In 2017, Publicis Conseil recruited me from New York. I was running the creative department of Becca Cosmetics at Estée Lauder, after several years on Maybelline New York. What they were looking for wasn't just a digital profile. They were looking for someone who could understand why certain brands stay culturally relevant across markets, and why others become strangers to the people they speak to.
The question was simple: how can a deeply French brand stay true in Brazil, Indonesia, South Korea or Mexico, without becoming a caricature of itself?
When I returned to Paris, something struck me immediately. The local markets had already understood what headquarters was still refusing to look at: the system worked exactly as it had been designed. Global campaigns produced at the centre, deployed everywhere, with a few local adaptations at the end of the process. And yet, emotionally, something wasn't landing anymore. The campaigns travelled. But not always the relevance.
Selling a deodorant is one of the hardest creative briefs in beauty. The category is crowded, the product truth functional. The only way out is cultural.
What gives someone confidence in their body isn't a product. It's a practice. Dance wasn't a metaphor. It was the most direct observation we could make: when the body is free, confidence follows. Not the other way around. What frees the body in São Paulo is not what frees it in Jakarta or Seoul. Same insight. Different expressions.
Fructis Hair Food Mask launched simultaneously across twenty markets. The insight driving the campaign was universal: when your hair is nourished, you feel good. That truth doesn't change. What changes is how it lives inside each culture.
Two TVCs, fifty digital video assets, a hundred social photos, ten press executions — all produced centrally in Paris, all delivered to markets already adapted to their local reality. Same insight. Different casting, different codes, different platforms, different tone. Twenty cultural expressions of a single human truth.
A launch pack is the complete creative toolkit a franchised market receives to launch a product. Films, digital assets, social, press. For Garnier's markets, it is the only creative output they have.
Pure Active Charcoal ran the same model at full scale. The tension was simple and recognisable everywhere: living in a city, wanting clean skin. A physical and emotional reality that young people recognise across every culture, but express differently. Five TVCs, fifty-two digital video assets, forty-one social photos — delivered across thirty markets, each pack already adapted to the local cultural reality before leaving Paris.
The launch pack shows the full scope of the digital toolkit delivered to markets — from TVC cutdowns to platform-native stories, each piece already adapted to local reality before it left Paris.
A brand that speaks the same language everywhere is not a coherent brand. It's a brand that has stopped listening.