Amazon Global Sales Campaigns

Context

• Amazon's annual sales calendar is the commercial heartbeat of the business, Prime Day and Black Friday alone shape the entire Q3/Q4 P&L across EMEA, with the rest of the calendar (Cyber Monday, Spring Sale, End of Summer Sale, Last Minute Christmas Deals) carrying the year between them.
• Each event arrives with a global creative platform built in Seattle and a hard expectation: land it credibly in five culturally and linguistically distinct markets, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, across ATL (TV, OOH, radio, print) and BTL (social, digital, automated ads), without breaking global brand consistency or missing the on-sale moment.
• The complexity isn't the creative idea. It's the operating model behind it: thousands of assets, multi-million-euro media plans per market, featured-product alignment with local Deals teams, legal sign-off on promotional mechanics in every jurisdiction, and a launch window measured in hours.

My role and scope

• EMEA lead for localisation and execution of Amazon's global sales campaigns from 2017 to 2020, sustained ownership across multiple Prime Days, Black Fridays, and the full annual sales calendar.
• Owned the end-to-end across TV, OOH, radio, print, social, and digital automated ads in UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Led agency partners across creative, production, and media; coordinated with local Deals Managers on featured products, pricing, and stock readiness; aligned with in-market Legal on promotional requirements and restrictions.
• Briefed the C-suite of each local business and translated their commercial priorities back into the creative and media plan.

Goal

• Hold global brand consistency and land each market with genuine cultural credibility, at the same time, every time.
• Run multi-million-euro media plans efficiently across five markets and thousands of assets, without letting localisation overhead eat the working media budget.
• Make the operating model itself repeatable, so each subsequent event got faster, sharper, and cheaper per asset to deliver, not just bigger.

Strategy

• Build close, standing relationships with local commercial leadership (including C-level) so featured-product trade-offs, pricing calls, and creative priorities get unblocked early, not in the final 48 hours before launch.
• Invest in trans-creation, not translation. Re-write scripts, headlines, and voice-overs so meaning, humour, and cultural cues actually travel, instead of literal translations that test fine and land flat.
• Standardise a localisation framework that compresses creative variants per market while still respecting local broadcast, legal, and platform standards, fewer assets, more channel coverage, less waste.
• Embed inside production at every step, casting, location scouting, shoot, voice-over recording, post, so cultural fit gets baked in upstream rather than fixed in revisions downstream.

Execution

• Reviewed and shaped local detailed media plans across UK, DE, FR, IT, ES, pushing back on asset proliferation to free working media for incremental channel coverage and reach.
• Coordinated legal review per market on promotional mechanics and restrictions, so creative didn't have to be re-cut at the last minute to clear local advertising standards.
• Aligned with PR for amplification through internal and external comms, sequencing market launches to keep global cadence intact while protecting local relevance.
• Sustained the pattern across four consecutive years (2017–2020), turning each event into a tighter, more efficient version of the last as the playbook compounded.