Podcast Summary

This podcast episode explores the topic of content localisation, discussing its importance, challenges, and how technology like AI can be leveraged to streamline the process. Shaheen Samavati, co-founder and CEO of Vera Content, shares insights on how localisation goes beyond just translation, the benefits of tailoring content for local markets, and how smaller companies can also benefit from localisation efforts. The discussion also covers the use of AI tools and automation to improve content workflows. 

 

Podcast Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

Announcer (00:01):
This is the Cambridge Marketing Podcast, and on this episode we're exploring the fascinating world of content localisation.

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (00:08):
I mean, I definitely think AI is transforming our industry and the expectations are totally different in marketing roles than they were a few years ago, but I think at the same time, there's more work than ever before.

Announcer (00:21):
You are listening to the Cambridge Marketing Podcast with Kiran Kapur

Kiran Kapur, host (00:26):
Hello and welcome. This week we are in the really interesting world of content localisation, and my guest Shaheen Samavati, co-founder and CEO of Vera Content, which is a leading multilingual content agency. Shaheen, welcome to the show. Could we start with a little bit about what you mean by content localisation?

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (00:49):
Yeah, so I mean the terms localisation and translation are used sometimes interchangeably, but localisation goes a step beyond translation. It's really about adopting content for a local market. So for example, in a typical text translation, for example, if you just translated it, some of the formats and things might be not adopted for the local market, you'll see that a lot if you see a text from somewhere else and it's got the date in the format, that's not the way you're used to for your market. So localisation, that's this one example, but there's lots of ways that you can really localise content for the local market using local switching out examples to be relevant to the local market. Maybe even changing if it's something visual, the colours the look and feel to make it to resonate more with that particular market.

Kiran Kapur, host (01:40):
Yes, I think the date's quite interesting, one, because it can be surprisingly jarring, can't it? If you're not used to the format and it comes through, for example, sitting in the uk, if it comes through an American format, I always have to do a mental summersault to try and remember where I am in the days and the months. But that of course is getting in the way of the marketing message.

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (01:58):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so it's to really make the message feel natural for the person who's reading it or seeing it.

Kiran Kapur, host (02:06):
I mean, I suppose this is fairly obvious, but I've just talked about things being jarring, but why do you see content localisation as so important?

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (02:14):
Yeah, I mean, it's important when it's important for you, as the brand, to really connect with and resonate with the local market. I think it's, of course, everything depends on the particular aim of a campaign, but if it's, or who you're trying to reach, the more you can I guess, make the content feel relevant, the more it's going to resonate with that market and the more impact you're going to have.

Kiran Kapur, host (02:37):
So I think one of the other questions that I know we're going to come on a little bit to how you do it, but what stops marketers doing it? Is it that it just seems too difficult or is it ignorance that we should be doing it?

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (02:52):
Well, I think definitely a lot really large brands with huge budgets tend to invest a lot in localisation. So really big companies will have an entire teams of people in each local market, and they hire local agencies who make really tailored campaigns. I'd say first of all, it depends on your business goals and if you're obviously selling internationally or not, or which markets you you're active in. But I'd say for those who are selling internationally and aren't doing it, a lot of times it's because of budget constraints, because it's basically a lot of effort and manpower and time that goes into creating local campaigns. So usually, yeah, that would be the reason.

Kiran Kapur, host (03:32):
And presumably you do have to have somebody local because it would be almost impossible, I would assume, sitting internationally to go, oh, well I know you're in Malaga, Spain, so in Malaga, Spain, this is how people would perceive it. So I have to have a local input.

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (03:48):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you definitely see a lot of localisation with outdoor campaigns, for example. I'm sure you see it in the uk, I see it in Malaga. I don't know, an ad for a soft drink or whatever it might have. I remember seeing something that's like, I think it was a Pepsi ad that was nine out of 10 people in Malaga prefer Pepsi or something. I don't think it was that high, but they use the local example or mention a local landmark or even show images. You can go really, really local or localise at a country level. There's different ways you can do it.

Kiran Kapur, host (04:22):
Yes, that's a very good point. I was thinking about localisation as being sort of probably at country level, so getting the language and the date format as we talked about, so you can really go down to something much, much more targeted and tailored.

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (04:39):
Yeah, absolutely. So in our case, in our agency, we tend to work with more scale up companies, medium-sized companies. So like I was saying, the Coca-Colas and the Fords and these really big brands, they tend to have a lot in-house resources and really big teams working on these things. And we work with fairly large companies that are operating internationally but maybe don't have that much of internal resources. So they want to outsource it to an agency like ours. And for example, we work with a mobile phone accessory brand called Pop Sockets, which is actually, I have one on my phone. It's this little thing that goes on your phone, really popular in the us. It's a really well-known brand in the us, and they were expanding into Europe. We helped them localising their advertising, also localising their social media channels for the different markets, including the uk.

(05:30):
And actually their approach on social media was going really local rather than try to target the whole, I mean, they're targeting the whole market, but they wanted to have someone in London, for example, for the UK channel to be able to show landmarks in London and go to events and do things that were really London specific. And we did the same thing with Berlin, for example, and partnering with local festivals and music events and stuff. So that was kind an example of where we went more local than just the country level. But a lot of clients, we do more country level things too.

Kiran Kapur, host (06:09):
I think when one thinks about localisation, you think it's going to be the big brands soon see set the Pepsis, the Fords of this world. But actually you're suggesting that smaller companies can do this too. It's not impossible.

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (06:20):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Another example that comes to mind is we work with a real estate scale up company called Spot A Home and a smaller company, but they basically, well, the one thing is operating in Europe, even if you're not a huge company, but if you're operating in more than one market, you need to translate things into the language for that market at the very least. But yeah, we do a lot of, so basically we're specialising in content marketing. So basically, so we don't do so much with advertising campaigns, it's mostly editorial content creation for blogs and for websites for social media. So for example, with this company Spot A Home, we helped them with blog content and landing pages, but they were doing a campaign for landlords in the different markets that they operate in, which was seven different European markets. It was like Spain, Italy, I don't remember all of them now France.

(07:13):
But basically because the topics were really about landlord specific landlord tenant laws in the different countries. So we had to create basically totally different articles for each of the blogs because we would write on the same topic, but we would create different content because it needed to be tailored to the situation in that country. So that's why in our agency we do a combination. It's like sometimes we have the content that is relevant for more than one market and we're just adapting it. Other times we have to create content totally from scratch because that content just wouldn't work in the other market basically.

Kiran Kapur, host (07:51):
Can you give me a example of where that might've happened?

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (07:56):
Well, that was the case with the landlord thing, because I was saying the laws are just different. So if we're writing an article about what are your rights as a tenant in this country or whatever, we would have to really research that for a particular market and write a specific article for that.

Kiran Kapur, host (08:11):
Okay.

(08:12):
Brilliant. I know one of the things your agency does is you say, we can use AI to do some of this. And I must admit, I sit here going, okay, I know about AI and we still talk about AI, whereas we actually should be talking about specific tools of AI because there are just so many of them. And I think to those who are not using it on a day-to-day basis, we just tend to go, "oh, it's AI". It's like, it's that internet thing, which I seem to remember people talking about at the beginning when you finally worked out that actually the internet was a lot of things. So what AI tools did your agency

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (08:46):
Use? Yeah, well, it's interesting what you say about AI because I think AI was already present in a lot of tools that we were using even before ChatGPT. But when ChatGPT came on the scene, it was like that became AI was chatt, BT, and kind of generative text creation. So I think now when people say they're talking about basically those large language models that can create content or they're talking about the image generation side of ai, but there's actually a lot of things AI can do and a lot of tools that have different AI features built in. And we're seeing tonnes of different, there's just a flood of different startups doing different things with AI. So we actually, in my company a few years ago started what we called the AI task force where we were researching different tools and we had members of different departments in our company researching the tools and then meeting every two weeks to share feedback on which tools we thought we could incorporate into our workflows.

(09:55):
And from that we identified some different areas we thought we could improve with AI. So that was really interesting. And then from that, we actually ended up creating one person who was on that task force who was just really into it. We ended up creating a position for her that was specialised in overseeing how we implement AI processes and AI and automation because we ended up looking into more features than not only AI features, but other ways we could automate things in our processes in terms of what tools we use. Well, I would say when we were doing our research, we looked a lot into tools that were specifically for marketing, like things like Jasper or copy.ai and writer.com, and there are some really cool features that they have, but we felt that they were really designed more for a brand to use in-house. And as an agency we had really unique needs because we need to be working on lots of different, we need different prompts and different style guides and things for all the different projects that we work on.

(10:59):
And it wasn't really practical to do that inside one of those tools right now, although we maybe need to revisit it, I think it's something we're still considering. But we ended up well in terms of, and we were looking at a bunch of different areas of how we could use AI, but when it came to the text generation part, we ended up deciding to basically for some of our projects, use Chat GPT, because we found it was really as simple to collaborate there and to create, to save our prompts and to share them across the team in a way that wasn't cost prohibitive. Because some of these tools have huge licence fees.

Kiran Kapur, host (11:31):
Oh, yes,

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (11:32):
Yes.

(11:33):
But I'm sure they have. I mean, we did do some free trial or short-term testing of some of these tools and we found that they were better for collaboration. Jasper is great for collaboration of a marketing team, and I think it's and writer.com as well. It's really practical if you're a team of five people who need to collaborate or maybe even 10, but that you're all working on the same brand because it really lets you save your history of what you've been working on together as a team. So with the way we're doing achi, BT is a little more, we do more stuff behind the scenes, manually keeping track of all our stuff and creating our guidelines outside of the tool, but it works as well. And I think we're going to see a lot of advancements in these tools and we're constantly seeing how we can adapt and use them better.

(12:19):
But in terms of other areas where we're using ai, well, one is for us being consistent across our content is something that's really important and a tool that we were already using before. And that's incorporated a lot of AI features is Grammarly. So we've really been taking advantage of their AI features. And we also have another tool that we use for when it's not in English, because Grammarly only works in English, which is called language tools, which we find it's an open source tool. It's not quite as advanced as Grammarly in some ways, but it's also really flexible. And so we find it works well when we're working other language projects, which we do about half of our work is in other languages.

(13:00):
So that's something. And then also I want to say, well, translation obviously is a huge part of what we do. We have a translation management tool called Phrase, which also has added a lot of AI features that we've been incorporating into our workflow. And then also image generation, graphic design. Of course, Adobe Suite has built in all kinds of stuff with AI. So it's just making sure our designers are using those features and taking best advantage. Also, Canva, of course, depending on the project, we use Adobe or Canva for a lot of social media projects where we need to collaborate, we're using Canva and some of their features. And then lastly, I mentioned a lot of things here, but is the dubbing and subtitling side of things. There's been huge advances on that, and that's actually for several years we've been using a tool called Otter for transcribing and generating the files for subtitling.

(13:55):
But then we've seen, of course it only worked in English as well. And then we were using another tool called Sub that works in other languages, and we felt that in the past that Otter did a better job with English. So we're using that for English sublease for the rest. Now we've seen Sublease improve. We also, there's other tools that have built in the subtitling thing with a better video editing. So we've started using V for some projects. So we're basically constantly testing all these tools, but because they're changing all the time. But I do think I would recommend not getting overwhelmed with all of the options that are out there, just trying to find one that meets your requirements. And just going with that for now, because I think we're going to see a lot more changes in a lot of consolidation of all these features over the next year or two probably because the reason why we use different tools for a lot of different projects is because for one project we need this thing and another project, we need something else, and that other tool doesn't have it.

(14:54):
And I think in a couple of years they're all going to have all the features or they're one's going to get bought by the other. And then also a lot of the platforms are going to buy some of these companies and build these features into the platforms, like the social media platforms. I am sure content management software, all these tools that we use every day for doing marketing are going to have these things built in. So I don't think there's, in my case, as an agency, obviously there's a big mix, a big deal to be able to just increase efficiency even a little bit. But I'd say for an in-house marketer, maybe you don't have to go crazy about this, but it'll come one way or another. You're going to end up using AI.

Kiran Kapur, host (15:41):
One of the things you said that I also find it really interesting, it's something, it's a part of the discussion that we don't tend to explore was you said we improved our processes, we went for automation. And actually when we talk about AI we tend to talk about using the tools like Otter, and it was really interesting selection of tools that you gave us there. But on the automation side of things, how have you used tools to help you with that?

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (16:06):
Well, I mean it's just in terms of making sure the tools work together and connect and the workflow is going smoothly. And I was saying some of these tools use AI as part of one automation feature. It helps you speed things up on one side of it. But on the other hand, I mean a tool, veed, for example, I would say that's a video editing tool in collaboration software. So we use that for some of our projects because it allows, it's just a lot faster than the way we used to do things, which was uploading and sharing files. With VE, you can record directly into the, I mean a bit like Riverside as well, the software we're recording on now. And Riverside has some great AI features too. So it lets you automatically choose clips and things like that. So basically v's kind on the same line, you can record directly into the software, you can collaborate with your team, you can do things there versus having to go in and out sharing files. And then you can use the automatically choose clip feature, which doesn't always work so great, but you can automatically add the subtitles. So AI is involved in most of those things, but there's some aspects of it that aren't exactly AI but are still speeding up the process.

Kiran Kapur, host (17:22):
Brilliant. Thank you for that. I was going to ask you about integrating AI seamlessly, and really that's what you were saying with the automation side, isn't it? How practically do you do that with your own agency? How did you integrate AI seamlessly?

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (17:43):
Well, I dunno if it's totally seamless. Like I said, there's some things we do manually behind the scenes, but I think just the important thing is to establish guidelines and a process and that your entire team is that you have guidelines and best practises that you've shared with your team and that they know how they should be using AI, that they're not just not left to their own devices to do whatever they want because they are going to use AI. Everyone has these tools at their fingertips, and even if you don't ask them to use it, they're going to do it to speed up their own job. So if they have clear guidelines, best practises, like, okay, we know you're going to use AI if you're going to use it, this is how you should use it in fact, or in this case you should use it in this case we need you to do this a different way or whatever. So in our case, we've been always, from the beginning of the company, we started nine years ago, we have a set of instructions that's for each project and style guidelines for that particular client. So now added to that is the AI guidelines. And basically for this client, well, we have clients who really don't want us to use AI at all. And so in those we say, this is what the expectation is, this is how you should do your research.

(18:57):
And when it is permitted to use AI, which I know it's very difficult to control as well because we work with freelancers. So of course we do run the test. Has this been AI generated? We make sure that, I mean that ultimately needs to be high value content that meets the quality standards. And whether you use AI or not, in theory shouldn't matter that much, but for some clients it does. But anyway, when we are using AI for a project, we make sure that the guidelines are clear, they know where to find the prompts that they're using detailed prompts in a particular format because the results you get from AI are hugely impacted by the quality of the prompt clearly. So just having instructions on how to prompt for a particular project we found is essential.

Kiran Kapur, host (19:49):
That is really good advice, isn't it? Because it's all down to the prompting basically. And I think a lot of us are still at the sort of wild west stage of, well, I'll just stick something in and see what happens. Oh, I need to refine it. Whereas if you do that bit upfront, it does make life much quicker for everybody.

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (20:06):
Yeah, absolutely. And one thing too that we've found, it's definitely for certain types of projects, AI is a game changer because if it's a really formulaic thing where it's like you're getting something in one format and it always needs to come out in this format, AI can adapt it to the other format really well. What it doesn't do well is decide the content of what needs to be in that. So you need to feed in what you want to get out. And I've found personally, if sometimes it's actually more efficient to just write it myself than to use AI in certain circumstances, it really depends. I found sometimes I've gotten in the habit of always using AI, but then sometimes, why did I try to generate this 10 times when I could have just written it? So we get a little lazy sometimes in relying on the tool. You have to know when and when it doesn't make sense to rely on it.

Kiran Kapur, host (21:00):
And I suppose that's the same with any tool, isn't it? If you watch a plumber, they don't open the entire toolbox and use everything. They select the right tool for whatever the plumbing job is, and we should be seeing ourselves as AI's tool and we should be doing the same. But as you say, it's very, very easy to just get carried away with it. So I think one of the questions we always end up with, and I get this a lot from students who are often at the early stage of their careers, is there any point in even going into marketing? Is it all just going to be AI generated and I will never have a career? What do you think?

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (21:34):
Yeah, I mean, I definitely think the AI is transforming our industry and the expectations are totally different in marketing roles than they were a few years ago. But I think at the same time, there's more work than ever before. So I think mean just the sheer amount of content that's being created now is incredibly higher than anything else we've ever seen in history. So there's definitely work for marketers, content marketers, specifically the area I'm in, but for those who are embracing the tools and willing to change and adapt to what's needed, because basically, I always like to use the analogy of machine translation because what we do is related to translation. And people said when machine translation was just becoming popular over a decade ago, it was like, oh, this is going to take away, we're not going to need translators anymore. And it's not the case.

(22:34):
There's more work for translators than ever before. But the thing is that translators who are the skills of the translators have had to change because the work that you're doing now is editing what's generated by the machine translation. So if you were really good at just translating one word from another but weren't so great at making it sound natural, then you're not going to be, that job is kind of gone. But actually, basically the job of editors is people who were translator had to become editors because that's what the job is now. So people who are good editors and who have good judgement and are able to write excellent prompts for them, there's a lot of work.

Kiran Kapur, host (23:19):
That's good to hear. So one of the final questions I always ask is how people's careers have developed. Because again, when you're in early stage career, I think it's very easy to think it's a ladder and you just climb the ladder slowly and actually careers don't work like that. We're all squiggly careers now. So how did you start, and when did you become the co-founder of Vera Content?

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (23:42):
Yeah, my background is in print journalism. So I studied journalism as an undergraduate. And one thing I would say about my journey is that, well, actually I fell into journalism because when I was in high school, we had a job shadowing programme basically. And basically they asked me, what are your interests? We'll try to find you a job shadowing opportunity that matched that. And so I said basically politics. I was really into debate club and stuff like that. And so they gave me two job shadowing things, which was an incredible opportunity. It would be great if every high school student could do this, but I shadowed someone who was a political, well first, a county commissioner, and I thought that was the most boring thing ever. I was like, okay, I don't want to be a county commissioner, that's for sure, which is local government level in Ohio, which is where I'm from.

(24:35):
And then I shadowed someone who's a political journalist at a local newspaper, and I thought that was so cool and really exciting and dynamic. So that's why I decided to study journalism. After that, I would say throughout undergrad, I was always thinking of switching to business because it was something that I was also interested in, but I decided to stick with my journalism. I chose this, I'm just going to go with it. But also, I learned that there was a lot of demand for business journalists because that's kind of the area of journalism where there's tonnes of demand and not so many people who are passionate about writing about that because considered maybe boring, but it was something I was interested in. So I decided to position myself as a business journalist. I ended up getting a job in that after I graduated, because I did an internship as well.

(25:24):
So then I worked four years as a business journalist, and then I decided that I wanted to do an MBA. And so I actually came to Spain to do the MBA. It was a short version of the story. I could go into more detail, but it was my life career story. But I did the MBA at IU Business School in Madrid because I was interested in studying abroad and seeing a bit of the world learning Spanish. And then after that MBA, I had a job placement through my universe. I heard about an opportunity through my career centre basically, and it was at a solar panel company, which was totally different and corporate communications. So I did that for a year. And then I mentioned, well, I worked in startups, so I had the opportunity to join a startup company. I did that job for a couple of years, and that was where my first time working in marketing.

(26:18):
So I was in charge of marketing for this early stage startup and doing a lot of content creation, social media stuff. And it was basically from my experience of in corporate communication and then in marketing that I just saw there was a lot of need for English content creation in European companies, Spanish companies. So when I decided to leave the startup and I started doing English content creation consulting with a few companies, like different contacts I'd made over the years, and it was basically a freelancer. But then I started collaborating with, well, some people that I met through my job as in my previous job named James and Daphne that had a translation company, we ended up, basically, they had started this company, I was bringing in clients for them. I ended up hiring them to do translation for clients that wanted other languages besides English. And then we decided to join forces at one point. So we merged our businesses and built it into what is now Vera content. We've been doing it nine years. We've grown a lot. We're like 20 people on the team. We work with freelancers around the world. So yeah, that's the whole story behind Vera.

Kiran Kapur, host (27:33):
It's wonderful because you've worked, you've done internships, you've done, you've sort of fallen into work where it just arrived. And it's a lovely story of how a career can be incredibly successful, but if you'd planned it out at the beginning, that's possibly not where you thought you might end up or even in the same country or whatever. So that was wonderful. Thank you Shaheen ti of the Vera content. Thank you so much for your time. And that was so interesting in listening about content localisation and the use of AI tools. Thank you so much indeed.

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (28:09):
Thank you. And I just wanted to say that we are actively looking for UK natives to hire in our company, so people are interested. Check out our website, vecon.com.

Kiran Kapur, host (28:19):
That's a lovely ending. Thank you very much. Alright,

Shaheen Samavati, VeraContent (28:22):
Thanks so much. Bye-Bye.