One of the biggest challenges for Global Brands is releasing campaigns throughout their media channel that can reach all of the markets they’re in without distorting the message they want to give.
And this is more complex than one might initially think, there’s a lot of cultural, language and ideological differences between America and Asia, just to give a really quick example, but when you’re releasing a campaign in markets throughout 5 or 6 different continents, these differences become key, and might represent the difference between a campaign being a success, or a failure.
So as someone trying to find the right vendor for the localization of your in-house built master campaigns, you might ask yourself, what do I need to keep in mind to choose that vendor?
We have a pretty good idea about that:
Organizational skills.
The usual localization campaign will include hundreds, or thousands, of different deliverables, so in order for every single piece of the puzzle in the right place, a lot of organizational skills must come into play.
Having an asset tracker is extremely important, and pretty much step one for our project managers in each project, that way you have a document where you know what’s the standing of each deliverable, who is building it, when it will be done, if we’re in need of getting a question answered or missing a linked file, every piece of information regarding every deliverable, will always be at your fingertips in the project’s asset tracker.
Keeping a standard folder structure and standard practices for editable files are two measurements we also take in every project, that assure our clients that not a single file handed to us will go missing, as we keep an untouched copy of everything you sent us, and also that every editable file we touch, can easily be worked on in the future for any new campaigns, which will not only save you headaches today, but also whenever you need to reuse the files in a few months.
Years of experience, hundreds of languages.
Even though our Creative and QA specialists might not speak in 100 languages, they have seen stuff written in them so much, that their eyes have become trained in identifying issues in these languages without even seeing the original text, of course they do, but when a right-to-left text got messed up from the translation sheet to photoshop/after effects, they can identify it right away.
At this point, most of the issues you’ll have to deal with when building localization campaigns (both static and animated), we have experienced, and we possibly already have a work-around or easy fix for it that our guys use in their day-to-day processes, so you’ll find us fixing problems more often than asking for help in the campaigns.
A standard workflow.
Throughout the build of thousands of static, animated and subtitle units, our teams have established a standard workflow for localization projects that contemplates every single item that needs attention paid to it, from the initial organization of the files in our local file server, to the way we check naming conventions and deliver final files (exported and editable) to our clients.
The only way a baker assures that their perfect bread is just as good every single time they take it out the oven, is by following the exact recipe every time and not missing any of the steps. Well, we see it the exact same way with Digital Production, if you have a recipe that results in seamless campaign production, you have to follow every single step, every single time a project comes in, and the result will always be the same, success.
Quality Assurance, quality assurance and more quality assurance.
It doesn’t matter if we’re delivering a complete campaign with multiple concepts and languages, or if we’re delivering a small text update in just one banner, everything we deliver our clients, goes through our rigorous QA team for an entire Quality Check to be performed, and yes, we have QA specialists in place, dedicated to review Online Advertising campaigns of every aspect, both creative and technical.
Additionally, our QA specialists have been specifically trained for localization in a pretty rigorous program where they become experts in the aesthetical part of typography for over 100 languages, which means that localization projects are not just checked by regular creative QA folks, but by people specifically trained in language reviewing.
The above mentioned, are our steps to success in any large scale big localization project, and if they’re followed, we guarantee that any project will go out just the same way it came in, in WAM Digital we assure our clients that our proof recipe to project success, is what we will follow with every single project you bring to our table.
