The fragmentation that makes a campaign feel disconnected—media bought in one place, data locked in another, creative briefed separately—is the problem Bruce Williams, CEO of Dentsu X North America, is working to solve.
Speaking at ADWEEK’s Brandweek 2026 in Atlanta during the session “Media As a Flywheel For Growth,” Williams told ADWEEK chief brand and community officer Jenny Rooney that fragmentation must be addressed for a campaign to work cohesively.
His suggested shift moves marketers from “experience planning” to “experience platforming.”
Planning vs platforming
Experience planning, as Williams described it, means creating consumer experiences by stitching together media, data, content and tech inside silos. Experience platforming, on the other hand, melds teams and capabilities so everything works systematically together to bring the full campaign to life.
“It’s just different ways in which we can think about using scale solutions and point ourselves to, ‘How are we building for that?’ But also be scrappier and nimbler,” Williams said.
Heineken’s connected system
He cited Dentsu X client Heineken as an example. The brand created systems that allowed teams to work together across markets and pass information bidirectionally, from agency to brand.
The result was a cohesive strategy that brought together competitive data, store data and local market intelligence. Teams could funnel those inputs directly into decision-making and activation at local market level, with outcomes feeding back to the brand, franchisees, stakeholders, stores and divisions.
Why the platform mindset matters
Most campaigns are still managed as separate workstreams: a media plan, a data stack, a content calendar, a retail calendar. When those don’t share a feedback loop, the consumer sees one campaign in one channel and something else in another.
Williams’s framing is a useful filter. Instead of asking whether each part of a campaign is good, ask whether every team, dataset and channel is connected to the same operating system. If the answer is no, the campaign is likely bleeding performance at the seams.
What marketers can do
- Bring competitive, store and local market data into one decision flow before launch, not after.
- Make feedback bidirectional, so agency and brand teams can adapt in real time.
- Use global scale for tools and data, but leave room for local teams to activate scrappily.
The goal is not another tech overhaul. It is deciding that the campaign itself is the platform—and building it that way from the first brief.
Source: Adweek
