Managing a global search marketing campaign offers fresh opportunities and challenges for marketers pursuing customers in a worldwide market. How can marketers maintain effective and cohesive brand strategies while efficiently reaching targeted customers at different international local levels?
Moderator: Matt Kain, SVP, Business Development, 24/7 Real Media
- Marcelo Sant’Iago, Director of Business Development, MídiaClick Brazil
- Lawrence Herman, VP of Business Development and Sales, Miva
Matt Kain
The first of the challenges in a global campaign is how to mobilize your own resources. You may have limited choice in that; if you’re a US-based company, you need a different set of services than someone in many countries.
Lawrence Herman
We pick and choose our business—we don’t try to be all things to all people. Our major advertisers want to get local customers in the UK, and likewise, people in France and Britain looking for US vacations, it’s good to have that geo-routed to the US.
The value of local market expertise and local language experience—a lot of people consider Latin America as one language and one culture
Marcelo Sant’Iago: that’s the biggest misperception. Brazil, the largest country—the Spanish-speaking audience of Latin America online is smaller than the Brazilian online audience. Search platforms give you complete control to run international campaign. Brazil, Russia, India, China, Korea—most don’t speak English. It’s a challenge to deal with local culture and local languages. In Brazil we have three different words for a tangerine, depending on the region. If you go to Spain—Barcelona—Catalan.
Lawrence: I think that he’s very correct (Catalan is right on). Google and Yahoo have virtually 0% penetration in Korea because the structure of the language is entirely different. People say things to create a feeling in others, not to make a point. Also, the logic structure is completely different: in Korean, start with the most obscure irrelevant point to come to the thesis at the very end. Keyword density might not be there—not a great factor for algorithmic search. They’re dominated by a human-powered search. This really requires a lot of human intervention to make it work. Ultimately you’ve got to be handed off to locals who can make it work.
Marcelo: A lot of US agencies are using us to localize their ads for Brazil. English-language ads don’t fly there; but some words aren’t translated (spyware is spywares in Brazil). Deal with local ideosyncrasies. It’s not just keyword translation.
You have to localize, but you also have to leverage. What do you say to clients who say that they want to set one campaign for all Spanish speakers?
Marcelo: Why not; it’s not hard to divide up the campaigns. There’s no inventory available in some places.
You can geotarget based on location, OS in another language (esp asian language).
Marcelo: For example, Google doesn’t have local search in Brazil. You can look at [exonyms/endonyms]. In one country, it’s a local ISP that’s #2 after Google. In most of the world adCenter isn’t available. In Latin America, MSN is still part of the Yahoo network. [You really have to look at the local markets—lots of partnerships, different models in different markets.]
Matt: Once you’ve overcome the issues of language, management, currency, speak with someone at individual engines/sites, and understand how those sites work. #1 in Korea is Naver.com: the SERP can be 3, 4, 5 scroll pages deep: several different indices, several different ad programs. Very much human edited.
Lawrence: The nature of what you’re getting stems from the difficulty of algorithmic search in the Korean language. Getting placement here is a completely different calculus than in the US.
Lawrence: Mobile phones as payment options: has resulted in different way of running mobile search, pushing local coupons directly to phones.
Marcelo: And that’s a good point, that there are a lot of different ways to push your content beyond keywords. Social media: Facebook and MySpace in the US, Bebo in UK, Orkut in Brazil—if you’re going to do social, it has to be done locally.
Matt: Advantages to having lots of different partners around the world: they have established relationships within their markets—a contact at Google, etc. If you’re going to operate in lots of different markets, you have to support all those different engines/APIs/platforms, etc. And then you have to have it report on lots of different charsets.
Another advantage (when the US$ is strong): with a local agency, your account can be in local currency, which can have a lower incremental bid, relatively smaller than a US$-based account.
Marcelo: There aren’t any real global search agencies; still partnering and acquiring to get that reach.
Lawrence: It’s not just a matter of linguistics: the nature of ads are very different. US/UK: price competitiveness. Based on CTR, quality is more important in Germany. That creative has to be localized to cater to linguistics and sensitivities.
