ADVERTISING GOING BACKWARDS

Something bad is happening to global advertising; it’s going backwards.

In the 80s, global advertising campaigns used to be translated either by translators or within agencies by people who were not always equipped to do so. 

I used to work for JWT Paris, and I was in charge of several clients who needed transcreation into French. When the job came to an end. I decided to offer the same service in London. The British music scene was a major factor in my decision, as well as the level of creativity in advertising.

So I moved to London as a French copywriter and “invented” transcreation, a service to re-create campaigns, headlines, taglines, and everything in between from English into multiple languages with genuine foreign copywriters. 

I worked on the very first transnational campaign for Nike on behalf of Wieden + Kennedy Portland. This campaign made history, and my contribution appeared in Campaign magazine.

Following the success of the Nike campaign, I won many big accounts such as adidas, Electronic Arts (EA), Dyson, Habitat, MTV, etc., from top agencies.

I was kept extremely busy for years. Until the 2000s, when translation companies started to include transcreation in their services. However, they never hired copywriters, and they carried on using translators paid by the word. It was transcreation in name only, an absolute con.

Agencies and clients flocked to them. They no longer bothered to transcreate taglines, even though 72% of French people can’t speak English, and paid these companies to deal with their language needs, from ads to packaging. 

As you can imagine, freelancers cannot compete with these companies, which, despite their woeful services, dominate the market by the sheer weight of their presence on the internet. 

So, in 2026, we are back to square one. Except we can hardly make ourselves heard. Not only is Google ranking an obstacle, but it looks like nobody really cares about skills anymore, and we know that rationalisation is the byword for everything these days. 

It baffles me that these translation companies get away with it. Their translators have zero experience in copywriting, and yet they are in charge of big clients and global campaigns. How many times have I had to proofread their content and rewrite the whole thing to make it into a marketing copy.

And if you don’t believe me, just look at the experience of the transcreation/localisation managers on LinkedIn. They are the civil servants of the industry, full of academic diplomas in translation, and absolutely nothing else that sounds remotely creative. Why would you give these people the responsibility for transcreating your advertising? Because you do despite all logic.