103: Pinterest Has Localization Pinned Down

September 09, 2020

32:10

In this episode, we talk to the head of the localization program at Pinterest, Francesca Di Marco. A 15-year veteran of the industry, Francesca shares how she built Pinterest’s localization program from scratch and how her localization team has continuously refined processes to combine translation, transcreation and in-market copywriting to achieve an optimum blend of global messaging and local relevance. Tune in to hear all this and more.

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Speaker	Transcript
Deirdre	Hi Globally Speaking listeners. This is your host, Deirdre Cleere. Today I’m talking with Francesca Di Marco of Pinterest, the global phenomenon that helps people find ideas for recipes, home décor, homeschooling and style among many, many other things. Francesca leads the localization team at Pinterest. She built the team and developed a process for localizing assets by using traditional localization, transcreation and local in-country development. Today we talk with her about this hybrid approach, about vendor communication, the skillset the members of her team need to have and about sentiment analysis. There’s more too, so let’s jump right in.
Francesca	My name is Francesca DeMarco and I lead the localization program at Pinterest. I’ve been in the localization industry for 15 years. I’ve been covering different functions. And at Pinterest, I joined the company when the localization team didn’t exist and so, I built a team. I implemented translation, transcreation processes and the team now has six program managers. And so, the workload has increased significantly. And we’re trying every day to align voice and tone across product marketing and regional offices. I’ve been at Pinterest for three and a half years now. I use Pinterest primarily for planning activities for my kids and trips and for my outfits. Our company mission is to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life that they love. And my team, the localization team, focuses especially on the ‘everyone’ part. So, it doesn’t matter what country the users live in or what language they speak or which device they use. We want to ensure that everyone finds inspiration on Pinterest.
Deirdre	I was curious about how many of the Pinterest users are from outside of the US.
Francesca	Yeah, globally, we reach over 400 million monthly active users but over 65% of our user base are from outside of the United States. And these users live in over 200 countries and territories. So, it’s really exciting to think about how the product that we build over here impacts millions of people all around the world. And my team is specifically focused on making international users delighted with the product that we offer.
Deirdre	That’s great. Was Pinterest always a globally minded company? It sounds like you really brought that to Pinterest with you since you had to build the team yourself.
Francesca	The company was originally created as an international company, or at least that was the aim, but making it to a reality was the everyday work of my team and the globalization services team at Pinterest. Every day for the past four years, we’ve been working on making Pinterest a truly international company. So, we opened international offices and we now run international marketing campaigns. We have international sales teams. And so, the company now is truly international, so we are serving international users and we are partnering with international businesses as well.
Deirdre	One of the things that you’ve mentioned before is that you’ve built the localization program at Pinterest, and that I understand that when you were setting up your team, you decided to take a hybrid approach to developing the content for the international customers of Pinterest, and you’re using localization as well as content creation. Is that correct?
Francesca	Yes. So, initially when I started building the localization team, our main focus was on product. So, making product international and pushing that international organic growth. But the more the company was becoming a solid company and the more we were building international marketing teams, my team started focusing on marketing content and sales content. And whether to standardize or localize the global brand marketing programs has always been like a very heated debate. So, on one hand we have local brand managers arguing that consumer habits and their markets are different and their consumers’ purchase behavior is different, preferences and tastes are different and the media and the retail trade are different. And so, these customers, these international customers, require a unique, very tailored and dedicated handling. And this is where our team came in and this is where we started working to bridge, really being the glue, between the marketing teams and the headquarters. So, the head office usually, like, takes the position that achieving scale justifies losing also some local customers in return for efficiencies, right. And so, we thrive on scaling and standardizing processes across markets but our responsibility, the localization team’s responsibility, is to make sure that we are allowing adaptation, and not only of obvious differences like language and format, but also we are adapting content in a way that we’re truly building trust with our international users and partners. It’s about trading off global efficiencies and global scalability with a locally optimal program. And so, our team in general has been playing a lot with trying to find the right power balance between local efficiencies and locally optimal programs. And so, we’ve been playing that role and we’ve been sitting in the middle across a number of cross-functional teams. And as you mentioned before, we’ve been landing on a number of processes where we are both using localization and globalization and content creation in order to recreate a content that is relevant and suitable for our international marketing teams.
Deirdre	Mm-hmm. So, on that topic, how do you decide when to apply localization and then where do you apply in-country content creation? So, how do you make that decision?
Francesca	There are a number of factors that weigh in. Localization goes beyond having to translate content, right, and it connects with customers on a personal level. It builds, you know, our brand image in a way that is both accessible and unique in international markets. We are aware that geo-targeted posts, for example, are way more successful than posts shared globally. So, we know what the ideal recipe is. However, as I mentioned before, reaching scalability and operational effectiveness is our main goal. So, we need to strike the right balance between efficiencies and scalability and efficiencies and local content. So, what we do, we split the content in different types. We use localization as a strategy within our international growth marketing toolkit, which means that we do not lean on localization as our primary method of doing marketing in other languages. But our strategy is more about, like, choosing to invest resources in scaling marketing efforts through localization. So basically, we do localization marketing. We use localization as part of the overall growth strategy, which stems from an overarching international expansion strategy, to working with marketing teams, having a tight relationship with local marketing teams and with local vendors. And then we do a mix of global campaigns that the localization team supports along with local campaigns that are executed by teams and third-party vendors in-region with native content as well as hybrid campaigns. So, we work with transcreators, copywriters, who can recreate sentiment in new words that work for the local market instead of translating literally and we have different processes based on the content type. I’ll give you a few examples. The content types for which we have very, very, very layered processes in order to achieve two goals, the scalability and operational efficiencies and local-ness, are vertical strategy content and marketing campaigns. So, I’m going to start with vertical strategy. This kind of content is very layered and it is based on insights. So, the problem that we’re trying to solve is that insights are pulled in the headquarters. So, insights are pulled in the US, so it’s very US-focused. And then we build a narrative on top of those insights, but this narrative then can be very difficult to be adapted for local teams and for local markets because the insights in the first place are not local. So, what we did first of all was to reassign responsibilities and reshuffling teams. This is a very cross-functional effort, so we’re working with the insight team and they’re responsible for pulling international insights as well when it comes to internal data. So, for example, imagine an internal insight that says 97% of searches on Pinterest are unbranded, and this is based on our US pull. So, how do we pull the equivalent? So, we work with the insight team and they start the approach with the same rigor as US insights, also international insights. And we pull some internal data and then we start building those narratives. The narrative is built in two ways. So, what we’re trying to do is number one, we’re templatizing pretty much all we can. Part of that narrative is what we call a global chassis or a global narrative, which means that it’s a narrative that is universal. So based on these insights, we want to tell the Pinterest story and that story is global. And that’s a story that we localize, we translate, and so, we use translation and review only. Then there is the story, the narration, that is built on local insights. That part is templatized. So, it means that a page, like a deck slide or a website’s page, has its own template and then it’s sent to copywriters for content creation. So, we provide basically a number of bullet points with general pointers and guidance and we are asking copywriters who are in-country and in touch with our local marketing managers to recreate that narrative that is specifically relevant for the local market. So, one asset, imagine like a vertical strategy deck, goes through two different processes. As I mentioned before, on one end it goes to translation and review with our translation vendor because the global narrative is universal and it can be simply translated. And then there is part of that narrative that is absolutely local because it’s gonna be built on local insight. And that part goes to copywriters, so international copywriters.
Deirdre	Can you tell us more about marketing campaigns, Francesca?
Francesca	Yeah. Marketing campaigns are localized in the same way as vertical strategy. So, this means that marketing campaigns are very layered assets. So, there is probably a tagline. There are a number of visual assets that can be universal and globally relevant, or can be very local and very US-centric. And so, imagine we have a marketing video that’s a brand video. And whereas the brand needs to be global, and that’s a message that we want to pass across the 200 territories that Pinterest is present in, at the same time we want to create also a very locally relevant asset. So, we have subtitles into a marketing video. That’s where the real work starts, the real localization marketing process begins. And then the video is sent to a copywriter that recreates a tagline. So, we provide a brief, we provide general pointers and guidance on the message that we want to convey out there. And so, we would recreate a tagline. And then there is another layer, which is the visual one, and we work with After Effects artists and we work with designers and we recreate all those visual assets in order to make them super global. And so, when we receive an asset for localization, basically our strategy is to split this asset into what is actually universally relevant in this asset and what needs to be locally relevant in this asset. The universal part, the universal message, goes to our ordinary translation/localization service provider, whereas the part that needs to be super local is rewritten, redone, reconceptualized by a copywriter who’s in touch with our local marketing teams. And so, of course as you might imagine, there are a lot of questions that arise like, oh, can these assets be localized, can be done with the same tools that we use? Are they going to break the design, are they going to cost too much, are they going to take longer than usual? Is it going to ruin our brand voice? These are the questions that we get all the time from our stakeholders. And actually, we have very reassuring answers. We’ve been testing out different processes and this is now working really well. Yes, we can use the same tools. Translation and review go into the usual tools, so we make sure that the first draft of localization, the first draft of text translated in a video for a marketing campaign, for example, is coherent with our glossary. So, we’re leveraging or using the same tools, we’re leveraging the same TM and we’re using the same pool of translators and reviewers who have been working on our account for years and knows all the ins and outs. Once that’s done, it goes to a copywriter who’s going to basically reconceptualize that content but working on an asset that is already translated and localized. It’s not going to break the design because what we’re doing, we’ve been working for a long time with the marketing team. And we make sure that whatever we work on, both for marketing assets, for collaterals, for vertical strategy, everything is templatized. And we know for sure that they’re not going to break the design when we’re going to introduce different locales. The process is quite cost-effective because the very moment you manage to split an asset into something that is globally relevant and then goes into a deeper translation and review, you’re already being very cost-effective. And then the copy-editing part is of course more expensive, but the outcome is definitely higher. And so, that’s something that needs to weigh into the decision. Time is always an issue, especially in our industry, and we want to be as time-effective as possible. We manage to be pretty fast because the global part can be processed according to the usual SLAs. And so, these allow us to carve a lot of creative time for copywriters, and that’s the time that we value the most in this process. And that’s the time that we’re trying to carve since the very beginning.
Deirdre	So it does sound like the localization vendors may have had to adjust how they work with you as you developed this hybrid approach. Is that the case? And I was also wondering how other teams at Pinterest have had to adjust their work to be able to collaborate with your team.
Francesca	Yeah, those are great questions. Our vendor, our localization service provider, had initially had to adapt a lot on our processes, especially when we were testing out new processes. Now we landed on a process that we feel very comfortable with and what we’re asking our vendor to do is basically to do the best they usually do on our product, which is translation and review leveraging TMs and translation memories and glossaries and style guides. So, they’re in charge of translating a message and making sure that it’s consistent with Pinterest terminology. And actually, we’re not requesting anything so unusual. What we’re doing, though, in this hybrid model is that we’re working with multiple vendors. And so, there is a lot of communication that at the moment is handled by us, by my team, meaning vendor A does translation and review and vendor B communicates with the marketing managers. And my team is the one who’s the glue, basically, who’s bridging this communication, but is also taking the toll. So, when you have multiple vendors coming in and working on these assets, the communication cost is…is bigger, is higher. Imagine for a video for a marketing campaign: we have an After Effects artist and a designer, and we have a localization service provider doing translation and review, and then we have a copywriter and then we have internal stakeholders: our marketing, our marketing managers, for example. So, what’s really crucial is keeping the communication cost to the bare minimum, and at the same time, enabling a communication that makes us function in a very agile way in this process. So, there are so many different channels of communications, and the localization team, as I said before, is the bridge, is the one, like, overlooking all these channels and making sure that things happen in a timely manner. So, as you can imagine, we’re working with the insight team, with the writing team, with the marketing team, with the brand team, and we’re asking for something new, for something different. We’re asking these teams to templatize their assets. We’re asking these teams to pick visual assets that are universally relevant. We’re asking these teams to build a global, a universal, narrative that is useful for all other markets and to provide additional guidance and information that we can collate into a brief when we rewrite narratives for local markets. We reshuffled a lot of responsibilities as well and we reshuffled resources. As you can imagine, an insight lead was pulling insights for US only, and now is pulling insights for all our core markets, so of course we need additional resources there. But probably we are freeing up a little bit of time of our writing team who is not writing, you know, multiple sections or paragraphs according to, you know, local needs, but we’re having copywriters doing that. And so, there was a bit of a shuffling of resources across the company as well to make sure that we are all part of this international growth marketing toolkit.
Deirdre	Yeah. It sounds like the people on your team must be very versatile; they must have an interesting skillset.
Francesca	For sure I have a team of superstars. I’m very proud of all of them and they all come from a localization background, but they manage to stretch their muscles and become much more than that. What’s needed in our team is really to be agile and flexible and great communicators. When I mentioned that, you know, we are a tool in the international growth marketing toolkit, it also means that our primary method of doing international marketing is not necessarily based on translation or on localization skillsets. So, we all have to, you know, stretch our muscles and become a little bit of marketers, communicators and leaders. Especially when we have big cross-functional conversations and we’re trying to figure out the best setup for all these teams to have the resources that we need to create an outcome that is much better than the one that we were creating before.
Deirdre	So, how do you measure the success of your program?
Francesca	We measure success of our program in different ways. Mainly, for us it’s extremely important to hear back from our local stakeholders. So, our international marketing managers are our eyes and ears on international growth. And so, they will let us know how the assets that we produced actually did in their market. They pull data on their dashboards, for example, if we’re pushing a video for international marketing, we’re measuring beauty metrics like how many clicks, how many views and so on. For sales teams, for example, we always share a survey with the teams asking to provide us with feedback. And for us it’s extremely important to hear, in a very bold way, in a very open and honest way, how our assets feed into their strategy, their local strategies. So, their feedback is the most valuable one. They’re the ones who can actually let us know how all the vendors that have been working on that asset, all those layers that we have implemented in order to come up with that kind of outcome, with that kind of asset, have actually worked. If they were effective and what we produced was actually something valuable for our teams, that’s what I will call success for my team. Local teams, as I said, they would measure success according to the assets they put out there in their markets and social media channels and so on and they measure success in a different way. And so, at some point like, usually when we run retrospectives after big go-to-markets or different marketing strategies or marketing campaigns, we pull all those metrics together. So, beauty metrics or local metrics and the feedback that we get from local teams.
Deirdre	Does that feedback include customer feedback?
Francesca	So the feedback includes both customer feedback and sales team feedback. So, imagine for a marketing strategy we have created, I don’t know, 12 decks about vertical strategy. We want to know from our sales team if the content was actually usable—that’s the bare minimum—if it was delightful, if it was effective, if it was understood, if it was catchy and engaging, and our teams can let us know that. So, usually, like, in the survey, we ask questions around language, but around the story and the narrative. That’s the most important part, because it’s a narrative that was created by local copywriters. And so, there are so many vendors that we need to keep an eye on in terms of the output that they have and the quality of their output, their time effectiveness and so on. And so, this is why the feedback from our local teams is extremely important, because we truly understand what part of the process worked well. It was the narrative, it was the translation, it was the visual assets, and what part didn’t work well. If the global narrative is working fine but the local narrative is still so-so, it means that probably our copywriter is not doing a good job or our brief was not sufficiently explanatory. And so, this is where we have to think of an action plan and intervene.
Deirdre	Can you tell us more about your terminology management process?
Francesca	My team, the localization team, owns the international glossaries. We have huge glossaries, as probably all tech companies have, and they span from terminology in all our products to terminology in marketing and sales. We manage these glossaries in all languages that we support at Pinterest and we are responsible to make sure that all the assets that we produce are consistent with our glossaries. This means that when we use a hybrid approach on marketing and sales content, we want to make sure that the vendors that are the most comfortable and confident on our terminology are the ones doing the preliminary translation and review. So, they are guaranteeing that our jargon is honored and glossary terms are used consistently across all assets that we are localizing. We have vendors who work on our product, who know the ins and outs of our product, know our terminology, the style and tone, and we want to make sure that—they are the people that have been working on our account for such a long time—they are the vendors who are working on marketing campaigns as well. Because we want to make sure that when we carve the creative space for copywriters, they do not necessarily need to focus on terminology consistency. But I want them to focus on the creative part. That’s the part that we value the most. And so, basically what we’re doing, we’re splitting responsibilities, and we have our usual vendor who’s gonna take care of more of the technical part of the translation, making sure that glossary terms are honored, that the style and tone is honored, and then we want the creative vendor to be responsible for the final touch that has to be hyper-local.
Deirdre	I was wondering if you would touch on Pinterest’s sentiment analysis program, and if you could tell us about the purpose of the program and a little bit about how you deploy that worldwide.
Francesca	Yes. At Pinterest, my team is responsible to collect the sentiment analysis as well. And the sentiment analysis is basically the interpretation and the classification of emotions within text data that our users are sharing out there on social media and so on. And so, what we do, we collect that information for all the markets that we support and all the languages that Pinterest supports. The reason why the localization team is responsible for the sentiment analysis is that Pinterest is supporting product into 34 languages and we are present in more than 200 territories. So, you can imagine the huge volumes of text, data, emails, support tickets, chats, social media conversations and so on that is created every day and that is talking about us. So, sentiment analysis helps us to understand number one, the sentiment, the nature of the sentiment that our users are sharing with us. Is it positive, negative or neutral? It’s also helping us to understand what are their feelings and emotions. So, are users angry, happy, are they sad, and also, what are their intentions? Are they interested in our product or part of our product; a feature, for example, or marketing campaign? The sentiment analysis is mainly shared with the internal teams and it became an actionable tool for our product teams, who are our main stakeholders, but also for our marketing team. Especially, like, we monitor social media, which allows us to gain an overview of the wider public opinion behind certain topics, features that we are advertising out there or that lead to a new product launch or a day a particular piece of that press dropped, for example. Also, we share this actionable feedback with our brand team. By using sentiment analysis on social media, we can get also incredible insights into the quality of conversation that’s happening around our brand. And then we share it with the research team as well. It’s an essential part of our market research and customer service approach. So, we not only understand what people, what users, why users are using our product and services, but also how they feel about it. And by looking at the sentiment of our users and sharing it with cross-functional teams, we get a lot of meaningful insights. So, we can track trends over time and we can share with the teams, and also, we can keep a finger on the competition. And you can imagine how powerful this tool is when we discuss, for example, the internationalization of a marketing campaign, or when we discuss the internationalization of a specific part of product. And so, this is an incredibly powerful tool for my team to advocate for any change or any request with the rest of the company.
Deirdre	Yeah. That does sound powerful. I mean, it sounds like you can build such a truly global product, you know, with being able to leverage that feedback in that way.
Francesca	Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. We leverage, for example, a few million customer reviews with star ratings from the App Store or Google Play. We collect a number of reviews also from social media and then the report is sliced by locales, by platform, by sentiment. And so, we can really look at in a granular way the sentiment of a specific geographical area. And the most important part is of course to make this report from being a sheer informative report into something that is truly actionable.
Deirdre	Everyone we speak to is experiencing challenges, and I’m curious if you’d share some of your challenges with us and what you’re doing to address those.
Francesca	Yes, many challenges. I think the biggest challenge is reshuffling resources across the company, reshuffling internal resources. And sometimes before you land on a definitive org structure, there are a lot of trials and errors, and so being agile is super important. And that’s the part where we struggle, or it’s a great opportunity to revisit really the potential of each team, but it can also be unsettling, you know, reshuffling responsibilities, reshuffling teams and reshuffling tasks, especially when you keep doing it over and over until you find the right recipe for success. Another challenge that we’re facing is how can we make sure that we get the resources that we need from a team from which we don’t have much visibility or control on. So, imagine that to create local marketing assets, we need to have local insights and we need to have access to those resources. And so, how do we make sure that we’re always asking for a fair amount of extra work?
Deirdre	Thank you so much for your time Francesca! I think our listeners will really benefit from your insights.

Guests

Francesca Di Marco

Francesca Di Marco is a veteran in the localization industry, and currently the internationalization lead at Pinterest where she leads the internationalization and global development program for product and marketing. She is passionate about enabling teams to achieve global scale by integrating processes and strategies, and by bridging gaps across functions and regional offices. Francesca is a lifelong language nerd and a former lecturer on the History of Japan at Stanford University in the UK and Italy. In her spare time, she makes documentaries.

Hosts

Deirdre Cleere

Senior Onboarding Program Manager

Deirdre Cleere is a Senior Program Manager at RWS. She utilizes her wealth of knowledge and passion for all things technology and language to develop effective localization and globalization programs.

After spending her youth overseas in Brazil and Indonesia, she was recruited by a small translation company right out of college. This led to 24 years of Deirdre successfully fulfilling localization roles for various organizations. Her impressive resume also includes a stint at Microsoft where she was the Geopolitical Strategist for the Global Readiness team.

Deirdre lives in Seattle and in her spare time she enjoys boating and cooking Indonesian food.