Kannada advertising creative

Kannada advertising is not the English advertisement translated. It is the same idea written again, by somebody who thinks in Kannada, inside constraints the English version never had. A script that needs more vertical room. A formal written register that sounds like a government notice when read aloud. Dialect differences across the state, and a vocabulary in which half the commercial words your buyer uses are English. Karnataka is our home market, and these are the four places the work goes wrong most.

The script needs more room than the layout gives it

Kannada letters are rounded and wide, vowel signs sit above the base line, and conjunct consonants hang below it. So a line of Kannada set at the same point size as its English version looks smaller on the page and needs noticeably more leading. Set it tight and the descending conjuncts collide with the line beneath.

The line is usually longer as well. A seven-word English headline for a hoarding becomes a Kannada line that will not fit the same panel at the same size. What happens next is that somebody reduces the type until it fits. Now the panel is unreadable at thirty metres and the campaign has paid for a site nobody can read.

The general sequence for this work is in how to adapt a campaign into Indian languages. Design the Kannada layout first, or at the same time. Set the Kannada headline at full size and see what space it needs. Fit the English version into that. A hoarding built around English and then re-set in Kannada is a hoarding that shrinks.

One more layout habit: never set a phone number, a price or a date in Kannada numerals. Every Kannada reader in Karnataka reads Arabic numerals faster.

The font problem that reaches the printer

This one costs more campaigns than anything else on this page. A great deal of Kannada artwork in Karnataka is still set in older non-Unicode fonts of the kind DTP operators have used for years. Open that file on a machine without the exact font and the text becomes a row of meaningless glyphs. The person at the printing press cannot tell broken Kannada from correct Kannada.

Three habits fix it. Set Kannada in a Unicode font. Convert every piece of type to outlines before the file leaves your office. Print a proof and have a Kannada reader read it, not glance at it.

The register is the hard part

Written Kannada in a newspaper editorial and the Kannada spoken in a Bengaluru shop are not the same language of business. Translators are trained on the written form. Advertising needs the spoken one.

A radio spot written in formal Kannada is technically correct and sounds like an announcement at a bus stand. Listeners hear the register before they hear the offer, and a brand that sounds official does not sound like somebody you would call.

The commercial vocabulary is the clearest case. Offer, EMI, free, booking, service, showroom and warranty are said in English by Kannada speakers all day. Replacing them with pure Kannada equivalents is the fastest way to make an advertisement sound like a circular. Write the sentence the way a shopkeeper in Vijayanagar would say it, then check that it is grammatical, rather than the other way round.

Dialect matters at the edges of the state. The Kannada of Dharwad and Belagavi, of Mangaluru, of Mysuru and of Kalaburagi differ in vocabulary and in ending. A word that is ordinary in one is amusing in another. For a state-wide campaign, keep the language neutral and let the voice carry the warmth. For a district campaign, use the district.

The wordplay does not cross, so do not send it across

Rhyme is the usual casualty. Kannada verse traditionally rhymes on the second syllable of the line rather than at the end. That is one reason an English rhyme scheme forced into Kannada sounds wrong even when every word is correct. A pun almost never survives at all.

So brief the idea, not the line. Tell the Kannada writer what the advertisement has to do, what the constraint is, and how many seconds or words there are. Then accept a Kannada line that is not a translation of the English one. Two lines doing the same job in two languages is a success. One line translated twice is not.

Keep the brand name in its own script and do not translate it. A brand name rendered phonetically into Kannada on one execution and left in English on another is two brands.

Kannada once a year is worse than no Kannada

Every first of November a run of brands that have spoken only English for eleven months puts out a Rajyotsava greeting in Kannada, with a flag. On the second they go quiet again. Karnataka notices. The greeting costs you more goodwill than it earns, because the gap between the greeting and the rest of the year is the message.

If Kannada is going to appear in your advertising, let it appear in the ordinary work: the price board, the offer, the enquiry form, the person who answers the phone. A showroom whose staff switch to Kannada without being asked has done more than any festival post.

The reverse also holds. If your buyer genuinely does not read Kannada, a token Kannada line on an English ad is decoration, and it takes space the offer needed.

A worked example

A furniture retailer with showrooms in Bengaluru and Davangere runs a Ugadi campaign: Kannada radio in both cities, a Kannada daily, and two hoardings.

The Kannada headline is written first, and the panel layout is built around it. The radio script is written by the same writer in spoken Kannada, with the words offer and EMI left in English. That is how the announcement would be made in the shop.

The Bengaluru execution carries a Kannada headline with an English sub-line for the flats around Nagarbhavi and Rajajinagar where half the buyers read English first. Davangere runs Kannada only. Same offer, same design, two decisions about language made for two different reasons.

What to do next

Take your last Kannada advertisement and read it aloud to somebody who works in Kannada every day, and watch their face during the first line. If they hesitate, or if they laugh, the register is wrong and no amount of design fixes it. Then check what font the file was set in before you send it anywhere. To have the media plan and the language decisions made together instead of one after the other, book the free audit.