• by Sebastien Flynn , Op-Ed Contributor, Yesterday

I moved to New York from Europe to work in advertising. I was genuinely excited. The U.S. felt like the home of big ideas, the birthplace of brand storytelling, and the epicenter of ambition and scale.

But after nearly two years here, I’ve started to notice something that people in our industry don’t often say out loud. While American brand strategy talks a lot about being global, it rarely thinks that way.

That disconnect has real impact. It shows up in how brands pitch, how they approach multicultural work, and how so-called global campaigns get built. Despite its influence, American advertising can feel surprisingly limited in how it sees the world.

The U.S. Thinks in Org Charts, The World Thinks in Context

In Europe, strategy is often built from the ground up. There’s an understanding that no two markets are the same. You learn to take into account culture, regulation, history, and language. You expect variation and design for it.

In the U.S., strategy tends to be more centralized. A big idea gets developed at headquarters, refined into a deck, and then shared across markets. Even when a brand’s biggest growth opportunities are outside the U.S., the thinking that drives everything often starts and ends here.

I’ve experienced this firsthand. I’ve been brought into global projects too late to actually influence them. I’ve seen briefs built without meaningful input from regional teams. I’ve watched campaigns miss the mark because they were never designed to flex. The unspoken assumption is that the American point of view is universal. Everything else becomes a footnote.

It doesn’t feel intentional. But it does feel baked in.

Why This Matters Right Now

The U.S. consumer landscape isn’t a monoculture, and probably never was. Young audiences in particular don’t separate global from local. They move between languages, cultures, and media without even thinking about it.

But brand strategy hasn’t fully kept up. Many platforms are still built around a single center of gravity. That might make things easier to scale, but it risks overlooking how people actually live, think, and relate to brands today.

This isn’t just a creative gap. It’s a relevance issue.

What Might Need to Shift

I’m not arguing that American leadership should step aside. But I do think there’s an opportunity to widen the lens.

That could mean pulling in regional strategists earlier in the process. It might look like questioning the starting assumptions in a global brief. It could simply mean making more space for different ways of seeing.

None of this is about adding complexity for the sake of it. It’s about building brands that actually resonate, across borders and across cultures. That takes intention. And sometimes, it means letting go of the idea that one way of thinking is the default.

Because if a campaign only works in English, it probably isn’t global. And if a strategy only makes sense in one market, it may not be as big as it thinks it is.

If we want to build ideas that travel, the thinking behind them needs to travel too.