Amazon’s Tamir Bar-Haim: Global Advertisers Mistakenly Assume Home Market Success Travels
CANNES, France — Marketing, like politics, is local. But it’s easy to forget that digital advertising’s promise of scale and efficiency tempts global brands into treating international expansion as a copy-paste exercise that transcends borders.
“The biggest mistake is assuming that offline success will automatically translate online and/or assuming that the trends of customer behavior from a brand’s home country will just automatically be true in whatever other geography they want to expand to,” Tamir Bar-Haim, vp of advertising at Amazon, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at Cannes Lions. “When it comes to digital, there’s an expectation that it’s going to be simpler, scalable, efficient — and that can lead brands sometimes down the wrong track.”
What works instead, Bar-Haim advised, is starting with local customer behavior and working backwards. That entails understanding how consumers browse, shop, and move through purchase journeys in each individual market before building any campaign strategy.
Customer behavior isn’t uniform
Social commerce penetration in China dwarfs comparable adoption in most other markets. Japan’s advertising culture is defined by an insistence on quality. Brazil leads with creative passion. Each market carries its own logic, and regional or global advertisers who ignore that tend to default to vanilla approaches that underdeliver everywhere.
“Every country also tends to have that one thing that they’re really proud of, that thing that they hang their hat on,” Bar-Haim said. “There’s a great opportunity for some of these international countries outside of the US to punch above their weight class and build a proof of concept, establish a playbook that then can scale globally.”
AI democratizes creative localization
The historic bottleneck in international advertising has been creative production — generating sufficient volume and variety to personalize effectively across languages, cultures, and geographies. AI tools are dissolving that constraint.
“The rate limiter has been the ability for brands to produce the variety and volume of creative needed to achieve personalization at scale. Through tools like our image generator or video generator, you can produce professional creative with a click of a button, no incremental cost,” Bar-Haim said.
Japan, he noted, has emerged as a standout example. Advertising partners there are combining Amazon’s AI tools with their own capabilities to drive both relevance and creative iteration at a pace that surprised Bar-Haim on a recent visit.
Different definitions of scale
Across every market, Bar-Haim hears the same three requests: personalization at scale, full-funnel outcomes, and speed. Where markets diverge is in what scale actually means and how mature the business already is.
“For those anchored in a large established business in a mature marketplace, the conversations are really about where do I find that next pocket of opportunity. Whereas for some brands launching in a new country or just getting started, it’s really around where do I have product market fit?” Bar-Haim said. “The good news is no matter where you are on that spectrum, the foundational tools are actually no different.”
The mental model Bar-Haim leaves advertisers with is straightforward — and demanding.
“A brand should know as much about their customers in every individual country that they operate in as they do in their home country. We expect our advertisers to hold us to that bar,” Bar-Haim said. “It’s exciting to look ahead and see how much room there is for growth when we nail those basics.”
You’re watching Beet.TV coverage from Cannes Lions 2026. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
CANNES, France — Marketing, like politics, is local. But it’s easy to forget that digital advertising’s promise of scale and efficiency tempts global brands into treating international expansion as a copy-paste exercise that transcends borders.
“The biggest mistake is assuming that offline success will automatically translate online and/or assuming that the trends of customer behavior from a brand’s home country will just automatically be true in whatever other geography they want to expand to,” Tamir Bar-Haim, vp of advertising at Amazon, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at Cannes Lions. “When it comes to digital, there’s an expectation that it’s going to be simpler, scalable, efficient — and that can lead brands sometimes down the wrong track.”
What works instead, Bar-Haim advised, is starting with local customer behavior and working backwards. That entails understanding how consumers browse, shop, and move through purchase journeys in each individual market before building any campaign strategy.
Customer behavior isn’t uniform
Social commerce penetration in China dwarfs comparable adoption in most other markets. Japan’s advertising culture is defined by an insistence on quality. Brazil leads with creative passion. Each market carries its own logic, and regional or global advertisers who ignore that tend to default to vanilla approaches that underdeliver everywhere.
“Every country also tends to have that one thing that they’re really proud of, that thing that they hang their hat on,” Bar-Haim said. “There’s a great opportunity for some of these international countries outside of the US to punch above their weight class and build a proof of concept, establish a playbook that then can scale globally.”
AI democratizes creative localization
The historic bottleneck in international advertising has been creative production — generating sufficient volume and variety to personalize effectively across languages, cultures, and geographies. AI tools are dissolving that constraint.
“The rate limiter has been the ability for brands to produce the variety and volume of creative needed to achieve personalization at scale. Through tools like our image generator or video generator, you can produce professional creative with a click of a button, no incremental cost,” Bar-Haim said.
Japan, he noted, has emerged as a standout example. Advertising partners there are combining Amazon’s AI tools with their own capabilities to drive both relevance and creative iteration at a pace that surprised Bar-Haim on a recent visit.
Different definitions of scale
Across every market, Bar-Haim hears the same three requests: personalization at scale, full-funnel outcomes, and speed. Where markets diverge is in what scale actually means and how mature the business already is.
“For those anchored in a large established business in a mature marketplace, the conversations are really about where do I find that next pocket of opportunity. Whereas for some brands launching in a new country or just getting started, it’s really around where do I have product market fit?” Bar-Haim said. “The good news is no matter where you are on that spectrum, the foundational tools are actually no different.”
The mental model Bar-Haim leaves advertisers with is straightforward — and demanding.
“A brand should know as much about their customers in every individual country that they operate in as they do in their home country. We expect our advertisers to hold us to that bar,” Bar-Haim said. “It’s exciting to look ahead and see how much room there is for growth when we nail those basics.”
You’re watching Beet.TV coverage from Cannes Lions 2026. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
Series Videos
