This year at Cannes, we brought together a panel of Influencer Marketing experts to unpack why hyper-localized influencer campaigns are no longer a “nice to have” but a necessity.

As global and consumer behavior becomes more fragmented due to factors like economic changes, politics, and cultural values, the most successful brands are shifting their approach: maintaining global consistency while empowering local teams and creators to lead campaigns with cultural nuance and real relevance.

We brought in experts, including:

• Simon Morris, VP International Marketing, Adobe
• Magali Mirault, Senior Marketing Director, Mondelēz International
• Isaac Hindin Miller, Creator
• Gabrielė Palepšaitė, Head of Influencer Marketing, Surfshark
• Caitlin Peterson, Head of Social Marketing, Amazon Music
• Jennifer Quigley-Jones, CEO & Founder, Digital Voices

Here’s how you can apply their insights to your brand’s marketing strategy:

1. Prioritize cultural relevance, not just translation

If you want to earn attention and trust in any market, your message needs to reflect the values, humor, and concerns of the people you’re trying to reach. This means going beyond simple translation or localization and instead anchoring campaigns in genuine cultural understanding.

What resonates in one country won’t land the same in another, and audiences can tell when content is tailored vs. templated. 72% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product or a service if the information is available in their native language, therefore, commissioning influencers in local markets compared to using a translated voice-over will create deeper audience trust. 

Actionable tips:

• Adapt your message to local concerns. For example, Surfshark aligns its core mission of digital freedom with different priorities: privacy in Germany vs. surveillance fears in Taiwan.

• Match tone and humor to the culture. Surfshark’s “kimchi without the spice” campaign played off a Korean cultural reference. Despite some hesitation from global teams, it resonated powerfully with the audience because it felt locally rooted.
• Use real, local voices. Creator Isaac Hindin Miller highlighted the difference between "TripAdvisor-style" influencer content and true insider knowledge. Authentic local recommendations build trust and engagement.

2. Empower local teams and treat creators as strategic partners

To localize well, your teams need autonomy. That includes both your internal market teams and your creator partners. Empower them to shape campaigns in ways that feel relevant, and give them space to push creative boundaries.

Creators aren’t just distribution channels, they're consultants, cultural translators, and co-creators who can help refine your messaging for local resonance. Trust your team member or influencer partner who is the most connected to the audience you’re targeting. 

Actionable tips:

• “Invest in local presence,” said  Gabrielė Palepšaitė, Head of Influencer Marketing, Surfshark. They have embedded a team in Taiwan, hired Mandarin speakers, and built close ties with creators. This enabled agile decision-making and culturally attuned content.
• Trust creators to shape the message based on what they know about their audience. Rather than dictating rigid scripts, give influencers the freedom to interpret briefs in ways that align with their organic content.
• Involve creators early. Treat them like brand consultants by asking for their insights into what will work, what won’t, and how your product fits into their community’s needs. One size doesn’t fit all. 

3. Set global guardrails, but let local creativity lead

It’s not about choosing between a global or local marketing strategy. The best brands do both by establishing global measurement systems, brand values, and creative frameworks that guide – but don’t restrict local execution.

This allows local teams to experiment freely within a structure, ensuring consistency without killing creativity.

"We need to stop considering the framework as a constraint. I'm a believer in the fact that these frameworks actually help the team to be more creative because there is a guardrail, there's a direction. And then within the direction, I have observed that it creates lots and lots of creativity." – Magali Mirault, Senior Marketing Director, Mondelēz International

Actionable tips:

• Build shared measurement frameworks. Adobe shared how setting up consistent KPIs and content tracking enables smarter decisions across markets.
  Simon Morris, VP of International Marketing at Adobe said, “We look to global teams to define what success looks like. We need to have global consistency. Once you have this in place, you connect with the local teams who understand the cultural nuances to create use cases for their areas. The performance speaks for itself!”
• Encourage two-way inspiration. Local insights don’t just stay local, identify high-performing ideas and scale them across regions. Great campaigns can inspire adaptations in unexpected places. And if one idea doesn’t translate in another market, at least you have tested and learned.
• Use frameworks as a creative springboard. Start with a universal idea (e.g., “what I pack when I travel”) and invite teams to express it in ways that reflect their audience’s reality.

4. Engagement > Reach

In a hyper-local strategy, influencer selection is critical. Bigger isn’t always better—micro and mid-tier creators with strong audience relationships often deliver the most trust and traction.

And in fast-changing environments, creators allow brands to react quickly to local events and conversations. Agility, not scale, is often the superpower.

"It used to be all about the biggest number, the biggest reach. And now it's really around engagement. So, how does your creator create trust for your brand and create a mirrored experience to the people you're talking to? Start audience or customer first and then figure out who can best speak to that. They’re engagement is far more important than their size." – Caitlin Peterson, Head of Social Marketing, Amazon Music

Actionable Tips:

• Focus on depth, not just numbers. Micro-influencers who understand their niche community can be more persuasive and cost-effective than macro talent.
• Use creators to respond in real time. Surfshark activated creators overnight to address sudden Twitter bans in certain regions, something traditional media couldn’t match in speed or tone.
• Use AI to support localization. AI can help surface risks (e.g., past video content), summarize influencer activity, and translate creative, but always leave cultural nuance to human judgment.

5. Let tension fuel Innovation

Global-local collaboration can be messy – and that’s a good thing. Creative tension between brand HQ and local teams often leads to sharper campaigns and smarter problem-solving.

Rather than aiming for frictionless processes, brands should lean into disagreements, learn from missteps, and build cultures of experimentation over perfection.

It is important to discuss how cities, and even specific event areas within them, require hyper-localized content. This is a need that influencers are uniquely positioned to fulfill.

“I live in New York City, and when we speak about localization there, someone in the West Village will be totally different to someone in the Lower East Side. There’s a lot of tension between the localities. So I think it's really important for me to try to utilize as many organic, local voices as possible, then I can get direct user feedback immediately,” – Isaac Hindin Miller, Content Creator

Actionable tips:

• Welcome creative tension. Amazon’s team emphasized that productive conflict between global vision and local insight can elevate the final idea.
• Learn from what doesn’t work. Not every campaign will land. Treat “failures” as data, not right-offs, and feed those learnings into future strategies.
• Let authenticity guide results. The most effective content often comes when creators are given freedom to explore and express. Equip them with business context, then let them do what they do best.

Ultimately, the brands that win globally in the current economy will be the ones that invest in local voices, trust their creators, and build agile systems that turn cultural understanding into business impact. In turn, you will strengthen your global presence. 

If you want to chat more about developing a hyper-local campaign strategy, reach out to us at hello@digitalvoices.com – we are specialists in building campaigns that target local market needs!