Languages in international advertising campaigns:

the transcreator

by Mario De Bortoli & Jesús Maroto

At a time when globalisation is becoming more and more a reality, and the world of the media
is becoming more complex and fragmented, advertisers are increasingly facing new
challenges. One of the biggest challenges is cross-cultural communication, and now more so
than at any other time before.
While the problem of languages in international campaigns has been debated for many years,
the advent of new media and in particular the Internet, has substantially modified the
advertising environment and increased the need for multilingual communication.
The globalisation of the market means that today companies are addressing an incredibly
varied target, with many different languages and cultures. But while until recently
international campaigns were little more than translated domestic campaigns, adapted for
foreign markets with the help of a good briefing, some consultancy, and an advertising
translator, needs have now changed.
Many brands now depend heavily on foreign sales and they have to be able to engage in a
two-way communication with the consumers, earning their respect in each market. Consumers
are much more sophisticated and demanding, and new media – in particular the Internet,
interactive television and even the mobile phone - have introduced the expectation of
interaction and dialogue with the brand in their own language and within their own cultural
framework. In fact, this is becoming a must since research shows that “Users perceive a company
more favourably when they see a version of its web site in their mother tongue, regardless of their English
proficiency (Hayward & Tong, 2001)”. Fulfilling all of these expectations implies the steady
creation of a great quantity of content and communication suited to each different market
while trying to keep a good level of brand consistency across markets to generate brand value.
This involves a strong need for co-ordinated action.

In this kind of environment, the old model of creative process in which a campaign is first
developed in one language (generally English) for a dominating home market, and then
adapted for less significant foreign markets at the very end, is no longer satisfactory. Not only
are foreign sales becoming increasingly important, but campaigns are not just about products
but about brand values which have to find their place in the value system of each target
culture.

The first consequence of this evolution in markets and in brand communication needs is that
most creatives and copywriters no longer have the full picture of who their target market is.
More and more often the creative of an international campaign and the majority of his target
market don’t speak the same language, and don’t share the same culture. To this one should
add the prejudice that creatives used to work for traditional (offline) media have for the online
world. In some extreme cases, creative teams who have never bought anything online and
who are English monolinguals, create campaigns for e-business clients with a 60 to 70% non-
English speaking target (non-English speakers constitute 63% of the world’s online
population according to recent Global Reach findings).
Such a lack of awareness would never be tolerated for domestic campaigns, and it should not
be tolerated for international campaigns either.

If in the past, consultants and translators could help solve the dilemma for old-style one-way
communication campaigns without too many problems, in our interactive and dialogue-prone
new media age, where feedback is immediate, sensibilities heightened, and news travel fast
(especially those about cultural faux-pas), “The language function needs to be permanently ingrained in
the communication process, a language function which covers a much wider spectrum of competences than that
of pure linguistic transcoding (Guidère, 2002)”.

By integrating the language function within the creative process from a very early stage, any
language and cultural issue can be assessed and solved during the creative phase. This can be
done with the introduction of a new figure within the creative team, that we will name the
trans-creator, who would have a role of mediation between the creative leader and the target
culture, and who would prove very useful in helping to protect brand consistency across
markets.

The resulting modified creative team would be better equipped to deal with today’s global
markets, and the Internet could be one of its most valuable work tools.

The role and purpose of the trans-creator

Why should a trans-creator be needed, when there are already plenty of translators and
localisation companies to do the job out there?
There are a number of reasons, all of which aim at a greater effectiveness of international
campaigns and ultimately at cost savings and improved revenues. One of the main reasons is
the above-mentioned new need for a two-way brand-consumer dialogue, where contact is
practically permanent, and the brand and its communicator have to be always abreast of new
developments. When this intensive level of communication covers several markets and
different languages the task becomes very complex. Ideally a creative leader should be able to
work, create and process feedback in more than one language, but people who can integrate
top creative skills with top foreign language skills are rare, especially where a very deep-
rooted awareness of foreign cultures is required. And when the number of different languages
and cultures in which one has to operate increases beyond a certain limit, the gap in language
and cultural awareness becomes too wide for one person to bridge, and the volume of content
too large for one person to manage. And the gap in awareness is precisely what the trans-
creator is there to fill. He acts as an ambassador, an alter ego of the creative leader, who can
provide him with the missing perceptive ability for a given language, and the needed insight
to produce messages adapted to the relevant culture. As for co-ordinating different languages
and managing big content volumes, help is provided by technology (as we will see later).
Analysing what a trans-creator could actually be doing for the creative team will help us
understand how distinctive international campaigns are and how important this role is. Let us
begin a short travel through the linguistic function of an international campaign.

Briefing Function
The first function of the trans-creator is therefore that of briefing the creative leader with all
the most important facts and information about the brand perception in his specific foreign
market. For best results, the creative leader and the trans-creator should be capable of working
as one, with the trans-creator supplying exactly the information that the creative leader needs,
and the creative leader able to guide and trust the trans-creator as if he were his own eyes and
ears for that given language. The trans-creator is needed because “Creative people are often quite
bad at distinguishing between concepts which are striking because they sound good in their own language, and
concepts which are striking because they are actually based on a more universal truth which will appeal to
human beings on a profounder level, irrespective of language and culture (Anholt, 1998)”.

However, good results can never be achieved if the work relationship between the two is not
long term. In the end, the judgement of the trans-creator will be instrumental in describing
what the brand perception is in a given market, and the trust that the creative leader has for the
trans-creator is the cornerstone on which the creative process will be built.

The need for a constant relationship, and a streaming briefing process is one of the main
reasons why briefings provided by external consultants can no longer be regarded as
sufficient. These give a snapshot of the situation at a given moment, while today’s
commercial communication is continuous and needs constant monitoring and feeding, in
particular on interactive media such as the Internet, where the brand-consumer relationship is
particularly intense. Only someone with a deep knowledge of a given market and culture can
correctly pick-up and interpret the feedback in a way that can benefit brand communication
production.

If some companies actually provide the advertising agency with very detailed and exhaustive
briefs, others are not as efficient. In either case the function of the trans-creator can be
precious. When there is a good brief, the trans-creator can filter and interpret the information
through his own experience of the market for the benefit of the creative leader, clarifying any
point that might not be clear, and even giving some creative input about what might work best
for a specific market, while in the case of a meagre brief, he can supplement any information
gap with his own findings. Being involved in the project from the outset means that the
research will be 100% relevant and to the point, saving considerable amounts of money in
non-relevant outsourced research, which then needs to be sieved through. But most
importantly, an early long-term involvement in the project as a full-fledged member of the
creative team, guarantees not only a good knowledge of all the issues and a greater focus in
the preliminary research, but also a permanent flow of information and therefore an up-to-date
image of the situation, which includes such important aspects as new legal provisions, brand
perception, competitive review, etc.
It is at this stage that the Internet can play a very important role.

The Internet as a tool for market research

The Internet has boosted globalisation opening new markets and annihilating distances,
however it also produced a platform on which the farthest and most diverse cultures are
rubbing shoulders, thus highlighting the challenges of cross-cultural communication in an
unprecedented way.

But the Internet did not only bring challenges. For the first time in history, we are offered the
opportunity to overcome these challenges by learning plenty about foreign cultures first hand.
It is there on the Internet for all to see: an enormous amount of content produced in your
target country is available to anyone 24 hours a day. Simply by spending some time browsing
websites from the target country you will immediately notice a difference in the general feel
of the local online communication. The things that matter are different (just visit a couple of
national newspapers websites), attitudes and opinions are different, and the relationship with
the brands is different.

In recent years, when global companies and their online advertising agencies started creating
international websites, they had to go through a steep learning curve. Very often they had to
learn the do’s and don’ts of international communication the hard way. The simple fact that,
according to Nielsen NetRatings, people spend a much longer time interacting with the brand
on the Internet meant that the content provided came under much closer scrutiny, and
therefore any error or gaffe would be a lot more likely to be picked up. Communicators also
had to learn that “Multi-language online strategy is about more than translating a website into a handful of
languages. It is about meeting global business objectives by tuning into the cultural dynamics of the local
markets (New Media Age, 9 September 1999)”.

The sheer size of the interface between brands and consumers offered by the Internet is
unprecedented, with a huge volume of constantly updated content streaming from the brand to
the consumer and an amazing flow of feedback streaming back. A brand’s website can help
establish a portrait of its target market infinitely faster and more accurately than traditional
channels, since the cycle of trial and error is much quicker.

In a few years of international Web presence, brands can accumulate a staggering corpus of
knowledge of local market culture, which can provide precious indications for offline
campaigns. What is more, the information gathered is 100% relevant to the brand and does
not include a huge amount of unnecessary data. Companies are interested in how the target
market relates to them, and not in becoming experts in every aspect of a country.
Unfortunately most of the time such specific knowledge goes to waste because online
communications are kept largely separate from offline activities, leading to error repetition
and loss of revenue, this time on a bigger scale.

Therefore the first step to take to improve the quality and the success rate of international
campaigns - thus cutting costs and increasing the return on investment - is to make full use of
the enormous cultural quarry represented by the brand’s websites. And no one could do this
better than the trans-creator himself.

With all the information that he can derive from Internet market analysis, he will be able to
provide a very clear picture of the target to the international creative team, helping at the same
time to prevent any error, misinterpretation or faux pas. This will in turn reduce the need for
later corrective action, thus reducing costs.

Preventing inconsistency
Another problem which plagues big international campaigns is inconsistency across media
and not necessarily across languages, since it is important to avoid “too much” consistency
between markets. Otherwise, “In presenting a face to the world, a company risks presenting the wrong face
to entire nations (Child et al, 2002)”. The real problem tends to happen between different marketing
channels within a same language. The increased need for a strong brand-consumer dialogue
requires more and more the use of media synergies to convey the message to an increasingly
atomised market. However, both marketing departments and advertising agencies are often ill
equipped to fulfil expectations.

A real-life example we could make is that of a large corporation that decided to launch a
promotional campaign for a product across several countries, in which the TV campaign, the
Direct Marketing activity and the online activity would be each led by a different department,
none communicating with each other. This meant that the campaign message was translated
three times (loss of money) in three different ways (loss of consistency). However the TV and
the DM were to drive traffic to both Points of Sale and to the website. And the website was to
generate traffic to the Point of Sale. The DM was also responsible for setting up the POS. The
discrepancies were therefore going to become practically impossible to miss by the target
audience. A few days before the launch of the campaign, by pure chance, a member of the
online department noticed the discrepancy in the advertising headline on the TV ad’s
superscript, and the one used online in his native language. This prompted other checks, and
the realisation of across the board inconsistencies in all languages. Urgent editing work had to
be carried out at an enormous cost, and in some cases the discrepancies could not be removed.

This example perfectly illustrates the need for greater integration across all media
(convergence), and the need for an in-house co-ordinator for each language to centrally
control the message. This is another function that the trans-creator would be entrusted with.
The task is quite vast and delicate, but modern technology could help him in managing the
right level of localisation consistency both across media and between campaigns, contributing
to earn brand value internationally. We are now going to analyse in which way the creative
process of an international campaign differs from a traditional one, what its benefits are and
which technologies could assist the process.

The international campaign requires a new process

Strengthening the creative leadership is one of the benefits, which best justify a greater
integration of the linguistic function into the creative process of international campaigns, and
the subsequent de facto modification of the creative team structure.
When the scope of campaigns remains within national boundaries, the traditional creative
team works perfectly, following a creative process that has been tested and improved over the
years, becoming very efficient and yielding good results.

At the centre of the creative process lies the creative director who is in control of the whole
creative process, from the briefing to the output of the campaign. If the brief lacks
information, he may require some extra clarifications from his client or his planners then he
interprets what the client wants and thinks of a way of conveying the message to the target
audience. This is followed by the phase of approval/negotiation of the idea with the client, and
then by the production and implementation of the campaign. The creative director is then able
to decipher and assess the feedback directly and immediately, the results appear clear and
obvious straightaway, and praise or blame can be attributed with a certain level of certainty.

These nicely oiled mechanisms, however, seem to break down when it comes to international
campaigns. The creative director finds himself in the foggy world of unfamiliar cultures. Even
if a brief is very detailed and complete with regard to the consumers of a foreign country, he
lacks the cultural parameters to evaluate the data and the expectations. He may fail to ask
questions and clarifications because they do not even occur to him. What are vital issues in a
foreign market are irrelevant to him. External consultants might warn him about the most
obvious pitfalls, but he will never have the ease and confidence of perception that he enjoys in
his home market: the creative director and his team suffer from a knowledge deficit. Since
they cannot produce a campaign with the full awareness of its potential effect, their
communication becomes more disempowered, and the creative leadership is exposed to
criticism by local agencies and markets, and can be challenged.

At this point the process can follow two routes: either the campaign is developed as if it were
for the home market and then translated and adapted for the foreign market by translators and
localisation specialists (a similar approach to the one predicted by David Ogilvy back in 1983
in his book Ogilvy in advertising), or the creative work is carried out by different creative
teams in each of the relevant markets.

In the first case (the centralised approach) the creative director, and the client too, feel
reassured because they are acting within known territory, only to risk big disappointments
when the campaign is launched in foreign markets: the creative director and his team could
end up creating content which, with a better awareness of the target market, they would never
dare to release. Additionally, this approach entails that the creation of the foreign campaign is
totally entrusted to an external translator, whose work will be difficult to evaluate by the
creative director, and which could therefore not be in line with what the client wants.
Traditionally the evaluation and final approval is performed by the client’s country managers,
but this practise is fraught with dangers: country managers can evaluate if the language is
correct, but they do not have the wider picture of the whole campaign and lack the sensitivity
that a professional creative/copywriter has to tell a good translation from a great translation.
Moreover, relying on the client (the country manager is also the client) for linguistic feedback
and cultural consultancy can make both the creative director and the client nervous for fear of
repercussions, and it gives the client an extra chance to judge you.
Additionally, translating a ready-made campaign into a foreign language places an
unreasonable burden on the translator. He is considered the sole responsible of the success or
failure of a campaign in a given market, even when that market was not considered during the
creation of the campaign in the first place.

In the second case (the decentralised approach), brand and message consistency are at risk,
and the result might alienate the client who can feel that certain markets have strayed too far
from the core values of the brand. But there are worse implications to the decentralised
approach: not only does the implementation of a single big idea become practically
impossible - thus totally undermining the creative leadership - but because of what we will
call the primadonna effect (creatives from different local agencies squabbling about the
superiority of their ideas), local creative teams will be very reluctant to recognise such
leadership, and local centrifugal forces will tend to make an overall control of the campaign
practically impossible.

In the end it becomes virtually impossible for the lead agency to determine who is responsible
for what. According to campaign results, there is a serious chance that a client might envisage
a change of lead agency, albeit within the same network, and this is a result that no agency
aspires to.

What can be done? It is quite simple. By working in close contact with a trans-creator, the
creative leader (as opposed to the creative director) can retain control of the international
campaign to levels that are (almost) equal to that of domestic campaigns. Their relationship
has to be close, but the payoff can be substantial: the creative leadership can be restored.

The first pre-requisite for the relationship between creative leader and trans-creator to work, is
for them to realise that they are working together on the creation and implementation of a
single big idea across more than one culture, and that this requires a strong leadership. A
single idea across cultures is possible because “Humans always say the same things, albeit in different
languages. The universality of the spirit was the response to the Babelic confusion: there are many languages,
but meanings remains the same (Paz, 1971)”. The creative leader and the trans-creator have to be
aware that the level of success of a campaign can be consistent across markets only if the
creative leader is prepared to listen and use the trans-creator’s advice all along the creative
process, and trust it as if it came from a part of his own brain. Being both part of the same
team means that comments, suggestions and amendments can be done in total frankness,
freedom, and confidentiality, without fear of being judged by the client as is the case when
these functions are carried out by the country manager.

When the trans-creator eventually translates the campaign that the creative director has
developed in a much higher state of awareness of the foreign market (thanks the constant
contribution of the trans-creator himself), he will have to explain to the creative leader how
and why the translated version is going to work, so that both can agree whether the overall
campaign conveys a consistent message, and whether this message is the one desired. This is
why we chose the name trans-creator: his job is not only translating, but also that of guiding
the creative director in the process of creation, by providing background information, by
interpreting feedback, by contributing creative ideas, by managing localisation consistency
and by sharing responsibility for success and failures.

Which technology?
Having described the complex function that a trans-creator would have in an international
campaign, we can wonder if there is any technology that could assist him in his numerous
tasks.
First of all one should consider that international campaigns often involve a large number of
languages, which implies that one creative leader is going to be working with several trans-
creators. Managing a big team like that could prove difficult in a traditional environment, but
if the whole creative team was connected to a computer network equipped with content and
workflow management software and tools, the task would become easier and the whole
process more transparent. Everyone could have access to brief, country reports and statistics,
brand history, observations, studies, focus group reports, etc. A content management tool
could also greatly improve consistency and possibly reduce costs (all departments responsible
for a particular media could access the same localised copy and therefore avoid having to
localise content once again). This approach could eventually incorporate a globalisation
management solution. This kind of tool would help the advertising agency benefit from
technologies that the software localisation industry has been using for the last 10 years. For
instance, automating the translation process, using translation memory software and a
terminology repository.

The total software make-up should include database type software facilitating data gathering
and analysis that is relevant to the brand and the market. It would allow the country manager
to supply data on the brand and on the market, but it would also allow access to relevant
databases, owned either by the brand, the advertising agency or a service provider with whom
the creative team holds a subscription.
The trans-creator could also create a database of relevant articles found on the Internet, or a
database of relevant legal regulations.
Once the creative comes up with an idea and he tries to develop it, trans-creators could upload
their comments on the message boards of the workflow management tool, so that any issue
and change can be followed in real time by the whole team, speeding up times and saving
money and effort. These messages could also be collected for future reference. This kind of
constant monitoring of the work in progress will prevent the development of untranslatable
campaigns and the need for expensive corrective action.
The use of content management tools will also enable the pooling of all content for use on the
most disparate media. First of all content will be created and translated in parallel and only
once. It will then be used for any need from TV to brochures, from radio to the Internet, just
by picking the needed elements and tweaking them where necessary, thus saving on
duplicated material. TV ads can be recycled in interactive banners for the Internet, the same
text can be used for a brochure, a press or an SMS campaign. Software applications like
Adobe® Graphics Server 2 allow to automatically generate graphics from content stored in a
database. This means that the designer need not cut and paste copy and create the graphic,
thus avoiding possible mistakes; the application uses the localised copy produced by the
translator.
When it comes to text translation and adaptation, consistency and speed can be greatly
improved by using translation memory tools and terminology management systems. These
will prove particularly useful in long-running campaigns, which reappear at regular intervals,
or in corporate communication in the legal, financial and technical sector, where the quantity
of information provided can be rather significant and where terminology and consistency are
paramount. For short, small one-off campaigns, of course, their use would be a waste of time.
Other technologies and services that can be useful are the ones like Adslogans.co.uk where
one can check if an endline or tagline has already been used before. If a similar service does
not exist in his target market, a trans-creator could create a database with all taglines and
endlines relevant to his product that he comes across in the press of the target market.
In short, modern technology has a huge role to play in the successful implementation of the
trans-creator function within international creative teams and in helping the achievement of
truly international campaigns.

Benefits
What are the benefits that this approach to international campaigns can have for all involved?
Let us make a small list for each of the above-mentioned actors.

Benefits for the brand

 Greater brand consistency across markets
 Decreased risk of communication or branding issues
 Greater level of implementation of brand values
 Better understanding of the target audience
 Increased effectiveness of communication
  Centralisation of campaign management
 Faster delivery (no need for corrective action; knowledge accumulation)
 More added value and ROI
 Better campaign monitoring
 Expansion into smaller markets made viable by decreased costs of advertising
adaptation.

Benefits for the creative leader

 Retention of creative leadership
 Better understanding of target market
 Clearer briefs
 Decreased risk of error
 Judgement-free arena for debate and improvement

Benefits for the team

 More collaborative and inspiring work
 Better understanding of other cultures’ point of view
 Increased effectiveness
 Clear leadership
 Clearer tasks and accountability

Benefits for the agency

 Retention of account leadership
 More consistent creative style and no primadonna effect
 Significant savings because of decreased errors
 Significant savings thanks to software tools
 More service and added value for the client
 More experienced and savvy staff in the long-term
 Perfect training ground for future creative leaders
 Greater client satisfaction
 Better control over the whole process
 Great selling point in pitches
 Ability to increase content output rate (esp. for New Media)
 Better campaign monitoring
 Etc...

Conclusions
The conclusions we can draw from this article is that international campaigns could greatly
benefit from the integration of the language function within the creative team at an early stage
of the creative process, not only because the dialogue with the consumer is now permanent,
but also because it is two-way, and a dialogue implies that both interlocutors must understand
the language.
Early involvement of the trans-creator and intelligent use of modern technology, especially
technology traditionally associated with software localisation, can reduce costs dramatically,
both in terms of averted duplications and mistakes, better exploitation of synergies and
improved brand consistency.
There are also new opportunities opening up, since reduced localisation costs mean that
previously unviable markets can now be exploited.
New technological solutions can be implemented which can yield great results, and more
solutions could be developed around each client’s need.
International campaigns offer a new niche in which language specialists with a good
technological knowledge can make a great difference, and the first advertising agencies to
notice this will have a significant competitive edge.
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