We’ve all encountered web sites from multinational organizations that detect your location and automatically start serving you content in the language of that country, completely ignoring the fact that a large percentage of web users are business executives or travellers on vacation, visiting cities and resorts where they don’t necessarily speak the native tongue.
Even those very clever geeks at Google get this one wrong. If you type www.google.com in your browser while vacationing in Phuket, for instance, you’ll be automatically redirected to www.google.co.th with menus in Thai, regardless of whether you’re from Bangkok, Boston, or Beijing. You’d think that they would know as well as anybody that location and language are increasingly unrelated in today’s globalized world. And there’s really no excuse for making this mistake.
The header that is transmitted with every Internet request carries the definition of the sender’s IP address that web servers use to determine your location. But it also includes several fields describing the user’s environment, including browser type and browser language settings. One of these defines the user’s primary language – the one he or she has chosen when setting up preferences in the browser or operating system. This is a much more reliable indicator of language preference than a user’s current location.
Intelligent ads can make use of this feature by sensing the language code at runtime, and using it to switch content accordingly, on the fly. It’s probably not realistic to cater for every language under the sun in every ad, but if you’re running an online campaign across a geographic region where multiple languages are commonly spoken, this can really improve effectiveness and hence performance. For instance in California and some other US states it would be smart to support Spanish and English language options. In Canada you’d certainly want to deliver both English and French. In Switzerland, add German and Italian. In Japan, China, and Korea, the addition of English language copy would help reach visitors and foreign workers.
The ad at the top of this page is a live banner example that illustrates the technique. This banner, developed using the Immedium platform, is able to sense both your location and your primary language and respond accordingly. Currently it is programmed to display its message in English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Japanese, Simplified & Traditional Chinese, Korean, and Thai. It contains embedded fonts, an animated logo and a background image, yet still has a file size under 50kB!
To summarize, a single creative developed with the help of Immedium can deliver your advertising message in any one of sixteen or more languages – the one each individual viewer prefers, irrespective of geographic location. That not only brings you closer to your market, it boosts your return on advertising expenditure. What’s not to like?
Bravo, you were visited with simply brilliant idea
Oh my goodness! an incredible article dude.
It’s not only Google that hasn’t wised up to this deficiency: I recently tried to sign up for a Flickr account through Yahoo, but being in Thailand (and not being able to speak or read Thai) what came up was a registration page in Thai characters. After emailing to Yahoo to ask how to access the English-language page I received (only a week later) a response with a link to their Help pages(duh!).
Kudos to you, internet advertising needs to be more intuitive and you are right, intelligent.