As a CMO, I'm invited to my fair share of industry events. And like most marketing leaders, I'm constantly weighing the value of my time against the demands of the business. Is this worth three hours away from the things I'm accountable for delivering? Will I leave with something that changes how I think or work?
That was the starting point for hosting the Spark-moderated event called Spark Conversations.
I didn't want to host another event where people exchanged business cards, agreed that marketing was changing, and returned to their organizations doing exactly what they'd done before.
I wanted to create a conversation that might make people a little uncomfortable. Not for the sake of being provocative, but because sometimes we need a catalyst to challenge the things we've come to accept.
We chose the topic of global campaigns because the process involves so many moving parts. Strategy, creative development, production, adaptation, localization, approvals, and activation. Different teams, markets, agencies, and stakeholders, all working toward the same commercial objective. And with AI changing what's possible at extraordinary speed, it felt like the right moment to ask whether the way we work still makes sense.
We mapped the campaign journey, invited people to identify friction points, and opened the room to discussion.
The themes were familiar: communication gaps, too many revisions, fragmented ownership, competing priorities, and the challenges of coordinating work across global and local teams.
One participant remarked that we're still talking about the same challenges we were discussing a decade ago.
A significant part of the conversation focused on adaptation and localization. People asked how much of this work AI might eventually automate, and what role specialist teams and agencies would continue to play. Yet we spent less time discussing what happens earlier in the process.
One perspective that emerged was that creative teams can receive a brief, develop the work, and have limited visibility into what happens to it afterward.
What did local markets need? What changed? What worked? What could inform the next campaign?
I'm not suggesting every creative asset needs to be tied directly to a sales result. But surely the people creating the work should have an opportunity to learn from what happens when it reaches the market. We talk endlessly about connecting teams. How often have we actually designed a process that enables them to learn from one another?
I've continued thinking about this since the event. Much of the conversation around AI focuses on what it can do within individual stages of the marketing process. Generate more creative concepts. Accelerate adaptation. Produce additional variations. Reduce production time. These are valuable capabilities. But I keep coming back to a different question. If we were designing the global campaign process from scratch today, with everything we know about technology, consumer behavior, and the demands of local markets, would we design it the way it operates now?
I don't know that we would. And I'll admit something: even as someone who's spent much of my career working on process improvement, I find it hard to envision an entirely different model. We still need strategy. We still need creative thinking. We still need work that resonates in different markets, but do we need the same sequence of handoffs? The same rounds of approvals? The same separation between the people who create campaigns and the people responsible for making them work locally?
What if we're so accustomed to working within the existing process that we've stopped questioning the process itself? What happens when we introduce increasingly powerful technology (AI) into a system we haven't fundamentally challenged? We may simply become much more efficient at doing things we shouldn't be doing in the first place.
If I were to start this exercise tomorrow, I'd do what I've done throughout my career and what I bring as a Six Sigma Black Belt. Get the right people in a room. Take one actual campaign. Map what happened from brief to market. Understand where work stalled, where decisions were revisited, and where teams had to compensate for something that could have been addressed earlier.
Then ask a question we probably don't ask often enough:
I didn't leave Spark Conversations with a blueprint for the future of global campaigns. But I left more convinced that we need to challenge the assumptions behind how they're designed. If we are going to give someone authority for the process, we'd better darn well be giving them authority to break it otherwise, this is lip service.
And I think that challenge extends well beyond global campaigns.
As CMOs, we're under constant pressure to deliver more, move faster, demonstrate value, and embrace new technology. It's tempting to focus on how AI can help us accelerate everything we're already doing.
But perhaps our responsibility as leaders is to challenge what we're asking our teams to accelerate.
AI may change what's possible in marketing. It's up to us to question how marketing should work.