Team Global vs Team Local

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative Director
https://www.LopezMartiMiami.com/

• A few days back I elaborated on a service we provide in the ad biz called “transcreation”.
• When simply translating an ad campaign is not enough or not advisable.
• Sometimes the need presents itself to culturally localize a campaign because it was created with strategic insights &/or creative premises &/or executional decisions that might sound foreign or be misconstrued by a certain target audience.
• Shortly thereafter, a colleague reminded me of the portmanteau “glocal”.
• Is it possible to create a campaign that is both global & local?
• Yes.
• Extremely difficult though.
• It’s the perennial debate in the marketing & advertising industry.
• Welcome to the rabbit hole.
• One side of the argument claims that an effective ad campaign must be global.
• Meaning that anyone anywhere should understand it with as little need for translation as possible.
• Some folks used to call it the “total market” approach.
• This premise STRONGLY applies to any campaign that aspires to win international awards.
• The logic being that it will eventually be judged by a multinational jury.
• Any cultural cue with the potential of compromising the clarity of the message adds a layer of friction that will lessen
• its chances of earning a statue, trophy or diploma.
• Juries review hundreds of campaign executions.
• Your chances of winning will be higher if the idea can be easily and quickly understood by mentally exhausted Danish or Vietnamese juries.
• Which brings to mind a line allegedly uttered by famous African American entrepreneur Elon Musk: “a product that requires an owner’s manual is a defective product.”
• If he really said it, he has a point.
• Universal ideas are cosmopolitan.
• They cross borders with little or no adaptation.
• For certain brands and products, it is true that a creative idea based on universal premises or insights and executed in such a way that it doesn’t require translation is bullet proof.
• The iPod launch campaign “Silhouette” comes to mind (courtesy of legendary LA agency TBWA/Chiat Day.
• Another brilliant example of such a campaign was rolled out by López Martí Miami (LOL) for its client Recuerdo Mezcal under the motto “Memorable”.
• See, non-Spanish speakers do not know Recuerdo is Spanish for memory, remembrance, souvenir, memento, etc.
• Memorable means exactly the same thing in English, Spanish and even French.
• Problem solved.
• The other school of thought, lets call it Team Local, advocates for maximum cultural localization.
• The more granular the better.
• They have a point too.
• Marketing’s at its best when it fits the target audience’s behavioral drivers like a glove.
• If your campaign can be laser-like in its focus on a certain demographic, the odds that it will be more effective are greater.
• Moreover, if your campaign is built on cultural insights that are privy to a certain demographic, it will most possibly build a strong emotional bond with its target audience.
• This, my dear brothers and sisters, is the bedrock of the US Hispanic market.
• Its bread and butter.
• Its motte and bailey.
• Rhetorical question: which brand is more inclusive: one that uses a one-size-fits-all approach to its marketing efforts?
• A brand that builds its messaging around color blindness, cosmopolitanism and gender agnosticism?
• Or is inclusiveness about acknowledging and catering to everyone’s peculiarities?
• What Hollywood types call representation.
• Globalism has a problem though: if campaigns are crafted by a handful of multicultural illuminati in, say, New York City, it can make redundant an awful lot of ad people across the world.
• Localism, on the other hand, can turn every irrelevant decision into a global minefield of micromanagement, turf wars and red tape.
• The Tower of Babel.
• If it is hard enough to have a campaign greenlit by clients of only one nationality, imagine what happens when you need a nod from Americams, Mexicans, Colombians, Argentines.
• Throw in a few Spaniards, Brazilians and even Canadians.
• It is a minefield.
• And remember, it’s Colombia, not Columbia.