Translation Advertising: Where Shop Meets Hip-Hop

Steve Stoute, the marketing force behind boutique advertising shop Translation, has made a living by pretty much ignoring the barriers Madison Avenue has traditionally drawn around demographics and ethnicity.

Ten years ago, Stoute left the music business — just before it tanked — and jumped into advertising and marketing. He saw an opportunity to navigate the gap that existed between corporate America and the lucrative youth market, an estimated $1.2 trillion sector that companies are eager to tap into but frequently miss the mark reaching. “Brands don’t often speak to young people in a way that is representative of them,” says Stoute. “What I do is contemporize a brand.” But, he says, “I don’t take the brand away from what it stands for. I don’t change who they are in order to appeal to the next generation.”

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As a result, Stoute has emerged as the hip-but-safe guy for large companies like Hewlett-Packard, Target and Samsung looking to grab a piece of the youth demographic. Leveraging his background in entertainment, Stoute has accumulated an impressive lineup of deals, most recently State Farm, Wrigley and the sports and entertainment division of McDonald’s. His work for McD’s includes the company’s Super Bowl ad, which featured hoop gods LeBron James and Dwight Howard in a restyled version of the can-you-top-this-shot classic from 1993.

It was Stoute who in 2003 helped steer Justin Timberlake to McDonald’s for its “I’m Lovin’ It” campaign with a rather unorthodox approach: instead of McDonald’s simply licensing an existing Timberlake song, Timberlake recorded an original “I’m Lovin’ It” tune. The song got heavy airplay prior to the campaign’s debut, and by the time the ad, also featuring Timberlake, aired, the public already had a relationship with the song.

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It’s a strategy deployed by Bollywood filmmakers to create a musical connection with audiences before a movie is launched. To date, the “I’m Lovin’ It” campaign remains one of the longest-running in McDonald’s history. And it was Stoute who put pop singer Gwen Stefani together with Hewlett-Packard in a successful 2005 campaign to promote the company’s Photosmart R607 camera. Says James Edmund Datri, CEO of the American Advertising Federation: “He blew apart the old model of the celebrity pitch, replacing it with a model that draws on celebrity, music, entertainment and culture to speak with audiences, not at them.”

Stoute sees no reason Samsung shouldn’t connect with fashion shows rather than with sports to sell high-definition televisions. Or that a sneaker company like Reebok shouldn’t make a shoe endorsed by a rap star — which it did with Jay-Z in 2003. He recognized that younger consumers were fusing music, fashion and culture in their brand choices, and the Internet only intensified that lifestyle.

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Stoute’s ability to engage consumers with his clients’ messages was on full display when Mary J. Blige debuted her new perfume, My Life, on the Home Shopping Network July 31 to record-breaking sales. The fragrance sold 60,000 units in six hours. According to the network, it also drove 20% of new customers to HSN. While the numbers were remarkable, so was the fact that buyers hadn’t even had a chance to sample the fragrance. Rather, Stoute had gotten Blige to create a series of online video vignettes so customers could connect with her. He calls the perfume “Mary’s life encapsulated in a product.” The marketing came down to the power of storytelling, says Stoute. “I put Mary on air and let her speak her story, her life, her journey and showed footage of her being part of the process of making the fragrance. It was a grand slam.”

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It was while running the urban-music divisions at Interscope and Sony, Stoute says, that he recognized the growing influence of and overlap between consumer products and entertainment. The light went on in 1997, after he executive-produced the sound track for the film Men in Black. As it turned out, the movie’s tie-in Ray-Ban sunglasses outsold the record. Three years later, the New York City native quit the music business and switched to advertising full time. “I knew that I could sell more sneakers and cameras than records,” he says, “and there was the opportunity for me to go into that.”

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Initially, he partnered with longtime adman Peter Arnell, head of AG Brand Consulting, in 1999. Arnell, the quintessential insider, worked with Stoute to bring an outsider’s point of view to the corporate suites. “I like to say I’m a cultural anthropologist,” says Stoute. “I’m paying attention to what’s going on. I’m looking at why people start wearing baggy pants or what is in their iPod playlists, like how there is rap in a white kid’s life when it is a black person’s music and how Coldplay is on a black kid’s iPod when it’s not marketed to blacks.”

Understanding where culture has the reach that marketers crave but can’t harness, Stoute moves in. “I take advantage. I look where companies fall short in understanding how consumers are interpreting their products and services. My world is the blurring of those lines.”

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Now Stoute is poised to translate the biggest trend on the horizon, what he calls “the tanning of America.” The growing African-American, Hispanic and Asian-American populations together command an estimated $2 trillion in buying power. And they have become hugely influential trendsetters. Demographers know this, but Stoute sees the shift as a massive cultural transformation that most companies are missing.

According to Stoute, this seismic shift has ushered in an era of shared cultural tastes and attitudes. The tanning concept, he says, is built around not the physical reality of different racial makeups but rather what he calls “a shared mental complexion.” To make a brand relevant, companies need to understand that multicultural advertising is no longer a niche strategy: multicultural is what America looks like. “One of the things that made me realize right away that Steve was an innovative thinker was when I heard him talking about the tanning of America,” says Pamela El, marketing vice president of State Farm. “He said that advertisers and marketers need to follow the lay of the land, and the face of America is changing.” Stoute took LeBron James to State Farm, managing to make King James both relevant and funny in ads for insurance.

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Stoute launched Translation three years ago, bringing in a business partner, Jay-Z, who has also racked up an impressive set of entrepreneurial bona fides to match his musical prowess. The two are majority stakeholders, while advertising giant IPG owns a minority stake. Stoute says the move to exist under IPG’s $6 billion global umbrella helps smooth his entrée and access to big corporations.

It’s a place where he thinks he can help redefine the concept of big. “As a general rule, I am looking to work with companies that are big market leaders that have issues.” He says the goal is to tap the veins of pop culture and young consumers to push brands that are liked to be brands that are loved. “We try to manifest conversations,” says Stoute. The traditional agency model of telling people what to buy or how to think, he says, is broken. “It limits the possibility of how far is far.”

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