Every international campaign has a layer between the central team and local delivery: adapting assets to local requirements, coordinating approvals and getting the right materials to each market. In most organisations, nobody owns it.
This was where the discussion at Spark Conversations became most candid. Brand leaders, creatives and agencies described the same position from different sides: stuck in the middle, absorbing problems they didn't cause and can't control.
AI came up here too. Faster tools are welcome, but the room was clear that speeding up adaptation doesn't settle who owns the process. If anything, it makes the question more urgent and amplifies the real cost of AI involvement.
Client leadership often sees upstream organisational barriers as outside their remit, leaving central marketing teams and agencies to manage adaptation, approvals and delivery across every market under heavy pressure.
When volume spikes, brands tend to add more agencies. That adds capacity but splits brand control, raises overheads and reduces visibility across the campaign. Meanwhile, faster tools compress timelines without giving anyone ownership of the end-to-end process, which creates real risk around brand compliance and embargo rules.
A campaign with five agencies and no single owner is exposed, however well resourced it looks.
Spark takes on the day-to-day complexity of international adaptation. We coordinate market adaptations, approvals and delivery, while the central team retains visibility and control. Around 70% of that work is programme and project management and 30% is execution, because the hardest part of a global rollout is managing everything around the assets.
For the past eight years, we've supported Netflix with OOH campaign adaptation and delivery across EMEA. We've also coordinated global campaign delivery for Universal Pictures, including Minions 3 across 67 markets and 2,178 placements, and Michael across 57 markets and 1,633 placements.
Our workflows are ISO 27001 certified, and we've handled pre-release campaign content for partners including Netflix and Microsoft with zero security breaches.
What central teams need is a partner who takes the day-to-day complexity off their plate, so they keep control and can stay focused on the launch.