At iMedia Brand Summit’s second day, 24/7 Real Media’s Matt Kain amused his audience with why global brands need search providers with global reach.
Even novice marketers know the story of General Motor’s folly in the 1960s, when the auto giant attempted to market the Nova in Mexico. Of course, in Spanish, the implication that a car “won’t go” in its name added an unwelcome degree of difficulty GM's sales efforts.
Matt Kain, senior vice president of business development for 24/7 Real Media, entertained the audience at this week's iMedia Brand Summit in Bonita Springs, Fla., with more and better examples of the Tower of Babel that well-executed search campaigns must scale far beyond mere brand name translations.
“When we talk about language, we see it as more than just translation of keywords,” Kain said. “Beyond literal translation, there are idiomatic nuances that must be taken into account among the different landing pages and approaches that include everything from knowing regional search engines to currency exchange rates for commerce sites."
Using branded, actual examples that demonstrated those differences, starting with the ubiquitous “Got Milk?” campaign that inappropriately could imply “are you lactating?” in other countries, Kain walked through numerous, sometimes salacious, scatological and often hilarious examples, of how popular brand messages routinely get lost in translation.
“Global brands must ask themselves ‘what language is our target searching in?’ to leverage global search,” Kain said. If it’s a Canadian campaign, French Canadians will search in a different language than English-speaking Canadians. The same differences arise for campaigns run in Switzerland and in some Asian companies. To generate strong results, the search agency has to have the right content to serve to each user’s query.”
Kain also pointed out that the idiomatic differences that must be aligned, from keywords through to a site’s landing page, don’t end there.
“Make certain that the phone number for contact information provided will be answered in the correct language too,” he said. “Search is no different than any other kind of direct marketing in that the advantages of working with a provider that has global reach will be realized at the local level. From the broader perspective, a brand or provider has an advantage since they can manage budget, seasonality and distribution. Because of these and other benefits, a single agency can consolidate many search engines in one view.
“However, this infrastructure must enable the flow down to regional silos, each of which has to have its own decision makers who can manage the local differences locally. Very few companies use one technology to do so. But, those who do can manage strategy centrally while distributing execution locally, which is the best of both worlds practice," he said.
Kain added that 24/7 Real Media has 19 offices in 12 countries throughout the Americas, Europe and the Pacific Rim. The company has developed API relationships with 50 search engines locally, enabling clients to regard global, extremely disparate campaigns through one report.
Kain, who joined 24/7 Real Media during the August 2004 acquisition of Australian firm Decide Interactive and its technology Decide DNA, manages global strategic relationships for 24/7 Real Media with all of its search engine partners.
He walked the audience through a case study featuring one of the world’s most popular dating destination sites, Lavalife, which has more than 600,000 active members throughout 65 markets in the United States, Canada and Australia.
This type of span enables 24/7 Real Media to develop a strategy from New York and execute it locally through three distinct regions: North America, Europe and the Pacific Rim. This also enables them to coordinate and centralize each regional execution with the head office more efficiently and run all the campaigns on a single database in the DNA technology.
24/7 is also able to execute a single consistent pixeling strategy across regions, with a replication of “same-ness” -- base keywords, base brand creative, et cetera.
This ongoing development retains its local flavor and best of all, at least from the client’s perspective, it's possible to see the “big picture” on a global level.
“For global marketers, it is important to understand that the importance of accommodating the variations from market to market,” Kai said. “New York is obviously different than Sydney or Singapore, and the differences in language, and in this case dating rituals, affects everything from keyword costs to bidding strategies. Regions have different competitive landscapes and that can mean wide ROI variations as well. Smart marketers must take these and other factors into account on every global campaign.”
Mark Naples is managing partner a WIT Strategy. Read full bio
