When centralization wasn’t an option, I created alignment instead — and the results changed how we worked.
In large organizations, paid media can easily become fragmented — and at Equinix, it was. Each region managed its own ad spend, and in many cases, individual countries had separate agencies running isolated campaigns. There was no central ownership, little coordination, and teams were often working in silos — sometimes even bidding against each other.
To address this, I founded the Global Paid Ad Leadership Council — an internal group of ad buyers and digital marketers across the company. We met twice monthly to align on strategy, share campaign learnings, and break down regional silos. I rotated meeting times to accommodate global time zones, ensuring everyone had a seat at the table.
The outcomes were real and measurable. We launched a single database of all active ad campaigns, built visibility across teams, and created shared standards like a Paid Social Playbook and a unified monthly performance report. We also established a culture of knowledge-sharing — surfacing what worked, what didn’t, and how to replicate success across regions.
While we didn’t centralize all budgets, we did centralize intelligence. And that made a major impact — reducing redundancy, improving performance, and creating tighter alignment across the global marketing organization.
