Centralize content production, not local decision-making

“So... you actually put four people in a room to decide whether the car should be described as ‘family-friendly’ or ‘perfect for football parents’?”

Yes.

Yes, we did.

And no, they’re not exactly the same thing.

The longer I work with content for international brands, the more I realise that the job is rarely about those big, dramatic copy breakthroughs. Surprisingly often, it comes down to the details. Understanding why a phrase feels completely natural in one country and slightly off in another, for example.

Because when localisation, or thoughtful human intervention as I prefer to call it, is done really well, it’s almost invisible. No one stops to think: “Wow, what an impressively executed cultural adaptation of centrally produced marketing material.”

It just feels right.

The problem is that local expertise is all too often brought in only after almost everything has already been decided.

Global content processes are often illustrated as a neat hierarchy.

At the top is the global hub, where the strategy and big creative concepts are defined. Below that are regional hubs that orchestrate, repurpose and quality-check the work. And at the bottom are the local markets, ready to receive the material and get it ready for publication.

It looks perfectly rational.

The problem is that the local market can easily end up being treated as the final stage of a waterfall process. Someone at the top decides. Someone in the middle produces. Someone at the bottom checks.

But those three levels shouldn’t have different degrees of authority. They should have authority over different decisions.

The global team should, of course, be able to safeguard the brand direction and its shared building blocks. Regional teams should be able to orchestrate and drive efficiency. But local markets need the authority to change material that might otherwise fail to do its job.

Localisation shouldn’t be a one-way street where the global team sends out material and the local market sends back corrections. When that happens, those of us working locally are reduced to little more than language police. And hopefully, no one is hiring the people closest to the market, and therefore the ones who understand it best, just to hunt down typos in a finished banner.

This isn’t an argument for every market to go off and build its own little content kingdom.

Quite the opposite.

In many ways, centralisation is both necessary and makes perfect sense. Today, a global company needs to feed social media, e-commerce, CRM, websites, retail media, streaming services and retailers with content. In multiple formats, for multiple audiences, across more and more channels. Faster. Preferably yesterday.

In that reality, it’s hard to justify every market building its own systems, buying the same capabilities multiple times and reinventing the wheel.

WFA’s Global Content Production 2025 also shows how centralisation has once again moved high up the agenda (and it has not gone the other direction in 2026). Of the 50 global brands surveyed, two-thirds said they had changed their agency model over the previous four years, often moving towards a more centralised approach. The drivers include greater control and cost transparency, more efficient asset management and better opportunities to measure results. 

All of that makes perfect sense.

So the problem isn’t that we centralise. The problem is that we centralise the wrong things.

What benefits from scale should be centralised: brand strategy, brand codes, master assets, data, rights, systems, workflows, AI governance, shared measurement frameworks and overarching quality assurance.

But cultural judgement doesn’t automatically benefit from scale.

An understanding of people, timing, humour, local offers, channels and behaviours can’t always be programmed into a global system. That knowledge sits with the people who are close to the market every day.

That’s why we need to bring local expertise in earlier in the process.

Not into every meeting. Not with veto power over every typeface. And not so that every piece of content gets transcreated ad absurdum. The problem arises when everything is pushed through the same localisation funnel.

Local input is needed when the master concept is being shaped, when modularity is being planned, and when the organisation decides which elements should be fixed and which should be flexible. This is also when you need to agree on what happens when a centrally produced asset package simply isn’t enough.

In practice, that requires three fairly simple but important decisions:

1. Decide early what is fixed and what can be changed. Local flexibility shouldn’t have to be negotiated two days before publication.

2. Give local markets the authority to stop or rework material that doesn’t work. Understanding the market but having no ability to act on that knowledge is a pretty expensive way to organise proofreading.

3. Let local insights shape the next global brief. Information needs to flow both ways. Not just from headquarters out to the markets, but from the markets back up again.

The best global systems, then, don’t just create a path downwards. They create a path back up.

Local data, emerging behaviours, cultural signals and what actually works need to be able to shape the next global decision. Otherwise, all you’re doing is scaling your own blind spots.

Efficiently, perhaps. But blindly all the same.

So yes, sometimes four copywriters sit in a room debating which of two almost identical phrases best describes a particular car. From the outside, it probably looks like a pretty inefficient way to spend an hour.

But that discussion isn’t a sign that the global content model has failed. It’s a crucial part of what makes the model work, and deliver. The brand flexes without breaking.

When local markets are trusted as part of the global content engine, we’re no longer just recipients of material. We become co-creators of impact. Because local relevance isn’t created during the final proofread. It’s created in the decisions made long before that.

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Johanna Borgström
Content Lead & Operations Manager
Plan.Net Nordics