Challenger brands going international for the first time often choose an agency based on reputation rather than fit. The brief goes out, the question comes back: who handles global campaigns at this scale? The answer is often one of the big networks.
I have been running Freedman for 35 years, and that longevity is not an accident. We have stayed independent by design, not by default. We have watched the industry reinvent itself repeatedly, absorbed each shift, and rebuilt around what clients actually need. It comes from being built to flex, from an operating system that adapts rather than breaks, and from making decisions entirely around client needs.
The moment a brand enters a new market, the nature of the problem changes. This applies whether you are a challenger brand entering your third country, a fast-growing business unit launching outside your home market, or an established organisation taking a new product line across borders.
McKinsey's State of Marketing Europe 2026 found that only a third of European consumers say they trust businesses to act in society's interest. In your home market, the brand has history. Consumers have seen it before. There is some accumulated goodwill to absorb small execution failures. In a new market, that reserve does not exist, and trust has to be built from the first campaign. There is no recognition to fill the gap when execution falls short.
The operational complexity compounds this. A single campaign running across five new markets simultaneously carries vast language variations, regulatory requirements, media specifications, approval chains, and asset handovers across agencies and time zones. Adobe's State of Marketing in an AI-Driven World found that more than eight in ten marketing teams missed an opportunity last quarter because their workflow could not respond in time. For a first international launch, where media is already booked and launch dates are fixed, that kind of workflow failure does not just cost an opportunity. It costs the entire window.
First launches do not fail loudly. They fail through delays, rework, and quiet brand erosion, through campaigns that ran but did not land, through regulatory issues caught at review rather than at brief, through markets that received a version of the brand that was technically correct but never quite right. The damage is real, and for a brand still building its international reputation, it is harder to recover from than it would be for an established one.
This is also the stage where processes either bed in or break. The workflows that hold together for market one need to scale to market three and four without rebuilding from scratch each time. Get the foundations right at this stage and international expansion builds on something solid. Get them wrong and every subsequent market inherits the same problems.
Network agencies are optimised for enterprise clients requiring standardised processes. The brief, the workflow, and the delivery model were designed for a spend of £50m across 5+ established markets. A challenger brand taking a new product international across five markets for the first time is an entirely different problem that cannot be solved with standardised processes.
Distributed accountability is structural to the network model. The lead creative agency owns the concept. The media agency owns planning and buying. The production arm owns asset creation. Regional network agencies own local adaptation. In-country agencies own market-level delivery. Everyone is accountable for their piece. Nobody is accountable for the whole. This puts the responsibility for making all of those pieces cohesive back onto the brand, meaning someone on your team ends up chasing decisions, bridging gaps between agencies, and trying to ensure that what is produced in one part of the process is still consistent with what was agreed in another.
The 2025 Omnicom-IPG merger made the service reality of this model more visible than usual. Senior account teams leaving. Clients struggling to get a straight answer on who is handling their account. For a challenger brand mid-launch in a new market, this level of disruption and the associated coordination burden lands at exactly the moment when the launch itself rightfully demands full attention. And if you get it wrong, the damage to brand equity could take years to recover from.
An independent agency is not a smaller version of a network. It is a different model, and for challenger brands taking their brand into new markets, it is the better fit. What follows is what we do at Freedman, and why it works for challenger brands going global.
At Freedman, accountability means owning the whole, not a piece of it. We take responsibility for campaign delivery end to end across every market, every agency, and every stage, so your campaigns launch on time, on brand, culturally relevant, and compliant. Alongside that, we design and embed the operating model behind delivery: the workflows, governance, decision rights, and handoffs that mean scale does not create fragility. And we protect the brand throughout. At global scale, small decisions compound. Tone drifts. Local tweaks accumulate. Every campaign should strengthen what the brand means in a new market, not quietly erode it.
We bring market expertise into the room before the brief is locked, not after the master is produced. Regulatory exposure is mapped before production starts. Cultural requirements surface as creative input, not final-stage corrections. The decisions that are expensive to change once the master is locked are the cheapest to make at the briefing stage, and catching them early is only possible if the right expertise is in the room from the start. This is where first launches commonly go wrong, and it is where an experienced independent partner pays dividends many times over.
We build around the specific requirements of your campaign, your markets, and your regulatory landscape. Clear workflows. Defined decision lines. Governance that travels with the work. Processes that hold at market one and still function at market four without rebuilding from scratch each time. This is the infrastructure that turns a first launch into a repeatable capability.
On production volume, the argument for choosing a network agency has changed. Gartner's May 2026 survey of marketing leaders found that AI-driven automation of marketing work is expected to more than double, from 16% in 2026 to 36% by 2028. At Freedman, we have already rebuilt our operating system around this shift. AI handles the production work that does not require human judgement. Human operators supervise, direct, and apply the cultural and brand expertise that AI cannot replicate. Brief in. Approved, locally adapted assets out. Across any number of markets. The production volume argument for choosing a network agency no longer holds the way it once did. What remains is the judgement layer: cultural intelligence, brand governance, regulatory expertise, delivery accountability. Those are exactly where an experienced independent agency has always had the advantage, and AI has made that advantage sharper.
In 2024, Klarna transitioned from a hybrid startup into a profitable global bank, growing overall revenue by nearly 50% and expanding EMEA campaign delivery from a limited number of core markets to more than 25 regions. The localisation model supporting those campaigns was largely internal and ad hoc. As expansion accelerated, inefficiencies, friction, and quality risks became increasingly visible.
Freedman took ownership of global campaign localisation and production across eight EMEA markets, operating as the accountable centre of execution between Klarna's HQ marketing teams, in-house writers, regional marketers, legal stakeholders, and production partners. Where no single function previously owned adaptation end-to-end, we became that function.
We introduced structured localisation workflows, implemented translation memories and glossaries to reduce repeated work and improve text control, and strengthened quality control processes to reduce rounds of amends. Brand validation and financial sector clearance ran in parallel with Klarna's legal teams, reducing regulatory friction across financial communications. Local market insight was integrated earlier into campaign development, reducing the risk of US and UK-centric concepts failing to travel. Klarna's marketing teams were freed to focus on specialist product copy.
The results included a consistent brand voice across EMEA, fewer regulatory rejections, reduced duplication of localisation effort, and increased visibility and control over campaign delivery across a rapidly growing market footprint. As Klarna's Production Lead at the Global Brand and Creative Hub put it: "Since working with Freedman, we've seen a 180-degree turnaround."
That outcome was not a function of network size or global office coverage. It was a single accountable delivery layer and an operating system built for the volume Klarna was actually running.
Challenger brands taking a new brand or product international for the first time face a genuine choice of agency model for their first international campaigns, and many make it on the reputation of the agency rather than fit. Expanding your marketing across borders demands a partner that takes accountability for the whole: campaign delivery end to end, the operating model behind it, and brand protection as scope grows. Not a team that owns one piece of a fragmented structure and hands the coordination burden back to you. AI has made the operational case for independent agencies stronger, not weaker. There is no longer a production volume argument for the network model that a well-built independent agency cannot match. The brands that get their agency model right early build international capability while they scale. The ones that get it wrong find out at the moment when the budget is spent and the timeline has no room left.
Every team is moving faster into new markets now. The gaps that hold first launches back sit in the decisions made before the brief. Freedman's First International Launch Readiness Check identifies where those gaps sit in your setup. Start here.
A partner that takes accountability for the whole: campaign delivery end to end, the operating model behind it, and brand consistency across markets. Not a team that owns one piece of a distributed structure. The right partner removes the coordination burden from your team rather than adding to it.
An established brand has years of equity to absorb execution gaps. A challenger brand entering a new market has none. The mistake a heritage brand absorbs in one news cycle, a fast-growing challenger pays for in trust and customer acquisition cost. At this stage, getting execution right is protecting the investment the campaign represents.
It strengthens it. A well-structured independent agency with the right AI infrastructure can now produce and localise at volumes that previously required network headcount. What AI cannot replace is cultural intelligence, regulatory expertise, and end-to-end accountability. Those are exactly where independent agencies have always had the advantage.
Yes, and in practice they often handle it better. The network model fragments accountability across multiple agencies, each owning their piece, with the coordination burden falling back on the brand. An independent agency that owns the whole removes that overhead. Fewer handoffs. Clearer decision rights. Faster resolution when something needs to change.