Why the Web Is Foreign Territory

OK, so I've never worked at an advertising agency and have never been part of a massive advertising network with, like, 1,000 offices worldwide. So I guess I'm not an expert on global advertising, except that nearly every brand campaign we have ever done at our small independent digital company has been global. Swiftly, inexpensively and (sometimes) massively global.So when we started working with big agencies and big agency networks, I kept running across this service called "global branding." It takes on different names, like the unintelligible "brand integration" or the more socialist-sounding "central creative control," but it's basically the thing that agency networks do for your brand to make sure that the advertising campaign and the brand personality are similar in cities around the world. This seems like a funny thing to me.I think global branding was "invented" in the early '90s, which makes me wonder: Was this a big problem back then? Were people flying from New York to Shanghai, seeing some ads for Coca-Cola and, in a confused state, buying Pepsi instead? Of course not. Wouldn't a business traveler or tourist expect an ad for soap in London to be different from one in Sao Paulo? People travel in part because they are excited about cultural nuances. I love advertising in different parts of the world. It's usually a slice of culture that's topical and telegraphic, and I like to see how it's different. It's interesting to compare. Why should I travel if everything, advertising included, is the same? And who are all these international travelers who have become this highly coveted market to which global networks are oriented? Are they that influential? I suspect that something entirely different is going on.It seems to me that it's super convenient from a client-services perspective to have one organization handling all your communications globally. I am sure it simplifies billing or something like that. And I totally get the economies of scale of producing one ad that runs anywhere. Efficiency. But the big pitch, from a creative perspective, was that your brand and advertising were going to be consistent worldwide. Which sounds like a really valuable thing, but it's actually kind of weird, uninteresting and, ultimately, unsatisfying.If you are in some country smaller than the U.S., you often have to wait for someone to give you your creative assets, and then they tell you what's the best creative idea for your country, which I am sure at the time they don't know a damn thing about. So you get secondhand creative. That doesn't sound very smart. And creative marketing is not necessarily the best thing to be centralized. (Advertising is, after all, best when set in a cultural context.) In fact, as the Web is increasingly showing us, having multiple streams of brand communication talking to your various audiences in various ways is most effective. So what should everyone do? Well, virtually everything we do on the Web is a global campaign. It's right there in the name, World Wide Web. This is, for the most part, a conscious thing on our end. We always know in the back of our heads that anyone, anywhere, can look at a piece of content that we've put online. But it's not often directly in the minds of our clients because they pay big agency networks lots of money to take care of that for them. Here's an idea: Stop and think about it.A few funny things have happened to us along the way that may be good examples of the conundrum of the World Wide Web and brands. For one, we've done a campaign for Miller's Milwaukee's Best Light that got tens of millions of views, but a fairly sizable chunk of them came from outside America -- and for some reason it was really popular in Portugal. So what's the catch? The product is only sold in the U.S. We've also done a campaign for the global launch of Unilever's Axe Vice line, but the brand and product name vary slightly in different countries, and was not to become available everywhere on the same date, and was launched in the U.S. last, a full eight months after the campaign began. We were tasked with doing an online campaign that used the same creative globally. We ended up solving the problem, but we were actually slightly nervous about the work becoming popular in the wrong country first, which was a new one. These are two opposite problems. One is that you've done some marketing for a brand that could be successful in other countries. (Hey, Portugal digs our vibe!) So we could think of online advertising as a test-marketing tool for brand image and try to sell that beer in Portugal. The other problem is that despite the global brief, the client saw the potential of the Internet to actually do something consistent and central and efficient that was in this case completely at odds with its internal distribution and branding. So hey, what if we reversed that and used the Web to centralize branding, leaving local markets to, well, make brands local?As a side note, when I do a Google search for a brand, I am technically just as likely to see content from elsewhere in the world. As regular Internet users our sense of location is slowly but surely disappearing, and if you do a good job with a campaign, especially if it's content oriented, from anywhere in the world, it can be a global phenomenon.So if you're a client reading this, please stop paying so much for distribution of increasingly ineffective content and instead spend that money on creating content that distributes itself. If you're a big agency network person reading this, well, push back and let local be local. And for everyone involved in all this nonsense, please, can I see something interesting the next time I'm in Moscow?Benjamin Palmer is CEO of The Barbarian Group.

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Why the Web Is Foreign Territory

Benjamin Palmer

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Benjamin Palmer