In this interview, we sit down with Daniel King, Executive Director at Havas Health & You, to talk about the challenges and opportunities involved with content localisation. With more than a decade of experience in digital content strategy, Daniel shares his insights on the importance of understanding local cultures and context to deliver content that makes a real impact.
All views are his own.
What is your role at Havas?
DK: I’m the Executive Director of the Australian Office at Havas Health. I've been working in life sciences, marketing, and medical education for about five years now. The agency that I work with currently is a grassroots Australian life sciences agency. It was founded about 10 to 12 years ago, but was acquired by the Havas Health and new global Agency Network after we'd worked with some global life sciences brands for some time.
At Havas, I work with Australian clients, Asia Pacific clients and global clients on positioning medicines, medical technology and medical devices against their competition, but largely reaching doctors and healthcare professionals and patients to better understand how to give them medicines and medical technology to improve their quality of life.
How do you help your clients localise content?
DK: To begin, we help our clients develop annual strategic and brand plans to figure out what their market drivers are. They might say: “I'm going to promote product X in this market targeting a particular doctor or patient type”, and they'll recognise the growth opportunity for that particular medicine or technology.
We then try to better understand the brand. Does the client have a global set of brand guidelines, and if so, what are they? Are these relevant to local markets, or are they disconnected? First and foremost, we've got to make sure that we've got a set of core elements. These are things that must be said and flexible elements that should be localised. Then, you need to localise the message, the language, and the tone of voice to whoever's receiving that message. The design also needs to be altered—things like the imagery, colour, and use of symbols. And then it has to be localised to meet the regulatory and compliance requirements of local markets.
We’re seeing a growing need for resources like brand guideline documents, campaign toolkits, content guidelines, and outlines—with the understanding that local markets will adapt them for their audiences.To give an example, when we were in lockdown during the pandemic, I worked with a global life sciences company that said they wanted to be the first to market with a novel oral antiviral treatment for COVID 19. There was another competitor coming to market, so the brief, in principle, was to beat the competition and explain that the company was solving a particular customer need.
We’re seeing a growing need for resources like brand guideline documents, campaign toolkits, content guidelines, and outlines
The client’s global brand idea used a phrase along the lines of: “Helping you ride the wave of COVID 19”. It featured an image of a clinician and a wave—in the shape of a face mask—all the artefacts of COVID 19, which we were really familiar with. However, we looked at the idea and wondered whether we should support it in the local market context. The image had this positive, toned, 3D, animated, happy vibe, but we thought, who's the customer? Who's the patient? They’re people like me and you. What do we think and feel like? What are our attitudes and opinions? Well, we're pretty frightened right now that we're going to end up in Hospital with COVID 19 and possibly even die.
The context was around the fear that we'd end up in hospital. Elsewhere, there was imagery of patients lying on beds and not being able to touch their family. We didn't want the virus to spread. So instead of “helping people ride the wave”, we changed the brand idea to: “Welcome to Treatment at Home”. It still had a positive tone, but it took away the fear that if you got COVID 19, you'd end up in hospital or dying. Instead, you'd end up with a treatment that could help. The consistencies of the brand idea that we took from the global concept were the look and feel of the animation style, some of the colour palette, the font and typography—but it had a local strategy.
When we think about localising campaigns for an international audience, it’s all about adapting the strategy to fit the local context. This is closely tied to our planning process—considering who we’re targeting, the brand we’re representing, the competition, and the unique dynamics of each market. We focus on understanding the local environment to ensure our approach resonates.
How do you juggle all of your localisation requirements efficiently?
Localisation needs communication, teamwork, and really efficient processes
DK: Localisation needs communication, teamwork, and really efficient processes. It's a lot to manage in a short period of time. When I think about how we overcame the challenges we faced in the past, there wasn’t any guesswork. We worked with speed; we worked out who our key stakeholders were; decided on our roles and responsibilities, and created an operational plan. Then in terms of systems and technology, we made sure that we understood the local clients’ MLR process and their platforms—which for most life sciences businesses, is Veeva.
We overcame our past challenges by working with speed; working out who our key stakeholders were; deciding on our roles and responsibilities, and creating an operational plan
We also get more people involved early and upfront. Early consultation played a critical role in some of those moving parts and streamlining the process. So when we asked the marketing, legal, regulatory people upfront, we understood more about their expectations. It helps set us up for success if we know people, process, responsibility, technology and platforms and then we go ahead and execute in the most efficient way possible.
Are there challenges with scaling local campaigns?
Every client is being limited by budget. We're seeing regular restructures, budgets being pulled back, and people expecting to do more with less
DK: The biggest challenges at the moment in terms of scalability and workflow management—and localising across Asia—is cost. Every client is being limited by budget. We're seeing regular restructures, budgets being pulled back, and people expecting to do more with less. And sadly, speaking to some cloud life sciences consultants in the region, there's a hell of a lot of content that doesn't get used at all. It's a strange thing. We want to scale, we want to produce more content, and we want it to be relevant and useful—yet it isn't.
Sadly, there's a hell of a lot of content that just doesn't get used at all
One of the other critical challenges to be addressed is distribution and engagement with content rather than just scaling its creation. There's a tension between markets saying we want to be faster to market, and we want great quality content, but great quality content often takes time.
Solutions like Shaman are really doing interesting things in the marketplace when it comes to accelerating content creation. I can see that like people produce websites now, life sciences content will probably be created through cloud based platforms like Shaman—the Canva of life sciences, if you like.
I want access to more technology that will save time, costs, and improve the efficiency and consistency of content strategies
I look at the approvals process and see how people can leverage digital asset management (DAM) systems and modular content and address scalability quickly. And I think one of the things getting in our way is technology. I want access to more technology that will save time, costs, and improve the efficiency and consistency of content strategies.
Have you found challenges with rolling out new strategies across multiple teams?
DK: My responsibility is to build bridges and connections between my regional colleagues and my local client. From there, I need to demonstrate capability, experience, and understanding to give them confidence, and make sure that this trust allows us to have a different kind of a conversation.
I think that it's often down to understanding each other and having that willingness to say: “I support your strategy. I want to see it through. I can see the value in it.” More often than not, these strategies and plans break down when we don't understand each other.
More often than not, strategies and plans break down when we don't understand each other
Yes, I could push the agenda. I could say to my clients: “You've got to do it because it's regionally mandated”, but that's not going to produce a great outcome for the product or for the patient.
If my agenda is purely commercial and I just want to make money, that's a pretty poor starting point. This is for the patient's benefit.
How do you adapt your content to suit local differences?
DK: There are many fun, interesting differences when it comes to Asian cultures. For example, I work in the diabetes space for a product across Asia, and we get asked to create different content across Vietnam, Philippines, India, Taiwan, Thailand, and other Asian markets. In terms of layout and design, some languages have differences such as text expansion. When you convert English into Chinese or Japanese, for instance, the way the text is expanded can be surprising. You end up needing a designer to figure out how you can build a template that has the flex for the different markets you want to work with.
Then with translation, you have issues like complex drug names, little nuances with medical terms, hospital locations, therapy types, and all sorts of different medical terminology. If these are translated poorly, it can lead to misinformation or safety risks. As a result, we need to be really concerned about local market translation or at least working with absolute experts. We need to make sure that's tested as well.
We need to be really concerned about local market translation
There are other sorts of nuances about how it works with localising, where in Western culture, things like hand signals—peace signs, thumbs up, waving—can be misinterpreted. Or phrases like “fighting cancer” are difficult to translate into another language when concepts like fighting a disease might be misinterpreted.
We want to represent people in a way that’s considered normal or authentic
There’s also the subtlety of nonverbal language. We often react to each other by interpreting gestures or appearance quite quickly. So we need to be very careful about how we represent people in Asian cultures in photos and designs. For instance, Asian cultures sometimes suppress facial expressions. There are differences in things like the look of surprise and happiness. I've found out that men in Asian cultures don't always smile as much. And we want to represent people in a way that’s considered normal or authentic.
When it comes to localisation campaigns, do you have any success stories?
DK: I worked on one American campaign, based on a cardiovascular drug, where the brand guidelines were representing a very unusual and futuristic concept around the use of robots in the local market. It seemed to lack a local understanding of the patient. If we don't lower their cholesterol levels, patients are at risk of heart attack and cardiac arrest. So it's really important that we act fast. Cardiologists were no longer the prescribers for this drug, but general practitioners (GPs). So the challenge for this client was that they had a completely new customer type, and we needed to produce content to educate GPs on a drug they’d never prescribed before.
We needed an omnichannel strategy and campaign to reach these GPs. There were 38,000 of them and we had no sales team, so it had to be a digital-first approach. We also needed an idea—a campaignable concept. Even though we had an omnichannel strategy—we knew how to distribute the story—we didn't have a brand idea.
So we looked at the American market and others promoting this medicine and developed a campaign around the concept ‘The Power to Prevent,’ presenting GPs as superheroes. After all, they'd never been able to prescribe this drug before, so it was a bit of a superpower for them to say to patients: “I'm going to stop you from dying if I give you this particular medicine”.
The representation of this—in the local market context— was a male and female GP. And after some cultural analysis, we found that the typical Australian male GP has Asian origins and the female GP has Indian origins.
We gave the characters superhero poses, with a twist on the typical medical image—rather than the usual white lab coat and stethoscope, we showed an Asian male doctor in a suit, jacket and white shirt, ripping his shirt open to reveal the campaign message. For the female doctor, we chose a powerful stance, inspired by Wonder Woman’s iconic hands-on-hips pose, to convey confidence in a culturally appropriate way. The campaign was incredibly successful and helped GPs better understand the role they played.
There isn't enough measurement and transfer of data and analytics performance back to the people who create campaigns
Veeva was at the heart of this campaign, with the DAM on top. We were producing a lot of content and distributing it through different channels. I don't have analytics on it, however, which is a bit of a shortcoming. To be honest, I’d say this is another gap in the market. There isn't enough measurement and transfer of data and analytics performance back to the people who create campaigns.
How do you balance global brand guidelines with localisation edits?
DK: Global brand guidelines are really helpful, but regional and local markets often have their own opinions on how closely they want to stick to them. Ideally, we should have both a global and a local content strategy. The global strategy would provide a toolkit—clear templates, messaging frameworks, and resources—empowering local markets to move faster and at a lower cost. Then, each local market should also have the flexibility to adjust certain content aspects to better fit their unique needs.
This approach offers clear, layered guidelines—not only at a brand level, defining what the brand stands for, its distinct identity, and visual style, but also at a content level. It enables the creation of content in the right format, for the right channels, and with the right messaging and frequency to resonate with local audiences.
There’s definitely an expectation to stick with what Global says because it saves time and cuts costs. But having a local strategy is important since each market has its own KPIs. If you just roll out the Global approach, you’ll probably miss those local targets, which can lead to underperformance. So, it’s all about balancing consistency with a local strategy.
If you just roll out the Global approach, you’ll probably miss those local targets, which can lead to underperformance
Global plays an essential role in providing consistency, while local teams focus on operationalising this and ensuring relevance. Life sciences cloud platforms, like DAM systems, make it possible to share and distribute content efficiently. Initially, I thought this process was expensive, complicated, and time consuming. I thought, there has to be a better way. And then when I dug a little, I found players like Shaman getting ready to begin a content creation evolution.
Life sciences content creation will be rapidly accelerated, but it still requires local strategists, creatives, and storytellers
Life sciences content creation will be rapidly accelerated, but it still requires local strategists, creatives, and storytellers to apply that knowledge. These experts need to work alongside life sciences businesses to accelerate content production, reduce costs, and go to market quicker.
From an agency perspective, how do you see the future of content localisation?
DK: It'd be foolish of me to think that artificial intelligence isn’t going to play a role. There's obviously a heightened sense of concern about how intellectual property is protected and ensure that generative AI (Gen AI) doesn't access things that are restricted. But at the same time, there's an expectation that Gen AI will provide operational efficiency. It'll provide us with support, and accelerate everything from research and strategy to planning, analysis, and creation.
Gen AI will provide us with support, and accelerate everything from research and strategy to planning, analysis, and creation
At the moment, I’m thinking about how we can develop Gen AI guidelines that our internal teams can all work with and then clarify how we expect that to be integrated within the workflow of us taking a brief, creating assets, having them approved and being deployed and analysing the results. It's early days, but I'm excited about how the future of content creation will be supplemented by or improved through the use of AI tools.
I'm excited about how the future of content creation will be supplemented by or improved through the use of AI tools
Collaboration is important. I think there's an opportunity for platforms like Veeva and others like Shaman in front of Veeva to improve the way we all collaborate and create, review, and approve content.
I also think the way that we're interacting with content is going to change. I see the pushes from the Metas and Apples of the world for us to adopt more screens in front of our faces and augment reality with more data, more visualisation, more engagement.
And I think that we're going to need to think about how patients should own their own data, as well as how we provide the ability for organisations to access this data—where permitted—in order to provide value to patients. This will include how we can personalise, distribute, educate, empower patients to get access to content to make better choices for their own quality of life. It's important for agencies and consultants to lean into this and make sure they can give clients advice if they're ready to dip their toe in the water.
