The Broken System: Rethinking Global Brands’ Strategies
Global brands are still relying on fragmented agency models in a world that demands speed, cohesion, and cultural fluency - and it’s costing them relevance and results.
The way global brands approach social media is broken. Not creatively, but structurally. For years, they’ve relied on a multi-agency model – hiring different partners for creative, paid media, influencer marketing, and local execution. What was once seen as a scalable solution has now become a major liability: fractured messaging, rising costs, and sluggish response times in a world that demands speed and cultural fluency.
The stakes are high. Social media now drives both brand equity and commerce. Yet as platforms evolve and user behavior shifts, many legacy structures simply can’t keep up. The solution? A structurally integrated model that replaces fragmentation with speed, cohesion, and global-to-local performance.
What’s Affected: Department by Department
1. Creative
Without central strategy alignment, messaging gets diluted across markets. Cohesive brand storytelling requires all creative voices in the same room.
2. Paid Media
Budgets are often inflated due to duplicate planning and disconnected audience strategies. An integrated setup allows smarter spend and better optimisation.
3. Influencer Marketing
Creators are too often briefed late, disconnected from the campaign’s core. Bringing them into strategy from day one leads to better alignment and higher ROI (578% average ROI – Influencer Marketing Hub, 2024).
4. Strategy
Each market often defines goals in isolation. Centralised KPIs unlock global learnings and coordinated growth. Additionally, siloed reporting makes it impossible to track unified performance. Integrated systems enable smarter real-time decisions.
And finally, social commerce 💸: As platforms double down on native shopping features, integrated teams are uniquely positioned to build creator-led funnels - from discovery to conversion - without slowing down for cross-agency handoffs.
Over the past decade, globalisation and digital connectivity have redefined how brands engage with consumers. Social media is no longer just a marketing channel – it’s a real-time, culture-driven ecosystem that shapes perception, drives commerce, and builds communities across borders. Platform-native creative on TikTok & IG doesn’t follow global templates—it emerges from local culture, creator ecosystems, and fast-moving trends.
Meanwhile:
- There are now 5.17B+ global social users, with 80% of feeds powered by AI and 71% of images generated by AI.
- TikTok alone has 1.6B monthly users and drove $4.6B+ in U.S. GMV in its first year of TikTok Shop.
- Social ad spend will surpass $277B in 2025, while only 30% of CMOs feel confident in proving ROI.
These changes aren’t just cosmetic. They challenge the way brands scale campaigns, attribute performance, and maintain consistency across borders.
To win, you need:
🌐 An integrated global marketing team
🎯 Local market execution at scale
📊 Cross-market social media execution driven by a performance-driven marketing strategy
🚀 A system built around smart performance tracking, creator data, and outcome-oriented creative strategy
Despite this shift, many global brands are still structured for a different era. Most continue to operate with siloed agency models – separating influencer, paid media, creative, and local teams across disconnected briefs, timelines, and KPIs. The result? Delays, inflated budgets, and cultural misfires.
According to Sprout Social, 65% of CMOs want clearer ROI from social media, but only 30% feel confident in delivering it. Why? Because fragmented structures lead to fragmented data, misaligned execution, and missed opportunities – a costly disconnect in an era where speed and cultural fluency are critical.
What needs to change: Brands must restructure around how platforms and people actually work – shifting from a layered, fragmented model to a centralised system with distributed execution.
Best Case: How Estée Lauder Got It Right
Many brands are still catching up – but with Estée Lauder Companies, we have already built the model others should be following.
Their global-to-local setup spans a diverse brand roster including MAC, Clinique, Jo Malone, and The Ordinary. While initiatives and campaigns are anchored in a unified global strategy, they’re tailored for local relevance through market-specific retail activations and creator collaborations. Many of these creators are also featured across multiple ELC brands, reinforcing consistency while maintaining cultural nuance. This approach allows ELC to activate across markets with aligned messaging, integrated influencer strategy, and adaptable execution.
Key differentiators in their structure:
🌟 Unified global strategy that sets brand direction and creative guardrails.
🚀 Local teams empowered to adapt content to culture, language, and platform nuance.
👯♀️ Influencers briefed as co-creators, not post-production amplification tools.
🎯 Centralised performance data, ensuring real-time iteration and regional learnings.
This isn’t just operational efficiency – it’s brand equity. Their content remains culturally tuned, visually consistent, and platform-optimised. The result: stronger ROI, faster market rollouts, and real-time adaptability without sacrificing brand control.
Your Playbook: Think Global, Activate Local
The false binary of "global vs local" must go. CMOs must build a cross-border marketing campaign architecture where markets can remix content, within brand guidelines, based on real data and local insight. To stay relevant and high-performing across today’s landscape, brands need a structure that aligns global vision with local execution - without the slowdowns of the old agency patchwork.
The false binary of "global vs local" must go. CMOs must build a cross-border marketing campaign architecture where markets can remix content, within brand guidelines, based on real data and local insight. To stay relevant and high-performing across today’s landscape, brands need a structure that aligns global vision with local execution - without the slowdowns of the old agency patchwork.
Centralised creative and strategy to define voice, visual identity, and KPIs.
Distributed local teams and creators to remix content natively.
Leverage geo-specific algorithms in your favour.
Unified tools and reporting, enabling fast pivots and performance sharing.
Influencer marketing integrated into campaign planning for local activations.
This model reduces cost and increases speed, with around 76% of brands identifying these factors as their #1 benefit and efficiency driver. It also produces higher ROI with results reaching up to 2000% in top influencer campaigns.
How Pulse Can Help Brands Win on Socials & TikTok Shop
At Pulse Advertising, we build and operate this new model for global brands by replacing fragmented agency ecosystems with integrated global teams that bring together creative strategy, paid media expertise, influencer marketing leadership, platform-native execution, and cultural fluency in key markets. We’ve seen first-hand how this structure cuts campaign lead times in half, increases influencer efficiency through early integration, unifies brand voice across regions while boosting local relevance, and enables real-time data use for smarter performance learning.
Just like Estée Lauder, we believe brands shouldn’t have to choose between global consistency and local resonance. With the right structure, they can have both. The system is broken – but the solution is already in play, and the brands that move first will reap the rewards.
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