The Marketing Rules Podcast in Writing: Evan Kramer

00:01.62

ThinkinCircles

Welcome back, everybody to the Marketing Rules Podcast, it is a pleasure to be joined by Evan Kramer, CEO at Motion Point. Evan it’s a pleasure to have you on the podcast. For those of us who kind aren’t aware of you in your work, maybe you could give us a brief introduction of yourself, a bit about your background, a little bit also about Motion Point, though we will cover some of that as we carry on through the podcast.

00:26.70

Evan Kramer

Thanks for having me this morning, this afternoon, depending on where you are in the world. But that’s what I do as we support a lot of global website translation for brands all over the world. A little bit about myself, really a digital marketing veteran over the last twenty-five years, I came up through digital marketing through many different technology and internet start-ups and growth companies mostly venture-backed working as a chief marketing officer for several brands, helping launch on an online automotive company an online real estate company home security business. So, over the course of my career have had a lot of those types of experiences and success selling companies in the. Sold selling a company to direct TV to an education technology company a marketing technology company and that has now landed me into Motion Point as my third time as a CEO with a couple successful ventures behind me. Joined Motion Point in September of last year and Motion Point is really fits what I do a lot because it’s about how you get more out of marketing globally or through translated experiences and that type of technology innovation. Do you need to support that. We’ve been around for over 20 years we are, private equity back company where we do a website translation that is managed for you. On a concierge platform so where we really fit is where companies especially marketing teams that don’t have internal localisation resources want to provide a translated experience ah experience and need an enterprise solution. We provide that experience on our platform. We do continuous monitoring. Of the origin site content and anytime content is updated whether it’s a blog whether it’s a home page whether it’s an image we’re detecting it in real time we’re getting it translated the way that our client wants it translated whether it’s through a linguist or we’re now using Ai. To begin to do that translation so we could talk a little bit about how Ai is disrupting and innovating in our category, but we do everything end to end from the technology platform to the translation itself and then all the professional services that come with it, so we support. Ah, some of the top global brands in the world and a lot of the us based companies that want to provide either a Spanish experience or French-Canadian experience. So, a little bit about myself and Motion Point.

03:22.10

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, well thank you for that. It’s, translation is one of those bug bearers of the marketing industry, right? It’s ah it’s one of those things that, we tend to work with businesses when they’re opening into a new territory and at some point, you have that conversation. Do we need to translate the website. Do we need to have a separate website in and in in in the in the and host language. How do we go about that and it always you just your brain starts to whirl around because you think we’ve got this website. It’s got God knows how many pages it’s got years and years of articles and blogs I mean it just sounds like an absolute. Nightmare trying to translate that. So being able to offload that onto someone else is probably the like the is ah and not using Google translate which is notoriously terrible right.

04:02.68

Evan Kramer

Death. A lot of the times over the last twenty years a lot of that has been managed by scope. So, a client would say I only have so much budget. So, I can only translate so much of my website. Some of that website is where the core traffic may go for that website. and there’s always a lot of complex decisions around website translation because it’s simple and straightforward from a return on a marketing investment if you are a transactional business, right? If you’re an e-commerce company and. You’re translating and the more you translate the more sales you get I mean that’s probably the most straightforward investment you can make in translation. But if you’re a b two b company or an informational site or publisher.  what the return is I’m going to get and so I think a lot of that has been managed by scope. over time and understanding really where those benefits are, and one of the benefits of Motion Point is that because we’re concierge we can provide that experience without the internal investment. It may take to get it done and so you can understand what that return might be before you. Make that next level investment. go yeah.

05:24.30

ThinkinCircles

How is it you go about it because there is theirs, I guess there’s a couple of lines of thought when ah, translating online content is if it’s your website. Do you have a separate website. That’s in German that’s dot. D or something like that or do you have the.com site and then you have your little flags up in the corner. Do you detect it by I P Address What is it your how it is, you go about it and what is it you see is there A preferred method is there a better method.

05:57.64

Evan Kramer

Yeah, so there is ah, really 2 ways at the end of the day to translate a website one is through proxying the site which is what we do where we literally on a separate server will mirror the origin site. , and we can be based on the client’s recommendation on how they want the URL structure whether they want it as a subdomain, or a subdirectory set up that structure and so that we will have a mirrored site. , and those pages managed the other way to do it is within your own CMS. Where you can set up your own pages and bring in that content through an ape or connector or you could proxy through the browser where you cache the translation in in JavaScript. So, there’s really sort of 2 ways to go about, setting up your website translation. the one on the one side if you’re using your CMS if you’re using, sort of the client-side experience. You’ve got to have resources to manage that frontend framework whereas if you use a proxy. my team’s resources can manage that framework. So, if. If we’re queuing it after we bring in and ah simplified Chinese onto a Spanish origin site.  the amount of ah characters and pixels are going to change and could break functionality. We would detect that we would fix that if that was within your own.

07:27.70

Evan Kramer

CMS experience your own frontend Framework You would have to have resources internally to manage that or wouldn’t get fixed.

07:35.46

ThinkinCircles

I mean, you make a good point there because that’s one of the things that might be that some businesses just don’t consider that the change in characters is going to change potentially change formatting. ah what the other things that businesses should probably need to take into consideration before they go down this route around translation.

07:57.90

Evan Kramer

I think that there’s first quality is the biggest area.  that you need to consider. There are really 3 levels of quality of translation. There’s good enough and the good enough is really coming along with. Machine training.  back in 162 when Google launched Google translate it really was the first normal machine model that was used and now with chat got and open-air you now have a large language model that can be used and so that will get you part of the way there. and you can say is that good enough. Ah, the second level is human translation using linguists and then the third level is what we call in the industry trans creation and what transcreation is not. Is taking a bit further from literal translation and localising it for that.  ah, language experience so making it sound and lingo in that language. So those are the 3 levels the thing about so quality is number 1, as terms of dimension number 2 is speed.  how quickly you need it translated.  we manage. you can probably figure out who those customers are but some of the largest telecommunications companies in the world and when there is an iPhone release right? The day that that iPhone release happens.

09:24.13

Evan Kramer

We need to have everything translated. So, the speed for that is very important. but if you are, writing an article. and you may not necessarily need that translated for weeks or months depending on. Yeah, when you get to it so the.

09:43.24

Evan Kramer

When that is and I think the biggest area to consider is the total cost of ownership.  if you are going to make this investment. Ah, how much do you invest in in this short term versus long term and a lot of reasons. Why. Ah, companies come to us is typically a managed outsource solution is about 20% The cost of doing it yourself now doing yourself. You have a lot of control. You build it into your workflows you have systems, but you’ve got to hire dedicated resources and you’ve got to really build that acumen internally. So, sort of cost of ownership is a big factor. So, speed quality cost of ownership. Those are a lot of the dimensions.  the other the other factor that’s sort of evolved over time is the complexity of your front-end Framework. There’s a lot of large enterprise customers that have built their own CMS for. From Homegrown some of them are using out of the box Enterprise CMSs like Sitecore and then you’ve got companies on the word presses and drupels in the World. So, it also depends on the type of front-end Framework you’re using and how that works and plays with translation.

10:55.87

ThinkinCircles

You touched on this slightly at the start is what’s the data around. Ah the reasons to translate with regards to your marketing activity your sales activity you were. Return.

11:13.69

Evan Kramer

All the research that that we have and validated through our customers is I believe it’s about 70% Maybe a little bit higher of people in the world that prefer to have. Language in their ah first language experience, right? So, if you are a Spanish speaking ah person that that over 70% of those want a Spanish experience no matter where you live in the world and so really trying to Understand. who your demographics are who are your customer segments. And go from there. So, the biggest reason ah to translate is that there isn’t unlike the Euro which has become or bitcoin which is now becoming more of a universal currency. Ah, we don’t yet at the point where we have a universal language and so that that is truly an important factor here.

12:10.79

ThinkinCircles

That all makes sense and, what about ah, offsite What about things like social media and advertising and things like that is that an area that ah Motion Point gets involved with and what other how does that work is that again Advantageous is it work is it too much trouble. What’s   the data around that process.

12:38.12

Evan Kramer

I think it’s all web content. So, the website is one of the more complex I would say after that you’ve got video and images that can be complex depending on how the, the content is embedded whether it’s subtitles. or dubbing for video whether the images have embedded text or whether they’re not embedded text.  when you get to social media, I think that it depends on the strategy of the marketing team. A lot of times there might be where you want a. some comment or post to stand out or the response to that post to stand out so they’re selective about what gets translated, email is straightforward. We do a lot of email marketing where whether it’s operational emails or marketing campaign emails either. Getting the template translated or just connecting a feed to get the text translated itself. and then I think an area 2 other areas that you mentioned 1 is the digital advertising side. that is probably. A little bit more straightforward as well because it’s more planned right? Usually, advertising isn’t as real time so you’re spending time developing copy getting that copy translated. so there’s not at this point sort of a real time need in a lot of areas for that digital advertising.

14:08.93

Evan Kramer

But where there is a lot of real-time need is in the customer support side of the business. So, when you think about or even sales with online chat.  online chat is now being integrated into things like Salesforce where you can instead of having multilingual customer service or sales reps on the one side. Ah, you could have the translation coming in and doing, an asynchronous flow of translation back and forth between two non-native speaking folks so that’s so across the Omni Channel spectrum is really where we focus and all of those. can be well supported like I said website translation the most vast and complex.  and then images and video probably next.

14:55.10

ThinkinCircles

Do you get much involved in like real time voice translation like universal translators it because that’s another thing that we see pop up on the writer or and have conversations about on occasion?

15:04.24

Evan Kramer

We don’t get as involved in that when we work with video. We’re doing more subtitling There are a lot of companies that specialise especially in the entertainment industry in in the voiceover. There’s there was a big announcement I believe it was. I don’t know if it was late last year or very early this year where YouTube is supporting a multilingual through a lot of their toolset and so the, the supply of translation in the YouTube channel which is the largest video channel in the world is really growing so the ability to do. Ah, dubbing and subtitling in YouTube so you’re going to see a lot more and more YouTube videos TikTok videos. really become translated be able to select the language that you want to know.

15:54.69

ThinkinCircles

With that offsite translation through social advertising whatever is I guess the stats and the data points towards that you’re going to get much. You’re going to get higher engagement rate higher open rates if it’s in that if it’s in that local language right.

16:10.63

Evan Kramer

Yeah, especially on a website one of the big things as a marketer for websites is engagement, right? and so the bounce rate is very critical, and we talk about attention span and it’s. Directly inverse inversely correlated to time, right? So as time goes on in 2024 next year, I would bet the average attention span and declines further for individuals and so as a marketer you need to do everything you can to capture that attention. Ah, very quickly and so if you have a flicker on your screen or if the page isn’t loading or if it’s not translating your preferred language or the quality isn’t very good. You’re going to lose that opportunity and you spend a lot of time to get eyeballs to where you want it to make sure those eyeballs engage in what in what you’re presenting.

17:05.70

ThinkinCircles

You touched us just at the start. Ah on AI and how that is changing the or it is making inroads into the translation space. talk to us a little bit about how that is it competition. You work alongside it. How does it how it works now in in translation.

17:23.22

Evan Kramer

Yeah, so the biggest disruption in our industry.  I mean it’s disrupting or innovating on a lot of different spectrums, right? So, you talk about website where you can talk about audio you can talk about video so let’s. Stick with the content format. within websites, the biggest sort of innovation happening with Ai is the ability to no longer must rely on a sending content directly to a linguist to get human quality translation and so if you were to take. Let’s say 3 chapters of text and send them to and send them through ai send them through neural machine training. you can get a certain level of quality across those 3 chapters of text and now where the industry is trying to understand how we measure. That quality so that we can provide signals and feedback to the customer client so that they can decide is that good enough for my customer or do I want to send it to post editing to a human linguist to improve the quality and so what that does is it. It creates more empowerment. on the workflow but it also reduces the cost of translation because now you don’t have to send everything to a linguist to get human quality. You try to send as much through technology as you possibly can and then probably that last mile you now translate now on the 1 hand it makes.

18:56.32

Evan Kramer

From a revenue standpoint if you’re thinking about a business side of it. The revenue I generate per word. Let’s say is going to go down but the amount of volume of scope will increase because now the customer can afford translating more where maybe they didn’t translate their blogs previously now can.  translate blogs. So, there’s a balance between the 2, so I do think that quality estimation is a big area and then I think the next frontier on the content side is really going to be on that transcript the amount of localisation. And needed to optimise the experience. So just because you have ah translation literal and I like to use the example of a Chevy nova, right? and in Chevy Nova in in Spanish is nova don’t go right? and so how do you sell a car that doesn’t go. Right? So, so the literal translation in a lot of languages needs to be localised.  and so, using Ai to identify hey is this good enough for that localised experience and is this good enough for search engine optimisation. and so being able to identify those areas so on ah on ah on a text world I think it’s more of innovation that’s driving whereas, but you think in the audio and visual space. It is much more disruptive because where you might have to use talent to do a voiceover, you can now use auto Ai Generated voice or Ai Generated ah people?  or avatars to do things and so, you don’t need an actual human translator on the other end of the phone. When you can have sort of an ai bot doing it. So, I think on that side of the fence on translation.  I’d be a lot more worried about the disruption but on the content side. It’s really about quality and estimating quality.

21:00.87

ThinkinCircles

I Know as a marketeer quality always appeals, I’m mortified if in English, we see something that’s incorrectly spelled or grammatically incorrect why you would want then then translate something and that you just get the same result but in Spanish or in…

21:16.22

ThinkinCircles

And Mandarin or something else right? I mean you’d be. You’d be absolutely mortified. this has been fascinating Evan is an area that I don’t think gets enough coverage within the marketing space and I’m sure a lot of the audience ah will want to know more. So as always. We’ll include all your details in the show notes if anybody wants to get in contact or know more about you and your business than they can but Evan Kramer for now. Thank you very much.

21:38.35

Evan Kramer

Thank you so much for having me.

Watch the interview: