When Global Reach Is No Longer Enough
As multinational B2B marketers confront regionalization, AI and increasingly complex growth challenges, Tony Riley, President and CEO of MX, believes the future of agencies may depend less on their size than on their ability to solve the right problems.
For decades, the promise of global marketing was built around scale. Multinational companies wanted consistency across markets, and global agency networks offered the geographic reach, infrastructure and resources to deliver it.
But what happens when being everywhere is no longer the same as understanding everywhere?
Tony Riley, President and CEO of MX, one of America’s largest independent B2B agencies, believes that question is becoming increasingly important—particularly for multinational business-to-business marketers.
The forces reshaping global business are also reshaping the work of marketing. Trade policies, tariffs, geopolitical tensions, rising costs and changing supply chains are prompting companies to reconsider how they organize, manufacture, distribute and sell across markets.
And that means marketing can no longer assume that the same products, strategies or routes to market will work everywhere.
“We’re seeing more and more of that regionalization needed in order to generate growth,” Riley explains. “Product strategy, brand strategy, all of that is really starting to be customized to these specific regions.”
For B2B marketers, whose customers often operate within complicated purchasing structures and extended decision cycles, the consequences can be substantial. The challenge isn’t simply to adapt a campaign. It’s to understand how the business itself is changing—and where marketing can contribute.
Global Scale, Reconsidered
Tony Riley suggests that the meaning of global scale is undergoing a fundamental reassessment.
In the past, multinational marketing could often be organized around a central strategy that was translated or adapted for different markets. Agencies demonstrated their international capabilities through offices, people, and geographic coverage. But a more regionalized business environment requires something different.
“If you’re more of a local-to-global strategy, then you really have to have that foundational boots on the ground and the ability to collaborate and strategize within those markets,” he says. It’s no longer enough to point to locations on a map. What matters is whether the expertise within those markets is substantial enough to understand local business realities and influence outcomes.
He offers a wonderfully simple example. For a client seeking growth in India, one of the most effective decisions was to purchase a billboard at the first tee of a golf course frequented by business executives. It wasn’t a particularly sophisticated technological solution. But it reflected an understanding of exactly where the intended audience could be reached.
The example illustrates an important distinction: global capability does not automatically produce local relevance. And as technology makes coordination across borders easier, the ability to recognize such opportunities may become more valuable, not less.
A Different Way to Build an Agency
This thinking helps explain the creation of GlobalAgility, a multinational B2B organization founded by MX and six other independent agencies.
Rather than operating as a traditional fixed international network, GlobalAgility assembles teams around the particular needs of each client. Its seven core agencies bring geographic expertise and specialist capabilities across multiple markets, with additional resources incorporated when necessary.
Tony Riley describes the approach as a departure from the familiar agency growth question: should an organization build a capability or buy it? MX has taken another path.
“We’ve always taken more of a spirit of generosity and been open to sharing work with others and using others’ expertise to make our clients better,” he explains. That willingness to acknowledge where another agency might contribute something valuable gradually evolved into a more formal collaborative model.
Today, the starting point isn’t the agency’s organizational chart. It’s understanding the needs associated with a client’s problem. “We take a client problem, and then we customize the agency to that client problem,” he says.
A multinational assignment might require creative expertise in one market, marketing technology in another, and a particular data capability somewhere else. Not every agency participates in every assignment, and not every partner needs to provide a full-service offering. The model challenges a longstanding assumption that agencies must own every capability they offer.
For Tony Riley, the opportunity lies in combining genuine local expertise with the flexibility to configure resources around the work. It also requires a particular kind of relationship among the agencies themselves—one built on collaboration rather than protecting individual territories.
AI as the Connecting Infrastructure
Artificial intelligence introduces another dimension to this changing model.
Much of the discussion about AI and agencies has focused on the automation of production, content development, and other executional tasks. Tony Riley sees those efficiencies, but he also identifies a less frequently discussed role for AI: helping independent organizations work together as though they were part of a single enterprise. AI and automation, he explains, can provide the operational structure through which information, context, and processes travel across markets.
For an international collaboration of independent agencies, that capability matters.
But he is equally interested in what AI means for the work clients will continue to value. B2B marketing already involves complex buying groups, long sales cycles, and specialized products. Add regional differences and changing business conditions, and the need for strategic judgment becomes even greater.
“I think they need more strategic discipline that can help them design the right model,” he says, referring to marketers’ expectations. In his view, AI can absorb more of the executional work that once occupied agencies, creating an opportunity—and perhaps a necessity—for agencies to become more involved in solving higher-level business challenges.
Technology may make coordination easier. It doesn’t necessarily make the decisions easier.
What Clients Really Want to Solve
Riley sees another significant change in the assignments coming through the door. Increasingly, B2B clients are beginning with a growth objective rather than a narrowly defined marketing brief.
A company entering the United States may need to double its business over five years. Another may be struggling to build awareness in a category crowded with competitors. Others face the challenge of bringing together multiple businesses and brands following acquisitions. The request is less likely to be simply for a campaign and more likely to begin with a business ambition.
“This is what I’m mandated with; how can you help me get there?” is how Tony Riley characterizes the emerging conversation.
That shift is especially evident in sectors affected by private equity investment and consolidation. As businesses acquire other businesses, they inherit brands, products, distribution arrangements, and customer relationships that don’t necessarily fit neatly together. Marketing strategy becomes essential to making the resulting organization understandable—and valuable—to its customers.
At the same time, competitive intensity makes distinctiveness increasingly important. For challenger brands, the ability to communicate in a memorable way can be as consequential as the size of the marketing budget.
Consider SEEBURGER, the Germany-based enterprise technology company working to increase its presence in the United States.
Rather than explaining the technical details of its integration software through conventional feature-and-benefit advertising, MX developed a campaign built around an unexpected benefit: when technology works seamlessly, people regain the attention to notice what’s happening around them.
In one execution, an employee finally notices that a colleague brings a pet falcon to the office.
The humor makes a complicated technology proposition accessible and human. It’s also a reminder that B2B buyers are people, not simply job titles or members of purchasing committees.
For Tony Riley, the creative work matters because it serves a business objective—not because it fits a predetermined definition of what an agency should produce.
When the Solution Isn’t Advertising
Perhaps the most revealing part of Tony Riley’s thinking emerges when he discusses the work MX has developed outside traditional communications.
He believes that agencies willing to understand a client’s business deeply enough may discover opportunities to create value that have little to do with advertising. MX has developed an application that monitors pipe corrosion in nuclear facilities, helping users identify when service is required. For another client, the agency explored digital tools to help customers manage well maintenance.
And in the industrial sector, MX helped create an e-commerce platform for purchasing truckloads of steel pipe and tube.The platform did more than facilitate transactions. It gave customers access to information about inventory, delivery timing and product availability. It also gave the manufacturer valuable intelligence on what customers were seeking.
These examples move well beyond conventional marketing deliverables. They address problems within the customer’s experience of doing business.
“The way that we find those opportunities is when we go deep on a client’s business and we look at who is the buyer, what is the buyer’s journey, how do they come to buy a product or a service, and then what are the pain points that the brand needs to solve along the way?” Riley explains.
The result can be a tool, a service, a platform or an entirely different way of connecting a company with its customers. What unites the work is its contribution to the client’s business.
It also raises a larger question for the marketing industry: if agencies have the expertise to understand customers, identify unmet needs and develop solutions, why should their role end with communications?
Independence as a Business Philosophy
Riley sees independence as an important part of MX’s ability to pursue these opportunities. Without the same obligations to outside investors or holding-company earnings expectations, he believes the agency has greater freedom to invest in long-term relationships, take creative risks, and pursue work that may not deliver an immediate return.
He describes MX’s mission as impacting the marketplace for companies that impact the world.
That philosophy also shapes how he thinks about recognition. Awards are welcome, and MX has earned them, including an Effie for its work with cybersecurity company Okta. But Riley is clear that recognition should follow meaningful work rather than become its purpose.
“The impact that we make is the most important,” he says. He returns repeatedly to the importance of understanding the client’s business and keeping its objectives at the center of the relationship.
It’s a deceptively simple idea, particularly in an industry where agency success is often measured through billings, growth, geographic footprint, awards, and increasingly the deployment of new technology. Tony Riley is suggesting another measure: what changed for the client as a result of the agency’s involvement?
The Next Agency Relationship
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Tony Riley what advice he would offer marketers navigating this changing environment. His answer was straightforward. Treat agencies as genuine partners—and bring them into the conversation earlier.
As AI changes the economics of execution and agencies develop broader strategic capabilities, he believes marketers will need to reconsider when and how they involve external partners. Rather than briefing agencies only after major business and marketing decisions have been made, he argues for including them in the earlier stages of planning, when the challenges and opportunities are still being defined.
“Really treat your agency like a partner because they need to be at the table with you,” he says.
It’s a fitting conclusion to a conversation that began with the changing meaning of global scale. Because the larger transformation may not be about whether agencies are global or local, independent or network-owned, large or small. It may be about whether they are organized—and invited—to solve the problems that matter most.
For global B2B marketers confronting a world that is becoming more regionalized, more technologically connected and more commercially complex, that distinction could prove increasingly important.
And perhaps it points toward a different definition of agency value: not simply what an agency produces, but what becomes possible because it was involved.
