In a globalized economy and increasingly connected communications landscape, accurate and authentic localization becomes crucial for brands to relate with audiences across markets. But good localization goes beyond simply translating content into different languages; it’s a matter of recognizing cultural meaning and injecting relevance into a message as well.

This requires brands to perform a careful and precise balancing act by being authentic to local audiences while staying faithful to the overall brand message. “The biggest challenge for everyone is to get the right tonality of the campaign, but also for the culture and markets—and still safeguarding the message of the big idea and brands,” says Petra van Veldhooven, Business Director at MediaMonks.

As speaking to a global audience becomes more important to success across industries, brands can’t treat transcreation as an afterthought. In fact, Forrester reports that that “cross-border shopping will make up 17% of ecommerce in 2023,” especially for shoppers based in China and the United States.1 With a focus on ecommerce, a space that’s become largely democratized thanks to user-friendly digital shopping platforms, it becomes clear that the need for better transcreation is no longer just a concern for global enterprise—which means brands must implement scalable solutions for any level of transcreation.

Lay a Strong Foundation for Localization

Transcreation requires brands to develop a more efficient production process, making careful planning a key component. “While it’s not possible to localize every product in every market, it is important to have a strategic view towards localization,” writes Nielsen. “To maximize growth, you must focus on the right opportunities—and that often means examining consumer insights at a market-by-market or even household level.”

Strategy is critical to success, and in an ideal scenario, transcreation is accounted for at the highest level of creation. “It’s important to have someone who’s client-side and understands the process, who understands what comes later,” says Jose Tirado, Senior Producer at MediaMonks. “The most important thing is preparation from early in the creative stage.” This means producing master assets in such a way that accounts for easy revision for localization—for example, filming different versions of a video to portray different cultures.

Both Tirado and van Veldhooven worked on a project to transcreate a safety campaign for Uber, spread to 27 different countries and comprising 2,400 assets. Given previous transcreation work, Uber made a conscious decision not to include too many images in the transcreated elements, opting to keep the process focused on copy instead for flexible editing. Because Uber and their agency supplied the master assets, this shows how acknowledgment of the overall process from the beginning mitigates common localization challenges further down the line.

Strategize by Blending Media and Creative

Perhaps the most significant way that brands can ensure a smooth transcreation process is by aligning their creative and media strategies. Establishing a clear media strategy per market ensures your master assets are available in every format and size needed, whether it be a square photo or social-first vertical video.

If this volume of formats is difficult for your brand to forecast, an end-to-end partner can help. “Visibility into consumer insights, media and creative enables transcreation efficiently at scale,” says MediaMonks Founder and COO Wesley ter Haar. United with our sister company MightyHive, which helps brands build their media capabilities to ensure relevance across the user experience, MediaMonks is acutely positioned to help brands strategize the full process— from establishing the creative concept to diversifying it per market needs.

If working with a partner, brands require one with global expertise that can offer authentic, local messaging. A simple example of this is knowing what can and can’t be shown on-screen in some countries, and accounting for differences in regulations. A partner that can offer a local authenticity bolstered with global understanding can help brands go far in providing more relevant, resonant digital experiences. In the Uber safety campaign, for instance, we went beyond just changing and translating the voice over by refreshing visual branding elements to provide a truly local, authentic feel.

Empower Local Teams through Delivery

Delivery is just as important as production when it comes to transcreating content, and empowering local teams to make the message is key to ensuring it’s genuine. For internationally known beer brand Amstel, for example, we not only produced over 200 assets for the brand; we developed a centralized marketing platform making it easy for local marketing teams to stitch together clips and copy into the perfect video for their audience.

This setup ensures that all messaging is consistent with brand guidelines and faithful to the message it wants to convey, while still allowing local markets to call their own shots, so to speak. It’s also incredibly scalable, allowing brands to easily grow their support for new markets. Whether you need content to last a calendar year or require more frequent deliverables—as provided by our global content hub exclusively for Avon, which also empowers local reps to mix and match tailored creative—we enjoy helping brands find a solution that best fits their specific transcreation needs.

Transcreation can be a complicated process, especially when it comes to managing a high volume of assets spread across dozens of markets and different channels. But with careful planning early in the creative process, brands can strategically scale up their messaging to a variety of markets through authentic transcreation.

1 How To Serve Cross-Border Shoppers In Today’s Global eCommerce Landscape, July 2019, Forrester.

Localization is a key challenge for any brand targeting several geographic markets, whether they be multinational or domestic. The way you’ll talk to a New Yorker about pizza, after all, might resonate differently with an audience in Italy. This gets at the heart of what good localization really is: it’s not just a matter of translation, but of paying special care to include the smaller details and nuances that appeal to a specific market.

Pulling off this level of transcreation can be tough due to the sheer volume of assets needed per market, the knowledge required about what markets respond to, and complex processes that hamper brands’ abilities to push this content out efficiently. For organizations struggling with any of these challenges, an integrated production partnership can help optimize transcreation workflows and implement local to infuse campaigns with a high level of local relevance around the globe.

An integrated production partnership is a team custom-built for your brand and its specific needs. Rather than brief an agency on a project, an integrated partnership focuses on the long-term and can scale up or down according to your need, whether it be through growth in consistent, daily responsibilities or sudden one-off projects. Working partially in-house, an integrated team provides access to a varied talent base across the globe, making the model a practical solution for brands seeking to provide local relevancy to always-on content.

Streamline Production for Growth

Inefficient transcreation isn’t just a matter of audience reach; it can impede growth as well. For example, one of our integrated partners is a digital brand that’s experienced very rapid growth through the acquisition of local businesses. With every new acquisition and market came a new need for assets, burying their in-house studio with an ever-increasing workload. An integrated partnership enabled the brand to offload lower complexity tasks and speed up the production process to match the rate of growth.

For some brands, a social media presence or their chosen industry might require an ever-quickening pace of asset production. This challenge rises exponentially for those catering to different local markets. An entertainment brand, for example, must react to current events across markets with speed, understanding how a given story’s relevance might differ among those markets. Because integrated partnerships thrive on long-term relationships and provide organizations with teams that are dedicated to their brands, they can streamline the production process by enabling daily deliverables rather than use a project-oriented approach. When brands feel increased pressure to develop always-on content ecosystems targeting different markets and cultures, an integrated partnership with access to a global talent base is ideal for offering the right message at the right time.

Improve Consistency Across Markets with New Creative Frameworks

Offloading tasks is simple enough, though the true potential of an integrated partnership is to optimize workflows across levels of the production process. A common challenge for large, global organizations is that they juggle several vendors per market, which can complicate the production process or threaten quality and consistency.

Through the guidance or talent resources provided by an integrated partnership, brands can provide local markets with autonomy to tailor messaging without having to worry about inconsistent style or messaging. While it might seem as though such a partnership is inviting yet another outside vendor into the process, this model is developed for the long term around a sense of shared responsibility. Custom-built and engrained within your organization’s culture, integrated partnerships have deep knowledge of a brand and can therefore serve as a safeguard.

Let’s consider another partner as an example. Its US team controlled asset production in other markets including Asia, which resulted in messaging that wasn’t necessarily relevant to them. This prompted local markets to work with their own vendors to develop assets with more cultural relevance. While they succeeded in that effort, the new materials lacked consistency. As the adage says, “too many cooks spoil the broth.” In this case, inviting several voices and vendors in the mix resulted in an inconsistent brand experience.

Our solution was to find a way to give room for freedom and autonomy to local markets while still allowing for a centralized work stream. At MediaMonks, we’re well-experienced in producing assets at scale through a unique creative framework that allows for several variations with little rework or added cost. We adapted this process for our partner by producing a series of master templates which would ensure a consistent visual style, while also being easy for local markets to adapt. This approach maintained flexibility while also quickening the time to market. “What sets this process apart is that transcreation is kept at front-of-mind and engrained into the process rather than being treated as an afterthought,” says Louise Martens, Executive Producer at MediaMonks LA.

A Talent Studio That Knows Your Brand—And Your Local Audience

Finally, our integrated partnerships provide brands with access to an always-on, global talent studio that can easily place a brand in any market. When a brand sees an opportunity in a new market, we can tap into a local talent pool with an awareness of what resonates there. “This flexibility in matching organizations to the larger MediaMonks network whenever needed is one of the key capabilities of integrated partnerships,” says Martens, “and is especially helpful for organizations that know no borders.”

Whether your organization is eyeing opportunities in new markets, is dealing with an unmanageable workload or simply needs to ensure a greater level of consistency across markets, an integrated partnership makes for a versatile, scalable model designed to fit those needs. Once in place, your team is equipped to adapt to new opportunities and challenges that can help your organization work faster and more efficiently, resulting in better ways to meet the needs of your audience no matter where they call home.

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