Pat Murphy:

Hello and welcome to the MCA Prodcast, your fix for everything innovative in advertising production. I’m Pat Murphy, and I’ve been working in this industry for more than 35 years now. I’ve seen a lot of changes, but know there’s plenty more around the corner. Each week on the podcast, you’ll get to hear from one of the movers and shakers shaping the world of advertising production for the future. And we’ll dive into some of the key challenges facing our sector today and how we’re best placed to overcome them.

Today we’re talking to Tanya Bogin who is the managing director of Craft Worldwide in London, overseeing end-to-end creative production operations, as well as global campaign localisation for IPG Partners and direct clients. She’s over 14 years of experience in advertising and has been responsible for developing integrated production solutions for clients like Microsoft, Cisco, Nestle, Unilever, and a whole load more.

Tanya, welcome to our Prodcast. It’s a great pleasure to have you here today.

Tanya Bogin:

Thank you so much for having me, Pat. I’m very excited to be here.

Pat Murphy:

Now, before we get stuck into the details of your day job, I noticed with interest that you started your career in radio as a talk show host. Did you have Howard Stern looking over your shoulder?

Tanya Bogin:

Every day, every day! No, no, we were, we were terrestrial though. This was in Philadelphia back in the day. Yeah. you know, you still couldn’t say some of the things that you can say on podcast!

Pat Murphy:

What got you into that in the first place?

Tanya Bogin:

Well, it was a love of music actually.  I’ve always been a love, a lover of, of rock music, grunge, post-punk, garage rock, and, and that’s what brought me there in the first place. But then I actually realised once I got there, I really liked the tools and technology that we were using. And I started building all these relationships with pr music PR companies, and, and it just sort of snowballed. And then I started managing the station at the, you know, end of my kind of stint.

And then realising there was probably not that much money in it, in the long run. I moved back to New York and got a real job, quote unquote!

Pat Murphy:

That’s exactly what I did. I was in radio in my first career and then decided, ‘well, I need to make some cash and pay my bills’ <laugh>. But I do think radio gets overlooked actually, cuz it’s it’s an incredibly intimate medium and probably could do with a bit more focus, I think in our industry.

Now from radio, you moved into the world of transcreation and localisation. What is that?

Tanya Bogin:

What is that as a definition?

Pat Murphy:

Yeah, for people who are listening and don’t know what that is.

Tanya Bogin:

Do you know what, it’s actually a very big industry in the world. People forget this, but it’s, it’s not a minor thing. People think of it as an afterthought, ‘oh crap, I need to translate this’. But actually there are billion pound, billion dollar value companies doing this all over the world. It’s a saturated industry. And you know, in my line, it’s really not just adapting words, it’s adapting nuance, you know, cultural interpretation using cultural insight to produce content that will generate the same feeling in local market as opposed to just moving the words from one country to the next. And that’s a science and, and art, I like to say that’s a bit different than just translation.

Pat Murphy:

Do you think your background in radio helped you to make that transition?

Tanya Bogin:

I think part of the business is really building relationships with really key talent. Because, and we’ll talk about this probably later, but it’s not just about automation and computers at the bare bones of it. It’s, it’s a human powered business and you need to equip those humans with the right cultural cues. So I think my ability to talk to people really helped. You know, and music has a, has an artistic significance in, language in general, so that’s for sure helped, I think.

Pat Murphy:

Now you’ve been in the business now 14 years in, in the world of advertising anyway, and are very committed to innovation at technology. How do you see the evolution in production?

Tanya Bogin:

Oh gosh. I mean, it’s evolving every single day. Sometimes every hour. At Craft, we have an internal AI council that just gives on the minute updates of every, any new thing that hits the ground, you know, and we’re constantly doing R&D on these things, and not necessarily only from the purpose of just pure curiosity. And we are curious by nature. It’s really for client applications. How can we use this new tool to make clients’ lives easier? To build solutions for things to affect brand growth globally and authentically.

Pat Murphy:

We’ll come onto AI a little bit later, but it also begs the question around authenticity, brand authenticity. What does that mean to you? And how do you kind of make sure that you keep that in the production process?

Tanya Bogin:

For sure. So to me, brand authenticity has a number of different facets, I think first of all you know, given my background, it’s meaningful global communication. It’s a meaningful presence on the world stage that’s real and really talks about what you believe in. That’s number one.

Number two, it’s integrity with core values, right? If you are saying that you’re supporting diversity and inclusion and sustainability, prove it, show the world how you’re doing it.

And third, it’s, it’s something that’s a bit harder for production to get involved in. It’s really more on the brand side. It’s honesty. You know, how honest are your marketing practices and are you doing things with integrity? And production’s role in that is huge. Particularly in the first two aspects of it, right? Global meaningful communication. That’s the heart of my job, right? How do we convert a campaign to another market and still elicit the same response, but also ensure that the brand message is consistent, not just culturally appropriate, but consistent. And then sustainability. I mean, you know, better than me about the developments in virtual production, LED screens realtime render engine, CGI – we’re using all of that every day. And it’s cutting down on travel. It’s affecting clients’ own sustainability priorities by having a team that can move that forward for them.

Pat Murphy:

You mentioned doing work or keeping brand authenticity on a global level. How does that translate locally? Because, you know, there’s a lot more personalization going on, and particularly at the local level. How do you keep the brand auth authenticity going?

Tanya Bogin:

We try to do more and more hyper customization of content per market. And different markets require different levels of this. You know, when you’re talking about a regulatory client, there’s limitations to what you can say locally because you’ve got, you know, global priorities and global legal restrictions, and also local legal restrictions.

When we’re talking about clients that are not in the regulatory space you can do that with a very strong creative writing team who understands the, the global meaning of a campaign, the initial thought, the concept, and can adapt it on a, on a local level without harming the initial messaging from the, from the global team. There’s also a relationship that you might have with the local brand teams, and we bridge that between them and the global client, because we say it’s not going to change the meaning of the campaign to do it this way in this local market.

Let them have their voice. And in terms of hyper customization of content, again, technology has a big role in this. First of all, collaboration tools, the ability to have our writers and our brand managers actually speak with each other – builds trust. Almost immediate trust, right? Because they feel that ‘oh, these writers can write in my voice, so I’m going to push back less on this, you know, centralised approach to production’. On the other scale, you know, we’ll get, I’m sure we’ll get into this more, but synthetic voice, you know, deep fakes, you’re able to use a more diverse talent pool to demonstrate local market attractiveness to different talent. What’s gonna work better in the marketplace. And, and they don’t necessarily need to even speak the language these days. We can make it look like they do.

Pat Murphy:

Let me pick up on what you just talked about there, because there’s been quite a bit in the, in the industry news recently about AI use for replacing voiceovers. <Affirmative>. How do you feel about that as a because it’s quite incredible how that has now refined itself to be incredibly accurate. <affirmative> How do you feel about that? Obviously there’s been a lot of there’s been a lot of talk about it.

Tanya Bogin:

Well, what a loaded question!

I think it’s really super cool. I think it’s a way to have a new dimension of brand authenticity in a local market. It started a number of years ago with just ‘oh, you’ve got an avatar. It’s standing like this in front in front of the screen and it’s moving its mouth according to the words. It’s not really saying them, but it’s kind of fake. And it looked great, but not that great.

But we’ve made such strides in this that you can’t really tell the difference. And now here’s the new development that not everyone’s aware of. It’s not just that we can give an actor – any actor fake or not, or real – a voiceover of a language they don’t speak.

The voiceover can be in their own voice. That is nuts. How I feel about it, again, I think it’s incredible. But the other part of me is of course, you know, concerned about it from a, a humanistic, you know, citizen of the world perspective. Sure. This has a lot of implications for data protection, security, fake news proliferation on the world scene. And that’s something that you know, I can have an opinion about. But it’s not, I’m not necessarily that concerned about it because I’m working within the brands, guidelines of it, you know, and I’m getting all my, I have a in-house business affairs team that takes care of all the, the usages and the rights and, and clearing everything. And a legal team that, you know, constantly calls me up and says, no, don’t do that. Don’t do this. So from my, in my environment, it’s cool. But on the world stage, there are concerns.

Pat Murphy:

Yeah. Do you think it’s gonna put a whole world of voiceovers out of business? Because even reading about Apple now, using those kind of AI generated voices for doing audiobooks. This is changing a whole industry!

Tanya Bogin:

It is, it’s a super good point actually, because I’ve been focusing in my studies. I mean, I’m doing, been doing a lot of R&D on this with my team on the, the new roles that AI is going to create in the world. Not just the evolution of roles, you know, from, from trans creator to just creator, going straight into language. You know, what that means for us in the future when we talk about VO, it’s a hard one because if you’re going get really close to it being authentically, authentically human, and you can probably do tests to see how, you know, with the percentages of that, it will have an impact on the VO industry. Absolutely! It’s a reality that I think we have to face and, and see where there are other applications for these voiceover artists because they can then be used to train machines to create those voices, right? So rather than doing it live, they become the trainees, they become the models on which AI voices are based. And I’m just thinking this on the fly, you know, this, this is how quickly these applications come.

Pat Murphy:

Sure. I mean, I know we’ve only picked on one part of the industry because there’s a, you know, this is also applicable to music or, doing creative development, that kind of stuff.

And, and I notice also recently that Apple and some other big brands like Samsung have chosen to ban the use of ChatGPT in their organisations. Do you think that will also be taken up by other brands and become more standardised?

Tanya Bogin:

It can go either way. I think from a enterprise perspective for businesses ChatGPT, Bard – what these are, they are large language models, they’re generative. They can create content from nothing, right? I think on the one hand, until we figure out the situation around security, data privacy, and most of all deployment, because you can’t parse it from other users. And businesses that are enterprise level are gonna have a real difficult time using it internally or externally for that matter, because their content is getting mixed with publicly available content. And until people know what to do with it, I think that’s the reason they’re sort of banning it internally in some ways.

Pat Murphy:

So there’s no real governance over this at the moment. I notice also in the last few weeks there’s been a vote in the European Parliament about putting some kind of frameworks and governance around the use of AI. But that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. Do you think this needs to be done on a global level or, are we gonna have different moulds and different variations of frameworks in all the different markets?

Tanya Bogin:

You know, from a simplicity perspective and just thinking of my team, I hope it’s done from a more centralised level than on a local level. Although that might create more jobs for my business affairs team. I don’t know.

But again, it’s another question. These are really, really interesting things to, to explore. There should be regulation, but, you know, rather than thinking of it from a regulatory perspective, I think the technology needs to evolve to be more adaptable to regulatory requirements, you know? We’ve come up with an interface for large language models like ChatGPT, which are so easy to engage with. I’m sure that in no time there will be other tools proliferating that use that technology, but can add data security and privacy to it and allow us to get the best outta the applications of it without necessarily putting us at risk of breaching any sort of contracts or, you know, information security for people.

Pat Murphy:

So generative AI, it’s so cool, you know, and of course we’ve all been using it! What its limitations?

Tanya Bogin:

It’s got a few. It’s got a few. So in, in the transcreation translation industry, you’ve got something called neural machine translation, and this is predictive AI. It’s still AI, but it’s predictive. So it’s, first of all, it’s domain based, so you can feed it with specific, you know, high quality information. It produces really accurate results. And secondly, it’s predictive. So you kind of know the accuracy you’re going to get out of it, and it’s privacy and data secure. You know, you can use neural machine translation without the content that you feed into a mixing with anything else. As a translation tool it’s pretty good for long form content. ChatGPT and generative AI is not a translation tool. The accuracy is not up to par. And people mistake it for it being the case. And it’s not Google Translate, it’s not that great. It creates fluency, but not accuracy. That’s the difference.

Now, add to that, the fact that the validating that content, you, it’s, it’s really difficult because it’s pulling from all sorts of publicly available domains and information. It’s not the best for domain specific requirements. And then again, we’re bringing up the copyright infringement, the data privacy, and again, the deployment. If you’ve got all of these users using this platform altogether, it’s a difficult to deploy for specific client usage on its own.

 Pat Murphy:

We were just talking about using it for local language editorial content mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And we still know that there needs to be an intervention with real humans. Yeah. Do you think it’ll ever get as good to the point where you won’t need any translators?

Tanya Bogin:

I love that question. Everyone always asks me that question.

No, I don’t. I really don’t. Not in my lifetime anyway. And that being said, you know, it’s actually subjective because the person you ask, ‘is it good enough’? You know, people have different answers to that. I’m a purist. For me, not so much. And I’ll give you an example. In 2016 we were working with a, you know, big blue chip client. We created a, an agile content newsroom to cover the Rio Olympics in the summer. What did that actually mean? That meant flying 14 copywriters and designers from 14 different countries to one’s place, sitting them in a round table talking to each other and generating live content on the fly. You know, according to anything that would happen, you know, during the actual Olympics, right? And releasing that on the fly, it was great! It was amazing. It was costly, it wasn’t sustainable, etc.

Today, how could we do that?  A – completely remotely with design automation, probably and using an a prompt engineer to generate local language content without a source directly in ChatGPT or Bard. I’m taking, you know, the data security part out of this for a second because it’s not ready yet. But then what happens with that content when it’s done? You don’t release it live because you don’t know if it’s accurate. You don’t know how good it is. You don’t know if it’s going to be culturally effective, yet you still need 14 writers to check it in every language. So it’s not going away. The roles are just evolving.

Pat Murphy:

Now, let’s come back to the subject of sustainability, which is on the top of everybody’s priority list right now, <laugh>. And, you know, one of the best way to reach Carbon net Zero is not to do any production at all. So kind reuse of content, really. What your position on sustainability? I know that you have a partnership with Ad Green. Walk me through that.

Tanya Bogin:

I have to say it’s our partnership with Ad Green’s been very, very good. Our clients have been very amenable to the levies to look at research and, and tracking their footprint. But my position on sustainability, it’s going to change the industry just as much as, you know, generative AI is going to change the industry. My producers, and I’m speaking very honestly, we love the travel in the job. We love going to shoots. We love experiencing that feeling of ‘I’m there’, you know. But I think the difference that we have to affect in the people’s minds and hearts is really what is the greater purpose of our jobs? What is the role that we have? You know, we work in advertising. It’s a difficult thing to reconcile with, with value sometimes, depending on the products we support. And to say, guys, you may not be able to travel this year because we created this new technology that enables us to use real time rendering to create authentic backgrounds. And look just as if you’re on location in Morocco, so you don’t need to go to Morocco anymore. I’m really sorry. You know, if it was me, I’d be like, ‘well, I’d rather go to Morocco on vacation anyway, personally’. It’s a new way of thinking. It’s a new creativity, and I think we should embrace it, and I embrace it.

Pat Murphy:

So you are embracing it at Craft. But looking at our own statistics within MCA, we are seeing a kind of reversion back to old behaviours pre-pandemic. Actually, it’s worse! We’re seeing more people flying to more destinations <laugh> than ever before. From a lot of the clients above line agencies. Is that the same in your experience?

Tanya Bogin:

Maybe they’re trying to get it all in before it’s before it’s gone! No.

Pat Murphy:

Maybe there was kind of pent tough frustration that you haven’t travelled anywhere for a while. What do you think?

Tanya Bogin:

I think it’s hard. I mean, I’d be curious to know what you were comparing it to and what sort of productions were happening back in the past versus now. And it could be a could be a post pandemic reaction, right? From the isolation. That’s part of it. Yeah. Yeah.

We’re scrutinising every production these days around sustainability metrics. Not just because we’re measuring it through Ad Green and, and supporting our clients and their own sort of metrics and sustainability priorities. From a, we need to save the world perspective. And I know that’s, you know, very high language, but it’s really true. It makes me wanna come to work every day knowing that I have an impact on that. So we are scrutinising shoots as much as our clients are. We’re helping our clients make those decisions. And our brands are bringing on board sustainability divisions and directors who are overseeing that and, holding us to account. So we have to hold ourselves to account internally in the same way. And we’ve done the same. We’ve brought on sustainability teams just within Craft, in addition to McCann World Group. And we work on an IPG level to make sure that these practices are in the hearts and minds of people.

Pat Murphy:

I see you have Anthony Falco, now having joined you from Ad Green.

Tanya Bogin:

That’s the one I meant. Yeah! We’re really lucky to have him.

Pat Murphy:

Great guy. And you’re very lucky to have Antony.

Now measuring is one thing, right? But that doesn’t mean to say that people might still want to change behaviour. Measuring your carbon footprint is one thing, but you still need to change the design of your productions. Virtual production is obviously a one particular thing that we’ve been doing recently. And I was at the ANA Financial Management Conference a couple of weeks ago where I put a stake in the ground and I said, ‘look, we’ll make a commitment at MCA to get to net zero or an option for net zero by 2025’. Do you think that’s something that’s achievable? Can you help us with that?

Tanya Bogin:

I hope so. I hope so. I’d like to think it is achievable. I think that part of it is not just on the production side. It’s a marriage between production and the creative teams, right? And right now, the more production gets upstream in the creative thought process, the more sustainability goals down the line can be met. So essentially we have to equip our production team with a consultative mind to think on the fly about how can we use new technologies to create more sustainable productions and be up upfront working with the creatives at the forefront with the brands, helping them understand exactly how they can structure their productions down the line to fulfil that goal.

Think outside the box, right? And that means that we all have to get in sort of the same mentality. If the production team is ready to go, but the creative teams aren’t thinking in that way, or vice versa, the process breaks down.

Pat Murphy:

That’s a really good point. So do you think the right questions are being asked at the right time in the creative briefing, creative execution, part of the process?

Tanya Bogin:

We’re trying. Internally, we’re trying.

Pat Murphy:

Is it an education thing with, with creative teams?

Tanya Bogin:

It’s an education thing across both. I’m not going to pinpoint any one limitation on creativity or the production teams. There’s a lot of responsibility that also falls on the client’s shoulders because brand teams and the global client have their own ideas about what they want to produce. It’s our job to work together to influence that big unachievable idea and think, ‘well, what if you did it this way’? You know?

And we’re doing different kinds of seminars and workshops internally between the teams to build those connections, build that trust so that not just with McCann who we sit in the same building with, but we’re agency agnostic. We work with so many different people so many different agencies and creative teams.

And the best way, I think, is to just show proof points. Look what we did for this client. Look what we did for that client. Look how that’s changed their ROI on some of the products and services that they’re selling in the marketplace. Look at the attention that’s brought them on the world stage. We also do a lot of, you know, pro bono work. We do a lot of work for mental health organisations, sustainability, you know, we’re doing a proactive brief now for Greenpeace, for instance. And that again it changes people’s mentality. It makes it feel, ‘I wanna be a part of that’. They almost get this sort of production, fomo and that changes behaviour.

Pat Murphy:

Now, we talked to Richard Glasson from Hogarth a little while back on one of our other prodcasts, and we touched a little bit on values and some of the stuff that he gets involved in outside of the business. Tell me a bit about some of your passions outside of outside of work.

Tanya Bogin:

Well outside of work I’m very involved in female empowerment and counselling for young women with with different mental health conditions. So I mentor a few women in that. I meet with them on a weekly basis. I also serve as a mentor for Young up and coming people in the production industry as well. It makes me feel like I’m helping them break through the barriers and get closer to, to where I got to quicker.

Pat Murphy:

So it’s interesting you touch on that. Does that also have an impact on how you hire people in the business?

Tanya Bogin:

Absolutely. And actually that now touches into another brand authenticity quality run – diversity and inclusion. We are doing some really cool stuff around marrying different kinds of production with the, with the type of profile and talent that you use to create that work.

So think about agile content – self shooting directors, more junior talent doing shoots and learning, learning the ropes. And we’re bringing in a more diverse talent pool to kind of, again, advertising has naturally been kind of a closed barrier business. It used to be who you knew. We have partnerships with with The Women’s Organisation. We’ve got partnerships with different universities trying to bring in interns as well. And we’ve actually managed, we brought in like, you know, three interns over the last year, and they’re now working for us full-time as junior editors, as junior directors, as junior producers. And they’re growing and building their their skillset.

Pat Murphy:

Before we go, this is a question we always ask our guests when they come on here. It’s become a bit of a highlight of our podcast. What’s your favourite ad of all time?

Tanya Bogin:

It’s a really hard one. You know, I could choose something that, you know, makes my clients look good, or I could choose something that really means something to me.

Pat Murphy:

I’d rather the second one, pick something that really means something to you.

Tanya Bogin:

Oh, yeah. Okay. Sure. No problem.

So on the topic of diversity, inclusion, women empowerment there’s a Nike ad. They keep re-releasing it, I think, but the first time I saw it was in 2016. It’s called Dream Crazier. Have you seen it? It’s really good.

Pat Murphy:

I’m sure I’ll see if I, if he showed it to me, I wouldn’t know

Tanya Bogin:

It definitely, you’d probably definitely know it. It’s probably one of the most universal advertisements I’ve seen in terms of its emotional appeal to women everywhere and, and just people who are, you know, have challenges to get where they are at. It’s a vignette kind of ad

Pat Murphy:

I think I’ve seen it.

Tanya Bogin:

Pictures like women getting angry, getting pissed off in, in sports, and they’re crying and, and they do it anyway. And people thought they were crazy. And it just, it resonates so much with me, not just because that sports, you know, gives them that sort of dramatic feeling of accomplishment, but the fact that these women are able to just release, let loose, not worry about what people think about them, it, it really hits home for me and my own journey to work.

Pat Murphy:

That’s a fantastic ad actually. And we’re gonna post it up on on our pub, our podcast with pace. So thanks very much for that suggestion. Brilliant. Tanya, thank you so much for joining us on our podcast today. And we’ll be, hopefully talk to you again soon. I might see you, are you going to Cannes this year?

Tanya Bogin:

Not this year, but we’ll see each other. Anyway, I’ll go to Lisbon and visit you!

Pat Murphy:

You come to Lisbon or we’ll have lunch in London.

Tanya Bogin:

Fantastic. Sounds good. Fantastic.

Pat Murphy:

Great stuff. Today we talked Tanya Bogin, Managing Director of Craft in London.

I want to say a big thank you to Tanya for talking to me today. We had a very insightful conversation about tech and brand authenticity and found more about how Craft is using the new technology to give the brands a unique experience.

To find out more about The MCA Prodcast, please head to theprodcast.com where you’ll find details on all of my guests, links to the favourite ads and full transcriptions of all the episodes as well.

If you have any comments, questions, or feedback, please email us at podcast@murphycobb.com. I’m Pat Murphy, CEO of MCA. Do come and connect with us on LinkedIn or Instagram, of which all of the links in the notes of this episode will be there. We’d love to hear from you.

Thanks again to Tanya, my team at MCA and to my production team at What Goes On Media.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.