How agencies can launch Marvel sized campaigns with brutal simplicity.
$200,000,000. That’s how much Marvel spent to promote Avengers: Endgame worldwide.
That’s a lot of zeroes.
Blockbuster budgets for blockbusters movies are par for the course these days, but spending over $200 million on marketing alone really turned heads in the advertising community.
And you can see where the money went. Weeks before release, Avengers ads were everywhere – bus stops, subways, malls, you name it. Long-time fans around the world pored over every trailer release looking for hints at how some of their favorite heroes’ stories would end. Amidst all the hype, even people who’d never shown the slightest interest in the franchise before were suddenly binge watching a decades worth of Marvel output just to get up to speed before Endgame hit theaters.
In short, Marvel’s campaign sent people into a frenzy. But how did they do it?
Yes, having mountains of money helps, but just as much can go wrong as right when targeting global audiences – Marvel wouldn’t have been the first corporate giant to embarrass themselves in a foreign market.
Knowing this, they spent a big chunk of their marketing budget on localization. Marvel flooded the internet with Endgame’s video ads, banner ads, clips and social media campaigns, all designed to engage local audiences. Companies that thrive worldwide know that content and video localization connects customers with the brand story they are trying to sell.
So, communicating with regional audiences in their local language is crucial. And when only around 5% of the world’s population has English as their mother tongue, that requires a hell of a lot of work – as anyone who’s toiled away on an international campaign like Endgame knows.
Marvel isn’t the only entertainment house that spends tons of money to connect with consumers of different countries and regions.
Netflix translates its shows, movies and adds subtitles to most of the content on its platform. For example, Stranger Things was dubbed into nine languages and subtitled in twenty-two to reach as wide an audience as possible. Similar efforts by Netflix made regional shows like Dark, Sacred Games and Narcos international hits.
Hundreds of pop-culture memes, movie clips, GIFs and quirky captions are posted every month from Netflix’s social accounts, and these efforts to engage with consumers in their regional dialect have turned casual viewers into paying customers.
To sell products or services globally, international brands have to create and version hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of creatives. As a result, most outsource video localization and content localization work to regional teams and agencies to avoid those pesky localization blunders.
But versioning assets manually is still common, and when attempted under tight deadlines, human error starts to creep in. On top of that, it can lead to inconsistent style, hampering the client’s brand image and credibility.
Revenue, results and speed are the name of the game when it comes to outsourcing international campaigns, and all three of those are hampered when agencies choose to manually version the text, videos, images, and audio of hundreds of marketing assets.
Manual, repetitive work in the marketing localization industry is essentially what horses are to the transportation industry: Outdated, inefficient, and painfully slow.
Imagine you’re the founder of a marketing agency who has been working their ass off to onboard a massive global business. Finally, lady luck knocks on your agency’s door, and you onboard a client as big as Marvel. Your first project: running a campaign like Avengers. You and your team are working night and day to meet the ginormous content localization requirements. A typical workday is spent manually tweaking a video for the Indian market, translating into German, again for Spanish speakers, and so on. Dynamic content localization needs of the clients are becoming hard to manage. Your agency is trying its best, but you’ve already missed multiple deadlines, and manual customization often compromises the creative quality.
And one day, you receive an email stating that your services are no longer needed.
Unfortunately, many agencies have gone through similar situations. But there’s a better, automated way – and you don’t need a Marvel sized budget to use it.
ReMake is a SaaS platform that empowers creative teams to version content in minutes. You can customize your creatives with images, videos and audio, and quickly deploy assets to all your social channels. All whilst saving up to 80% of your versioning budget.
Our USP: it’s brutally simple to use. Honestly, you could teach your grandad how to use ReMake and he’d get it right first time.
We know the struggles faced by agencies working tirelessly under aggressive client deadlines. ReMake respects the brand’s identity and keeps style consistent through all marketing assets. ReMake is a solution by creative people, for creative people.
If you want to version with pixel-perfect accuracy, reduce production time and costs - you know what to do…
