Some intercultural common sense about
our way of doing it.
They
key for understanding the uniqueness of our approach and the success of
our operations lies in our company history. Smart Communication was
started by an experienced copywriter and campaign planner of
advertising, marketing and business-oriented communications and joined
by a number of ambitious professionals in the field. Relying on his
background as a journalist and information officer, the company founder
began his career in advertising in 1985 working nearly a decade for
several prestigious and highly-successful agencies, such as USP
Helsinki, USP Worldnet and Lintas:Business.
Our approach to international
and global campaigns is based on true
understanding of the requirements of the
various target groups: the messages -
both verbal and visual - are never merely
translations. Rather they could be called
’transcreations’ that are
culturally fine-tuned and precisely
adjusted to specific surroundings. These
varying intercultural requirements have
to be taken into account in the oveall
creative solutions irrespective of the
media choice. In
our case the fact that many of our
creatives have personal experience of
living in various cultural surroundings
makes this mental fine-tuning much
easier. Our intercultural approach is
therefore very much based on the strength
of the personalities working in our
network. Due to our proven
capability to create effective copy in
the three languages – Finnish, Swedish and English – it was
a very natural process for more and more
international accounts and intercultural
projects to be trusted to our creative
teams. They already had a solid professional
experience in most of the platforms used
in modern business communication: from
brochure production to ad campaigns and
from corporate videos to articles and
press releases. The number of accounts
quickly increased covering the following areas:
the travel industry, high-technology,
various consulting services, politics on
a national level - and corporate image
creation in general.
From the very beginning, we could not help realizing that the traditional ad
agency had passed the
over-the-hill maturity of its life cycle
and that something new called 'networking'
was clearly emerging also in the Finnish
advertising scene. There is no denying that the traditional ad agency is
a very expensive alternative by any
comparison, because it can match neither
the intellectual nor the cost-efficiency
of an ad hoc team of established
professionals. Smart Communication's network preferred agility,
responsiveness and a horizontal
organization without any unnecessary gate
keepers between the clients and the
creatives.
A comment by an expert of
interculturally-tuned copy:
"We have enjoyed close
cooperation on a number of challenging
projects dating back to the late 1980's.
I firmly believe in the business idea of
providing culturally fine-tuned
copywriting and messages directly in the
language of the target group by combining
intimate product knowledge and solid
advertising know-how with true,
professional native speaker editing. I do
not believe in a mechanical approach to
translation. Teamwork based on a genuine
respect for the language and ideas
produces copy that lives and
breathes."
- Jane O'Neill, Managing Director,
Habil Oy International House
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