The leadership team at Translation. Top row: CEO and Founder Steve Stoute; Chief Marketing Officer Chaucer Barnes; President Ann Wool and Head of Production Alison Hill. Center row: Chief Strategy Officer Sandi Preston; Chief Creative Officer Jason Campbell; Head of Client Services Susanna Swartley; and Executive Director of Engagement Planning Joel Rodriguez. Bottom row: Chief Revenue Officer Eden Gorcey; Head of Operations Ed Lau; Head of Talent Management Courtney Nally and VP of Finance Fabian Villenas
Steve Stoute founded Translation 19 years ago with the belief that culture is the key to advertising success. Fast-forward to 2022—with brands itching to deepen relationships with younger and more diverse consumers, and Translation is perfectly positioned, thanks to a guiding principle the agency has lived by for nearly two decades.
Stoute started Translation in 2004, as the name suggests, to translate culture into advertising opportunities for Fortune 500 companies.
What that looked like in 2022 was a slate of consistently good work that broke boundaries and provided unique insights on diverse audiences, further integration of the agency and Stoute’s music distributor and creator network UnitedMasters, and an even more equitable workplace.
As a result, Translation increased its revenue 13% to $72.5 million last year from $64 million in 2021 with new business wins including Ally, the Big 12 Conference, Meta, Intuit, MolsonCoors and Pepsi. It also maintained and continued to build on existing accounts, including State Farm (which it has served since 2005), the NBA (its client since 2017), Beats by Dre (2019) and WhatsApp (2021).
“When I came up, nobody cared about this conversation,” Stoute said. “I was building Translation and I would say constantly that there was a white kid in Greenwich, Connecticut, who had more in common with a Black kid in Compton than anyone in advertising.”
Stoute said “it was unheard of” to relate culture to advertising in 2004. “To look up now and watch these agencies actually try to put a cultural offering in front of a client is an absolute joke because this is not something you can do overnight,” he said.
Because of the agency’s track record, the Big 12 sports conference hired Translation as its creative agency of record to reimagine how it shows up in youth culture amid an evolution in college sports—which includes recent changes to name, image and likeness (NIL) deals giving more power to student-athletes now able to profit from their individual brands. Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark was CEO of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets when the team moved and rebranded from New Jersey in 2012; Translation was the agency behind that move.
“Brett, who watched us transition a team from New Jersey to Brooklyn, thought that we would be the best partner to help him with this transition in college sports,” Stoute said.
New business aside, Stoute said he is certain that Translation couldn’t do the defining work that it does without being tapped into culture and without diverse employees.
Of the 200 employees the agency employed in 2022, 50.5% were female and 15% were women of color; 48.6% were male; 0.9% did not identify; 24.1% were Black; 13.2% were Asian; 13.6% were Hispanic or Latino; 7.7% were of two or more races; and 41.4% were white.
“Multicultural is mass culture. Diversity is mass culture,” Stoute said. “How could you actually do a good job without being multicultural and diverse?”
Translation also made its workplace more equitable in 2020 by restructuring employee compensation to offer staffers, regardless of tenure, stock options in the company, which is relatively unheard of for an ad agency.
Buy your ticket for the Ad Age A-List & Creativity Awards Gala here.
"I have a lot of pride in the consistency. Whenever we show up, we show up in a certain way and we show up with a level of craft, storytelling and talking about things that not everyone's talking about but that we're pushing,” said Translation Chief Creative Officer Jason Campbell.
Case in point: When Meta’s WhatsApp tasked Translation with creating a campaign to connect it better with Latino audiences, the shop zeroed in on the deep connection Latina women have with music despite the dominance men still hold over the industry.
Translation tapped Argentine singer-songwriter Martina “Tini” Stoessel, Brazilian singer Anitta and Mexican-American singer Rebbeca Marie Gomez (Becky G) for a campaign aimed at amplifying female voices. It launched on the WhatsApp and Instagram accounts of the three artists, who used a new blue microphone sticker as a symbol of how the app’s features can help boost Latin female voices.
The campaign received 4.8 million views, 736,000 engagements on social posts and an overall 98.4% positive sentiment in earned conversation. And the agency reached its goal, with the most conversations coming from Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Mexico and Chile, across the 47 countries it touched.
For the NBA’s 2022-23 season, Translation had another big task: following up the stunning “NBA Lane” work it did the previous year for the league's 75th anniversary season—which included a metaverse iteration and a short film that starred actor and producer Michael B. Jordan.
Translation knew it had to find a way to hype fans back up. The agency landed on “Nonstop,” a new character and NBA superfan whose energy and “nerding out” on all the excitement in store for the 2022-23 season gave fans a relatable, affable mascot to root for.
After actor Keyon Bowman’s audition, there was also no question as to who should play “Nonstop.” Campbell said a lot of thought went into casting the character, including finding someone with the right age and energy.
At the start of the audition, Campbell said Bowman just took his phone out and “started walking down the street; this was not like a closed environment. He took his phone and just started talking to neighbors. We were like 'All right, that's the thing; that's the energy you need to carry this whole idea for a whole season.’”
Translation's research showed that 89% of younger core NBA fans and 67% of older core fans are “excited” by the new character. Across all audiences, more than 90% of fans are either excited or neutral about the superfan.
Translation’s “context department” is key to the agency's ability to create impactful campaigns and is the brainchild of Chief Marketing Officer Chaucer Barnes. The department reports directly into strategy with the goal of providing key insights that inform what message, moment and medium a campaign should run on.
“Context was always designed to work on both sides of the brief,” Barnes said. “If you've heard a phrase like, ‘make strategy more creative and creative more strategic,’ that's because context is involved. It’s involved pre-brief (or) data collection, audience understanding, etcetera, and it's also associated with post-brief work. So once the core creative idea has been identified, (the context department) is looking for all the different ways to turn it on, whereby it can become less like advertising and more attractive to the people that it was intended for.”
Barnes said for every campaign, this team asks a laundry list of questions including: “Who do we cast? Who has the authority to speak here and to be here? When does this need to happen? Where can we take advantage of things that we can't control, but we can benefit from?”
UnitedMasters was also a game-changer for the agency. After announcing the integration of the agency and platform in late 2019, Translation started offering UnitedMasters as a core offering to clients last year.
The platform helps independent creators get their content in TV shows, movies, commercials and games, and now encompasses 1.6 million artists that brands also can access.
“[United]Masters has really created an unfair advantage for Translation clients,” Chief Revenue Officer Eden Gorcey said.
PepsiCo, for example, partnered with UnitedMasters to launch the Pepsi Music Lab, which offered 12 rising artists mentorship and coaching from music industry professionals to help them reach stardom.
While PepsiCo has always been a brand that’s leaned into music, Gorcey said UnitedMasters is also partnering with clients that wouldn’t have historically been attuned to this type of work, including Ally and Intuit. Ally and UnitedMasters have been working together since 2021 to create physical spaces for underrepresented artists to learn about building and maintaining wealth.
“It’s 1.6 million creators who essentially run their own small business, and that's where things get really exciting for us,” Gorcey said. “Obviously artists are really managing their businesses. They need to do taxes, set up surveys, send out emails,” she said, referring to the work the agency is doing for Intuit and its brands including TurboTax, Mint and Mailchimp.
Ally Chief Marketing and PR Officer Andrea Brimmer said the company's work with Translation “revolves around their ability to push culture forward. They’re a perfectly diverse group of people who understand culture better than anybody and that's what makes Translation special."
As Stoute looks to the next two decades of Translation, he anticipates expanding more into media, the creator space, data and possibly adding consulting for NILs—he sees opportunity wherever his employees seem to be particularly excited.
“This idea of culture being the central system or connected tissue that unites all of us is going to be an idea that is going to stick around for many years,” Stoute said. “Whether it’s adding on media services, data and research, there are going to be many more services we’ll have in the coming quarters and years that will provide us market dominance.”
