Industry Issue: Lost In Translation

One important thing to know about advertising in an international market is that you must be sensitive to others cultures, and languages. Most advertisers who market over seas, or who just market to the large (and growing) Hispanic market in the United States, will over look this fine detail. This has been a topic of discussion in a few media classes that I have taken at Ithaca College. One famous example was the "Got Milk" campaign.

The "Got Milk" campaign is a national canpaign in the United States done by Gooby Silverstein & Partners, to entice people to start purchasing and drinking milk again. When they translated the slogan into Spanish they realized that the literal traslation meant "Are You Lactating?" NOT "Got Milk". They than did the smart thing and hired Siboney USA, a spanish-language advertising agency, to do an adaptation of the campaign. This is a very common occurance in the advertising industry. Companies try to traslate their own campaigns without the help of professionals in the foreign market. According to a survey done by TransPerfect Traslations Inc. in 2003, "of 513 people surveyed, 57% said they had spotted advertising that was incorrectly translated from English into other languages. [article: Lost In Translation The Wall Street Journal Europe - September 19,2003}

TransPerfect Translations Inc. is a service with the mission "to provide the highest quality language services to leading businesses worldwide." It is agencies like these that save companies from running into trouble while expanding to other cultures, like the Coca-Cola co. when it first came out in the 1920s.

Coke expanded to a global proportion in the 1920s. In China, shopkeepers who sold the product tried to find characters that translated the brand name. The literal translation turned out to be something along the lines of "female horse stuffed with wax" [Lost In Translation].

Companies and marketers just aren't allocating enough money and time to foreign campaigns. They spend as little time as possible on translating the copy. It isn't enough to just translate. Companies now need to adapt campaigns to the foreign culture or they might be at risk of loosing an entire demographic.

I now make a call to action, for marketers and advertisers to stop being lazy!! And start paying attention to the cultures of their demographics and to start catering to those people.

iPhone travels across the pond

Apple has chosen O2, the leading wireless carrier in the UK, to offer the iPhone to UK customers. Their website posted a press release on Sept 18th but information about the deal for over a week. The race to carry the iPhone was a global competition between four of the top carriers in Europe, O2, T Mobile (Germany), Orange (France), Vodaphone, and O2 (who ultimately "won").
It seems that O2 will be sharing much of its revenue from selling the iPhones as part of their contract with Apple. According to an article from the Guardian O2 will be sharing 40% of its revenue with Apple. Wowza!!!
Despite this, other carriers are still vying for a bite of the Apple. T-Mobile is rumored to have signed a contract with Apple to make the iPhone available in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Hungary and Croatia. (CNN Money) This has yet to be confirmed but I believe that the iPhone's availability in the UK has laid the ground work for new expansion of Apple's product in all of Europe.

Get in the LOOP: ProductionPoint

News Flash:
I just stumbled upon this amazing free networking web page for companies who are in the entertainment industry. ProductionPoint is an international production consultant that has contributed to more than 1,000 productions in over 70 countries. Wow!! I think their slogan is genius: source. network. promote. Simple and to the point, clients don't need to be confused or bewildered by a complicated slogan and mission statement.

The productionpoint web site includes an internal search engine, making it easy to navigate the site, QPOINT, their forum for industry questions, WORLD UPDATE, which contains industry news from all over the world and one can filter by region as well, and P.O.V., discussion boards for the Advertising and Entertainment Industry.

I can see this website becoming the FACEBOOK of the entertainment industry. Its a state-of-the-art international resource for networking between the people of the Advertising industry and the international production scene. Membership is free. However, to receive a Preferred Listing status or to advertise on various pages, there are monthly fees. Check out ProductionPoint to network within the worldwide Advertising and Entertainment industries.

Industry Profile: BBDO

Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (better known at BBDO) is one of the largest names in global marketing/branding/advertising, and one of three large agencys in Omnicom. They have 287 offices in 77 countries around the world. I wanted to fill you in on this monster agency that has its foot WAY IN THE DOOR of global marketing and advertising.

BBDO has its regional headquarters in New York, but they have any branches to their network. Each branch is specific to a location or a type of advertising (ex. BBDO Russia or AtmosphereBBDO).

The organization of specialties within the entire BBDO agency is very impressive. As an Integrated Marketing Communications major in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College, in Ithaca, NY, I am intrigued by a large agency that can keep itself so organized and controlled internally. With such a large international network, I believe that integrated marketing communicationsis key to keeping all aspects of your company afloat.

Here is an interview with John Osborn courtesy of youtube.com

Analysis: Assumptions about audiences

In the article from Marketing Daily, Marketing to Single Women, Adreienne W Fawcett discusses the common misconceptions that marketers have about single women. She compares information from a Draft FCB survey of 500 advertising and marketing professionals in the U.S. to recent statistics. The conclusion that I have drawn from her observations is that marketers have just been stereotyping single women and don't bother to do the proper research that they would do for any other audience.

According to Fawcett's report, "marketing execs think single women are less educated, more adventuresome and richer than statistics indicate. They also are off the mark on the ethnicity of this market."

This makes me question, where do people in this industry get their audience information from? Is it all bullshit?

The other article I read with Portrait of the New Media Consumer by Peter Lauria. The article discusses the new consumer, 18 to 35 year olds who are media multitaskers, working on the computer doing research while texting on their phone and having the TV on in the background. I am that "media multitaker". I can be on the computer IMing, working on a paper, listening to music or a podcast, and talking on the phone.

Lauria sites two specific studies in his article, one done by Ball State University on "concurrent media exposure" and a Kaiser Family Foundation study on media multitasking among American youth. An interesting bit from the Ball State University is that most of the study's respondents "have been so exposed to media and are so adept at processing it that they didn't even realize how frequesntly then engage in concurrent mediea use." The study also found that 18 to 24 years olds spend more minutes a day interacting with media then any other group.

i'll POD your CAST

In this age of technology, everyone wants their opinion to be out there. Through blogs, vlogs and podcasts you can pretty much hear anyones opinion on any topic you would like.

I listened to Marketing Edge by Albert Maruggi. I would've have rather had it writtten, so that I could browse through it to actually find what I was interested in. Podcasts are great for traveling, putting them on your ipod and listening on the train or in the car. Blogs are more convinient to receive information, you can refer back to them, find the specific passage. When you want to refer back to a podcast you have to go and listen to the whole thing again. Not a fan of these podcast things. Not a fan!

How Interesting.....

Welcome to IntrAda Place. The domain for all things international related to advertising. It is important for all businesses, big or small, to have their eye on the international demographic and to keep up to date with whats going on over there. Its also important for companies who are planning to go global to understand the styles and regulations of advertising in the countries it will be marketing.

My job is to keep you up to date on all of that, as well as educate you on somethings about the international industry of advertising.

I leave you with this hilarious commericial: