Stand Out

Examples of ads produced at the start of the pandemic that remarkably resemble each other.

This past spring, businesses were forced to acclimate to the new world order due to the global pandemic. Remarkably, advertisers cued up the same melancholy piano music accompanying the opener “In these uncertain times…” and “We’re here for you.” At DDR Global, we encourage our clients to think about ways to stand out from the crowd. One way is to translate this type of creative content into different languages. We try to make this process as seamless as possible for our clients. First, we ensure we understand the intent of the original content, what the advertiser is aiming to convey, and in what context. Next, we identify their target audience. It isn’t enough to say people who speak Spanish. We drill down further and pinpoint whether they are talking to immigrants in the U.S., third generation bilinguals, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Guatemalans, Mexicans, Spaniards. Once answered, we proceed with our creative adaptation, and think through different combinations of words that potentially resonate with the target audience, but do not read like a literal translation. Then, we translate our creative back into English to test whether we have captured the spirit and intent of the original content. Lastly, we tweak the foreign language versions based on the back translations, until we arrive at several potential options. By collaborating with our clients throughout this entire process, not only do we allow them to stay on message regardless of the language, we enable them to differentiate themselves by speaking the languages of their multilingual customers.