel­e­vant, Desmond said.

“I think some of the con­tent pub­lish­ers real­ly under­stand the peo­ple they’re reach­ing in unique ways,” she said. “Refinery29 is a good exam­ple. So is Buz­zFeed. It is incum­bent upon us to have more data at our fin­ger­tips.”

What do you think about brands relin­quish­ing cre­ative con­trol to con­nect with younger audi­ences?