3 Voice-Over Translation Takeaways from the Zenith Adspend Forecast

If you’re in marketing & advertising, you’ve no doubt read the Advertising Expenditure Forecast that Zenith Media just put out. But if you’re in voice-over translation, you should take note as well, because it highlighted one critical change in advertising – that global internet adspend is about to surpass global TV adspend. This is already having an effect on multimedia translation – but crossing this threshold will intensify the industry disruption.

This post will list the three takeaways from this report that audio & video localization professionals need to know.

[Average read time: 4 minutes]

The adspend growth rates

First, let’s look at the report itself. It’s produced by Zenith Media, an online media consulting group affiliated with Publicis Media. They track advertising expenditures and put out various reports each year. In the latest one, they found that adspend (the amount of money spent worldwide on any marketing or advertising) is lagging from 2016, mainly because that year had the Rio Olympics, the US elections, and other quadrennial events that drove up spending. Once adjusted for those events, Zenith found that adspend is growing faster overall in 2017 (at a rate 5.4% this year as opposed to 3.6% in 2016, by their calculations).

And of course, they found that the big driver of that is the global internet adspend – online pre-roll, social media posts, banners, etc. – which is growing much faster than adspend for traditional outlets, in particular for TV. In fact, they say, internet adspend will surpass TV adspend any day now. It could happen as you read this post.

Why the shift to online? Mainly, because users are already moving there for content. But on top of that, online platforms are particularly robust marketing delivery systems because they’re able to target users more specifically by analyzing their online footprint (where they go online and what they do) to discern their content preferences, buying habits, and of course – their native language.

Naturally, this has big implications for audio & video translation.

1. Online data aggregators can determine a user’s language – easily.

A user’s online digital footprint can contain information not just on a person’s native language, but of his or her preferences in each context (for example, for bilingual users). That’s not the most common scenario, of course, since most users are monolingual, but it gets at just how robust the data culled from a footprint is. Compare this to the language options available on TV to US-based companies – most stations are monolingual as well, except for stations targeted at a specific audience which may be largely bilingual (for example, in the way that Univision targets Spanish-speakers with both English and Spanish voice-over spots during its programming). Marketers were limited by the stations available to them, and specifically the languages in which those stations operate.

Online micro-targeting allows for a much more personalized experience – in the same scenario, marketers may present some content in English and some in Spanish, depending on a user’s preference. For localization, this means more micro-targeted ads, as well as more transcreation. It also means larger language sets – after all, TV limits language distribution, but on the web the language set is limited by the actual groups that are being targeted.

2. Pricing for online video will keep shifting.

A lot of online ads are already getting more eyeballs than TV ads, and the prices talents are commanding reflects that. At some point, TV ad rates – even US broadcast ones – will probably fall below the rates for online pre-roll, especially for dubbing. In fact, social media is the biggest driver of online ad spend growth (including Facebook), and the retention and buy rate for online ads is reportedly higher than that for TV ads, so social media video will probably starting pricing higher than TV as well. Expect to see these changes solidify in the next few years.

3. It’s all about Asia Pacific.

According to Zenith, adspend in this region is expected to grow by $30 billion between 2016 and 2019 –that’s almost half of the global projected growth in this period. They expect Asia to have about a third of the global adspend by 2019 (33.4%). North America is still expected to lead by a wide margin (36.3% projected for 2019, despite a much smaller population), but the growth in Asia is still explosive.

There are already developed markets in this region, primarily Japan, which is why Japanese dubbing and voice-over services are one of the most sought-after video translation services. Same with Korean – the amount of Korean voice-over services requested reflects the relative maturity of this country’s economy. And of course, requests for China – in particularly Mandarin Chinese subtitling services & Mandarin dubbing – are growing very rapidly. In the next five years, expect to see much more content going as well into Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnamese, Thai, and Tagalog.

One final note – keep an eye out for Central Europe (7.3% growth rate, per Zenith) and Latin America (4.1% growth rate) as well. They’re not growing as quickly as Asia, but they shouldn’t be discounted. Latin America has the advantage of having two major language groups, Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, meaning that large audiences can be reached cost-effectively. However, keep in mind that marketing content requires navigating regional differences when translating. Central Europe has a different scenario altogether – many national languages with relatively small populations, each requiring tailored localization.

Ultimately, this is an exciting shift for the localization industry in general. The internet is much more customizable than any other media platform that’s ever existed. It’s also more localizable, since content language can be tailored in very specific ways. One of the traditional barriers to localization has been delivery, but increased internet accessibility means that this impediment is disappearing rapidly.