Behind Weglot’s first big brand campaign, “You Mean Weglot”

Weglot has always been AI-native, even before it was cool. Back then, it was called “machine translation” and it was less sexy. We often had to defend our position of using technology to enable something so human.

Then AI as we know it came onto the scene. It changed how we work – and how we perceived em dashes. Naturally, teams that want to expand internationally started wondering: “Can AI help us do that?” But the answer is more nuanced than a simple yes.

So I knew it was the right moment to reintroduce Weglot and how it empowers businesses to go multilingual with AI. It wasn’t hard to convince the rest of the team. Then started the 4-month adventure of creating Weglot’s first big brand campaign, “You Mean Weglot.”

The inspiration

The idea of the brand campaign didn’t come from an imaginary scenario. Our Senior Brand Manager, Noémie, had already done a brand survey to understand the market dynamics. How did marketers tackle the problem of internationalization? What tools came to mind when we spoke about website translation?

To my surprise, even with the rise of AI, a majority of users had Google Translate top of mind. And I don’t think it’s because they think it’s the best solution available out there. It’s just what they are familiar with.

Then I went through our Sales team’s demo calls. Less surprisingly, many prospects were curious about AI and how it could be integrated into their internationalization projects.

The irony didn’t escape me. On one side, we had users who trusted what’s familiar, even though it might require a lot of manual work. On the other, we had those who were ready to experiment with the latest technologies, regardless of risks that might come with it.

We always thought of Weglot as the best of both worlds. A hybrid solution that brings together AI efficiency with the translation quality and control you'd expect from doing it manually.

And there I had my idea: 3 characters that represent different ways of translating a website. The hero of our film, Maya, is the voice of reason, an all-rounder CMO who has unconventional translation capabilities herself. She’s able to decipher the underlying message in the CEO’s buzzwords, Gary’s old-school wisdom, and Jake’s AI lingo.

Although it’s heavily caricatured, Gary represents the attachment to outdated methods by suggesting that the team should manually copy-paste their website content into Google Translate and then have their native colleague go through everything. That’s how he always did it.

And Jake represents the overly-confident early adopter who thinks that a reliable website translation solution can be vibe coded in a few hours. He just needs more credits (like the rest of us).

I think it’s important to clarify here that we don’t dismiss either character’s reasoning or workflow. There is a lot of value in sticking with what’s reliable, and there is a lot to be gained by experimenting. That’s why we suggest that a hybrid approach is stronger than either method on its own.

I’ll let our hero video do the rest of the explanation below.

The team and the behind-the-scenes

Although this was a very big project for us, I didn’t have to look far and wide for the perfect production partner. I’ve worked with the K-OS team on multiple video projects, so I knew they wouldn’t disappoint.

But what I didn’t know was how much work would go into a brand campaign of this scope. From conception to script-writing, filming to distribution, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the K-OS team lived and breathed this project to help us achieve what we envisioned.

So I invite you to watch the 10-minute behind-the-scenes video done by them to see how many people, hours, and shots it took us to get to the 1:30-minute hero film.

What happens now?

The campaign is finally out there, and it feels strange not to start my day by watching hero_video_V23_final_FINAL_sub_corrected at least 4 times in a row. It used to be only a few of us who knew of these videos. Now it’ll be seen by millions.

Many users will be introduced to a smarter way of going international for the first time. Maybe they’ll be inspired to ditch their old ways, or to get started with a project they’ve been putting off for years.

And when someone asks if there is a solution that can translate everything with AI, make sure it’s accurate and SEO-friendly, and take care of all the other technical stuff, they will be able to say, “You mean Weglot.”