Standing in front of a bank of Beko washing machines at a DIY superstore in Milan, Marco Brucato is thinking less about spin cycles and more about shopper journeys. “If we do our job right,” Beko Europe’s head of digital ecommerce believes, “the customer never feels the tension between global and local. They just feel understood.” It is a neat way to describe a challenge many brands face as ecommerce scales: how to accelerate digital growth across markets without flattening everything into one generic experience.
Beko, one of Europe’s leading large‑appliance players, sells in dozens of countries, each with its own language, retail structure and media landscape. Brucato’s answer has been a model he calls “freedom within a frame”: a centralized backbone of strategy, governance and KPIs, wrapped around local autonomy for execution. The frame defines non‑negotiables—brand positioning, tech stack choices, measurement standards, data strategy—while country teams get latitude to interpret how that looks on the ground, from marketplace tactics to creative nuance.
In practice, that means a Serbian shopper sees very different content and offers from a Spanish one, but both journeys ladder up to the same brand promise and performance metrics. A central playbook sets the structure for product detail pages, content modules and review strategies, but local teams adapt the language, visuals and even feature hierarchies based on what drives conversion in their market. For Beko, that balance has been critical in categories where purchase cycles are long and decisions are heavily researched; trust is built in local context, even if the technology and data that power the journey are globally harmonized.
That tension is where out‑of‑home increasingly shows up. In many European countries, appliance buying is still anchored in physical stores and local retail partners, making OOH a powerful bridge between digital discovery and in‑aisle decision. With a unified ecommerce strategy in place, Beko can deploy OOH not as a blunt awareness instrument but as a precision tool: creative tied to localized online assortment, QR‑enabled paths into retailer product pages, or dynamic messaging that mirrors campaigns running on marketplaces and direct‑to‑consumer sites. The frame ensures that these touchpoints feed into a single measurement logic, so uplift from a digital‑augmented OOH campaign in Poland can be directly compared to one in France.
Scaling that kind of omnichannel discipline inside a legacy organization is less about technology than behavior, Brucato argues. The first step is making the *cost of inaction* impossible to ignore. Rather than starting with a shiny solution—new D2C site, retail media partnership, data clean room—he focuses leadership on the risk of standing still: eroding share as competitors own the digital shelf, rising media costs without corresponding data, missed chances to influence consideration before a shopper walks into a store. When leaders experience those gaps as concrete P&L threats, transformation stops being a “nice to have” and becomes mandatory.
From there, the mantra is “test small, scale fast.” In Beko’s world, that might mean piloting a new direct‑to‑consumer proposition in a single market, testing a retail media–OOH combination around a specific retailer, or building a new ecommerce content model for one category before rolling it across the portfolio. The point is to compress the proof cycle: show real revenue or margin impact quickly, document the playbook, and then expand through the existing governance frame. This approach, Brucato notes, also lowers resistance from local teams who worry that global initiatives will steamroll their realities; when they see a pilot born in one market and then refined collaboratively, it feels less like a mandate and more like a shared win.
Making transformation stick also requires reframing internal roles. Brucato positions his central ecommerce team less as a controller and more as a service hub: providing shared assets, performance benchmarks and tools that make local teams more effective. That includes standardized dashboards, content templates and test‑and‑learn frameworks that can plug into both digital and OOH planning. In markets where retail partners are particularly strong, that hub helps ensure that D2C experiments are incremental, not cannibalistic—an especially sensitive topic in categories dominated by long‑standing channel relationships.
First‑party data sits at the heart of this evolution. For Beko, direct‑to‑consumer is not about replacing retailers but about enriching the overall ecosystem with better insight into who the end consumer is and how they behave across touchpoints. Those insights, from product registration to service interactions, can then inform everything from creative messaging to where and when OOH should be deployed. An area with high density of older appliances nearing replacement, for instance, becomes a prime candidate for contextually relevant street‑level messaging that pushes shoppers toward preferred online and offline retail partners.
Brucato is clear that omnichannel is not a slogan but an operating principle. That means digital teams and trade marketers work from shared objectives, media plans are built to move people fluidly between screens and streets, and success is judged on end‑to‑end outcomes rather than channel vanity metrics. In Europe’s patchwork of markets, it also means being realistic about the pace of change: some countries leapfrog into advanced ecommerce behaviors; others remain store‑first but digitally influenced. The frame must be strong enough to hold that variability without collapsing into chaos.
For OOH stakeholders, Beko’s journey offers a blueprint for staying relevant in a digital‑first commerce world. As brands like Beko centralize ecommerce strategy and data, media owners that can plug their inventory into that frame—through flexible formats, location intelligence and attribution partnerships—stand to benefit. The future Brucato is building is not one where physical touchpoints disappear, but one where every screen, shelf and billboard is orchestrated around a single, locally resonant, data‑informed shopper journey. In that world, scale and relevance are no longer opposites; they are designed to reinforce each other.