The situation
A global consumer electronics brand was running paid media across more than 20 markets, and the operation had grown the way global operations usually do: market by market, each with its own buying habits, naming conventions, reporting formats and quiet workarounds. The result was money leaking through inconsistency. Comparing performance across markets took days of manual reconciliation, good practice in one market never travelled to the next, and nobody could say with confidence where the budget worked hardest.
I led the central activation team responsible for fixing that: ten people managing a £2m monthly media budget across the full market set.
The work
The core of the job was standardisation, treated as a performance project rather than an admin exercise. We centralised operations so that buying decisions, trafficking standards and quality control ran through one team with one set of rules. Buying processes were standardised across markets: consistent account structures, naming and taxonomy, so that a campaign in one market was legible to anyone in any other.
Reporting was rebuilt on the same principle. One framework, one set of definitions, one version of the truth, replacing the patchwork of local formats. That is what turned cross-market comparison from a monthly archaeology project into a routine view, and it is what made underperformance visible enough to act on.
Running through all of it was governance: a regular cadence with the markets so that standards held over time, exceptions were agreed rather than accumulated, and improvements found in one market were rolled out to the rest.
The results
Reporting efficiency improved by 25%, freeing the team from reconciliation and putting the time back into optimisation. Media waste came down 15%, found in the places inconsistency had been hiding it: duplicated effort, off-standard buying and budget sitting where nobody was looking. More durably, the brand ended up with a single operating framework across 20+ markets, which kept paying back after I left.