Vernacular first: the case for briefing in 12 languages

Who the internet speaks to now

The last few hundred million Indians to come online did not come for the English-language internet. Reporting on internet adoption in India has been consistent for years: the growth is in Indian-language users, on Indian-language platforms — ShareChat, Moj, Josh, regional YouTube — and in the vernacular corners of Instagram and Facebook. This is not a niche audience. It is most of the audience.

The translation trap

The standard response is to write the brief in English, approve it in English and have the creator “do it in Marathi.” What comes back is Marathi words in an English structure — a claim, a feature, a call to action — that sounds like an advertisement because it is one. The audience can hear the seam.

Content that travels in a language is written from it: the joke, the reference, the way people in Kolhapur actually talk about a car or a face wash or a school. No translator supplies that. The creator does, if the brief lets her.

Language is not the last step of the brief. It is the first field in the targeting.

Briefing for twelve languages without twelve briefs

• Brief the intent and the constraints, not the copy. What should happen, what must be said (a claim, a disclosure), what must not. Everything else is the creator’s.
• Set language per town. Kannada in Davanagere, Marathi in Kolhapur, Bengali in Siliguri. The platform’s job is to activate creators who post in that language already, not to ask Hindi creators to switch.
• Approve outcomes, not scripts. If a brand manager cannot read Tamil, the review step should check the constraints — claim present, label present, product visible — not the phrasing.
• Let the platform pick. In some towns the audience lives in Facebook groups, in others on Instagram Reels or regional YouTube. Language and platform travel together; choose them together.

What changes when you do this

Three things, in our experience of watching campaigns run this way. Engagement rises, because the content sounds like the feed it sits in. Cost falls, because vernacular creators are under-priced relative to the audience they hold. And the campaign becomes measurable by language — which towns and tongues moved — instead of by a national average that hides both the wins and the misses.

The honest caveat

Briefing in twelve languages means giving up some control over the exact words. That is the trade. The brands that make it get content people forward to their families; the brands that do not get content that is correct, approved and ignored.