Last year, Translation was awarded Ad Age’s 2021 Small Agency of the Year, boasting new hires and revenue gains when others were shrinking, powered by a portfolio of work that spoke powerfully to broader conversations. Now, the agency has outgrown the criteria for that title and joins the Ad Age A-List after another consistent crop of new business and impressive creative.

Delivering on its motto of translating the language of culture for brands, Translation decoded the elusive aura of 2021—a year that may have felt lost between the despair of 2020 and hopefulness of 2022—through its creative. A series of spots for SiriusXM imagined a cast of celebrities including Dave Grohl centered around indulgence and humor. A campaign for the NBA’s 75th anniversary focused on how professional basketballers’ careers can inspire future generations. And an evolution of 2020’s profound “You Love Me” campaign for Beats by Dre, an award-winning response to the growing Black Lives Matter movement, explored unity through the common language of music.

“Historically, we had always been able to hit a high note and then go missing a little bit and then hit a note again,” said Jason Campbell, Translation head of creative. “And I think what we've done consistently—fingers crossed—is hit the high notes all the time, and be sort of true to ourselves at the same time in terms of the work we deliver.”

An evolution

“It’s the Music” examined the ways music can empower and inspire an individual through a series of films inspired by the aesthetic of “You Love Me.” But rather than making a statement for inclusion and a challenge to bias, it focused on representing the diverse global community of music fans through what they love. Uniting influential brand ambassadors from Serena Williams to comedian Druski, the campaign gave product features the back seat for the launch of Beats Studio Buds and focused instead on the music that inspires each personality (the former chose “Black Magic” by Kelly Rowland, the latter “Forever After All” by Luke Combs), to express how song can form a community of its own.

“It was a dark year,” said Steve Stoute, Translation founder and CEO. “And giving people entertainment, optimism, the feeling of joy—we made some dark work, some thought-provoking work for Beats … and then post-that statement, I think creatively [we said] let's bring joy, let's bring optimism. We're coming out of this thing—we're coming out of the protests, we're coming out of the pandemic—let's make work that makes people feel good.”

The result was tremendous: 28 million organic social interactions and 300,000 clicks to purchase Beats Studio Buds, resulting in the most successful product launch for Beats by Dre in more than a decade.

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“The ‘You Love Me’ work put the entire ad industry on notice, put the world on notice and it was really celebrated—but it wasn't selling headphones,” said Chaucer Barnes, Translation's chief marketing officer. “What it was doing was resetting a brand so that it could be adopted and advocated by a new generation consumer who’d aged up and didn't know anything about Dr. Dre. So the proof-point of whether or not that positioning worked really came with ‘It's the Music.’ ‘It's the Music’ is not about the stopping power of culture. It's about the shopping power of culture. It was the most successful skew in company history.”

A culture

After three-quarters of a century, the NBA has become more than just a sport to many. Its players' stories inspire and its events bring people together. But during a time when many have been hesitant to venture out in public, that sense of community has had to emerge in venues other than the arena. So, Translation created its own fantasy world to gather fans: “NBA Lane.”

The spot brought together more than 30 current and former NBA stars, who playfully interact among a horde of Easter eggs for viewers to hunt. The video’s guide is played by Michael B. Jordan, who drives the Hoop Bus, a real nonprofit that empowers communities through basketball. The video gained more than 83 million views within hours and scored engagement across social platforms as fans teamed up to decode its many references, all resulting in an 8% increase in year-over-year TV ratings.

“NBA Lane is one of those things that we really measure in cultural response,” said Barnes. “And when we talk about cultural response, we're talking about the memes and the participatory elements and the fact that whole Reddit threads and forums would come together to pick apart the launch spot to figure out that the Kobe and Devin [Booker] sequence was eight seconds long, which, of course, was Kobe’s jersey number for so long.”

“Basketball had shut down, people were watching it in a bubble, fans weren't in arenas, and so we needed to find a way to celebrate what this ecosystem of basketball was,” Campbell added. “It wasn't just a sport, it was a culture.”

The growth

Campbell was part of a huge hiring wave for the agency that began in 2020 and resulted in a total of 124 new Translation employees in 2020 and 2021 combined, plus a new office in Los Angeles that joined its existing locations in San Francisco and Brooklyn.

“The people that we've been able to attract have been really nothing short of extraordinary … and how they maintain our laser focus on diversity of everything—diversity of mindsets, diversity of culture, diversity of just representing almost everything you could possibly think of to ensure that we really are able to stay true to who we are,” said Ann Wool, Translation president. “I've talked to numerous clients and they point to that fact: The difference of our talent compared to our competitors is one of the main attractions to them.”

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In addition to its growth internally, the agency grew its clientele with wins for American Express’ NBA work, WhatsApp, TicTac, insurance group TIAA and pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly’s metastatic breast cancer prescription Verzinio.

Overall, Translation experienced a 97% increase in revenue from $30 million in 2020 to a projected $59.3 million in 2021.

The future

All of the growth, financially and in staff and clients, also led to an ideological realization for Translation. The agency hadn’t found success fitting into already-formed frameworks for how an agency should look or operate. Barnes said that “2020 could have felt like an exception,” but now that the industry has seen what Translation is capable of, it’s the agency's job to keep pushing their work forward.

“Pop culture was clearly in tatters,” Barnes said, citing the pandemic, the nation’s racial awakening and its political conflict. “2021 was really about not being exceptional anymore, but normalizing what had happened in 2020, finding the right partnerships, the right canvases and the right moments to continue the momentum amount of 2020 in such a way that even as the world attempted to bounce back to normal, we were able to hold on to not just the clients, but also the brand of work that we're most proud of.”

When asked what these years of success have taught him, Stoute’s response is “focus.”

“Really focusing on doing what we do best,” Stoute said. “I think there was a period of time where we started trying to be things that we weren't. And when we became things that we weren't, we haven't performed well.”

“It takes guts to say no, it really does,” said Wool. “People dangle very big prizes and it’s easy to chase.”