One of the early lessons media consultants are drawing from 2024 is the importance of in-language advertising. The last presidential cycle had the most diverse electorate in history in terms of race and education level — and in 2024 those trend lines have continued.
These population shifts have meant that delivering ads to voters in languages other than English could be the deciding factor in a number of races up and down the ballot.
“We’ve seen just really dramatic over performance of the in-language creative that we’ve deployed,” said Tom Blake, a SVP of advertising and digital at full-service shop Fenton. “This is borne out not only in performance data, but also we have the opportunity to run some randomized control trials that [show] when in-language advertising is deployed thoughtfully with a thoughtful, culturally competent message, [it’s] much more effective at driving turnout among those voters than their English counterparts are.”
Elisa Campbell, an AVP of advertising at the shop, said what’s also helped is that their team has used data to understand the target group’s “lived experience.”
“There’s thoughtfulness behind that when we dig in these data to understand the human behind the voter,” she said.
They work with researchers, including pollster YouGov, to create customized audience segments. “We run qualifiers on who these voters are,” said Campbell. “And then from there, our analytics team and the research team here, we look at the data, we come up with a theme — there’s always a particular theme that will show itself — and then that’s how the messages are crafted.”
While some practitioners have experimented with AI-voice creative this cycle, Blake said that in-language advertising wasn’t a creative type that would benefit from the generative tools available.
“We have seen the difference between, you know, creative that is developed really intentionally for in language audiences versus ones that feel flat together. And the performance data alone just really bears it out.
“That making the extra, added investment and trying to find a native speaker or trying to find a translation that goes beyond a Google or machine translation really does make all the difference when the ad is actually out in the market.”
