Some ideas exist only when said out loud. This tactic lets how something sounds- an accent, a slang word, a mispronunciation, a mishearing, or a bad translation- carry the idea. The risk is that an accent used as a punchline makes the audience the joke. The campaigns lean in with the speaker: they borrow the local voice, give people permission to use their own, or let everyone enjoy the same mishearing. What matters is whose voice the joke belongs to.
- Speak the Local Accent
- Make Accent Pride the Platform
- Mishearings and Soundalikes
- Lost in Translation
- Turn the Accent into a Game
1. Speak the Local Accent
Rewrite the brand's lines, product names or media voice in a local accent, dialect or slang, so the brand sounds as if it belongs to that place.
T'en veux une frette? — Coors Light, Rethink, 2026
Coors Light sells itself on cold, but "froid", the standard French word, is not how Québecers talk about beer. They say "frette", which means colder than cold and, as "une frette", a beer. Rethink built the brand's first Québec-specific campaign in more than a decade around that one word. Comic vignettes showed Québecers refusing to settle for anything merely cold, and posters carried lines such as "Plus froid que froid c'est frette" (colder than cold is frette). The claim was the same one Coors Light makes everywhere. In the local language, it stopped sounding like a translation from head office.
Refreshing the Nation — Strongbow, Otherway, 2026
Strongbow wanted to recommit to its British heartland, and one national voice would have flattened the regions that drink it. Otherway used the word people in each region say after a first refreshing sip, from Glasgow to Cardiff, across more than 50 poster executions, each placed in the region that word came from. Glenn Kitson cast the films with genuine local accents, and updated the packaging to match. A drinker in Glasgow and a drinker in Cardiff saw different posters, each in their own words.
2. Make Accent Pride the Platform
Give people public permission and a platform to speak their own way, whether that is their accent or a brand name they fear saying wrong, so their voice becomes the campaign's voice.
Say It Proud! — Head & Shoulders, AMBILHATI Jakarta, 2020
In Indonesia, Head & Shoulders had trailed Clear for more than a decade. About half the category sells through warung, small traditional shops where customers ask for products by name at the counter. Most Indonesians find the English name hard to say, and people afraid of getting it wrong asked for Clear instead. So the brand took the blame. It opened with a genuine blooper reel of the actor Joe Taslim fluffing the name over and over on a commercial shoot, which was widely shared and parodied. Video, TV and regional radio followed, with Indonesians in different dialects saying the name "wrongly", and special-edition bottles spelt it the way people say it. P&G approved a mispronunciation and misspelling of one of its brand names for the first time. Asking for the hard name stopped being a risk.
Contagious reports sales up 13% and the launch video reaching a million organic views within an hour. The campaign won Silver at the WARC Awards for Effectiveness. — Contagious
Own It: Be Proud of How You Sound — Trebor, elvis London, 2023
Trebor's "Own It" platform is about owning your insecurities, and the brand needed fresh proof of it to revive mint sales among 30 to 45-year-olds. Two in three people change their accent to fit in, and accent anxiety makes people speak up less at work and socially. Geo-targeted social ads invited people in every region to record a Trebor ad in their own accent and send it as a voice note. Fifty winners voiced ten radio ads on Heart, Capital, Smooth, Magic, Kiss and Spotify, and digital billboards in key cities linked by QR code to an Instagram map of the nation's accents. The proof of "Own It" was fifty strangers' accents on national radio.
