Nicola Orrell, Managing Director of Edison Media, argues that brands expanding internationally should resist the temptation to work with multiple agency partners – and explains why consolidating media buying with a single strategic partner delivers better results, stronger buying power and significantly less complexity.
The global media buying services market is projected to nearly double from $80.5 billion in 2025 to $151.1 billion by 2035. Yet as this market expands at 6.5% annually, driven by programmatic innovation and digital-first strategies, many brands are making their international campaigns more complicated than they need to be.
The instinct when expanding internationally is often to work with multiple agencies – local specialists who understand regional nuances, separate partners for different markets, or a patchwork of relationships built up over time. It feels like the safe choice. But in practice, this fragmentation creates as many problems as it solves.
When you split international campaigns across several agency partners, you’re not just dividing the work – you’re multiplying the complexity. Each agency brings its own processes, reporting formats and strategic perspectives.
What starts as “best of both worlds” quickly becomes a coordination exercise that drains time, dilutes messaging and fragments accountability.
Finance teams know this pain acutely. Multiple agencies mean multiple currencies, different rate structures and invoices that arrive in different formats at different times. Converting spend from euros, dollars and zlotys into a single GBP view becomes a monthly headache. More fundamentally, it makes genuine budget oversight nearly impossible.
Marketing teams face a different but equally draining challenge: managing the managers. Instead of focusing on strategy, they’re coordinating timelines, aligning presentations and translating between agencies who may never speak to each other. The administrative burden doesn’t scale linearly – it compounds.
Singular vision, consistent execution
Centralising international media buying with one agency partner creates something that’s surprisingly rare in modern marketing: clarity. One strategic direction. One brief that flows through all markets. Messaging, timing and objectives that stay genuinely aligned rather than superficially coordinated.
This isn’t about losing local insight – it’s about having one team accountable for ensuring that local adaptation serves the global strategy rather than competing with it.
At Edison Media, our work across cities like Paris, Milan, Berlin and London has shown us that effective international campaigns require genuine understanding of audience behaviour combined with the ability to apply insights across borders. When planners are part of the same agency structure, knowledge compounds. A format that works brilliantly in one market can be assessed and applied elsewhere. Static storefronts, for example, started as a Parisian innovation but are now deployed strategically across European cities – the kind of cross-pollination that rarely happens when agencies operate in silos.
The consistency extends beyond creative thinking. Service levels, response times and ways of working become predictable. There’s no wondering whether the German team will deliver to the same standard as the UK operation, or whether approval processes will vary market by market. Expectations are set once and maintained everywhere.
Where the money actually goes
Here’s an uncomfortable truth about multi-agency international campaigns: a significant portion of budget goes towards duplicated effort rather than media impact. Multiple agencies mean multiple account teams, multiple planning processes and multiple margin structures. Each agency needs to cover its overheads. Each market becomes its own P&L.
Consolidating spend with a single international partner fundamentally changes the economics. Aggregated buying power means stronger negotiation positions with media owners. More of the client’s budget flows to media placement rather than being absorbed in agency fees and administrative overhead. In a market where programmatic buying and AI-driven optimisation are becoming the norm, this efficiency matters more than ever.
Working with brands like JD Sports and Nike across multiple European markets, we’ve seen first-hand how consolidated buying power translates into better inventory access, stronger rate negotiations and ultimately more impactful campaign delivery. The difference isn’t marginal – it’s substantial.
When something needs to change mid-campaign – and something always does – fragmented agency relationships create a predictable pattern: finger-pointing. Unclear ownership.
With one point of contact, single-agency partnerships eliminate this ambiguity entirely. If performance in France is lagging, if German creative needs adjustment, if budget needs reallocating from Poland to the UK – there’s one conversation, one decision, one implementation.
This clarity extends to compliance and brand safety. One agency means one set of approval standards, one interpretation of brand guidelines, one approach to regulatory requirements. In an environment where data privacy regulations like GDPR already complicate international campaigns, adding multiple agencies with different compliance approaches is a risk few brands need.
The strategic argument
As media buying becomes increasingly sophisticated – with AI-powered targeting, real-time bidding and cross-platform attribution becoming standard – the strategic case for consolidation only strengthens. These tools work best when fed unified data, when learnings accumulate in one place, when optimisation happens holistically rather than market by market.
The brands winning internationally aren’t necessarily spending more. They’re spending smarter. They’re working with partners who can see across borders, who can shift budget dynamically based on performance and can apply insights from one market to improve results in another.
In a media landscape that’s fragmenting by channel and format, the counterintuitive move is to consolidate. One agency. Multiple markets. Singular accountability. It’s not the complicated choice – but it could be the smartest one.
Nicola Orrell is Managing Director of Edison Media, an award-winning independent full-service media agency specialising in out-of-home advertising, digital marketing, and international media planning and buying.
