Europe (EU) playbook

01What this market buys

Pan-European and national agencies buy multilingual campaign assets: one master run, cut across German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Polish. The buyer is usually a network agency localising for a brand that will not accept an English master, which means the deliverable has to read as native in every market at once rather than merely correct in one.

02The language layer

German needs Sie/du decided per market and per audience. French needs tu/vous. Dutch is shorter than any translation implies, which breaks subtitle timing. Polish and Czech run long enough to break a caption budget. And none of them are improved by a translated hook: each locale gets its own opening line, written by someone who reads it natively, because a translated hook is the one thing every audience spots immediately.

03What the money looks like

A second language is a text and voice layer, not a second production. Once the footage exists, a locale costs a fraction of a shoot — so a five-market campaign prices as one production plus four layers, not five productions. That is also why the multilingual line erodes fastest when a supplier quotes each market separately.

04What decides the job

• Register per localeFormality is correctness in German and French, not style: get Sie/du or tu/vous wrong and the campaign reads as a translation rather than an ad.
• VAT by destinationCharged in the buyer’s country, with reverse charge for VAT-registered agencies. One card, several invoice treatments.
• Length budgetsGerman and Polish run long, Dutch short. Caption timing is settled at the brief, not discovered at delivery.

05What goes wrong

Localisation is where budgets die: five versions of one master, reviewed by nobody native, reading slightly foreign in all five. The saving on review is always smaller than the cost of the ad it produced — and nobody finds out until the campaign is live.