Hannes Ben has spent his career making sure global brands don’t get lost in translation. He’s the founder and CEO of Locaria, Stagwell’s multilingual content and adaptation agency. He speaks 14 languages and has lived and worked in more than 20 countries. I’ve worked alongside him, and I’d put him among the world’s leading authorities on multilingual marketing.
So what happens when an AI interviews him about keeping advertising culturally relevant as the industry automates?
In this episode
00:00 Intro
01:05 Claude starts the questions
01:50 Why global ideas fail to land
03:35 What 14 languages teach you
05:15 What can’t AI feel?
07:00 “I’m sorry” and the multilingual majority
08:25 38 trillion cells vs words alone
09:30 Persuasion without a conscience
11:50 What question should Claude have asked?
13:00 After Claude: the debrief
15:00 Is persuasion uniquely human?
15:45 Washing powder vs AI governance
17:45 Close
Love in Portuguese, German and Chinese
Hannes made a point early on that got the conversation going:
“The word love exists in every language, but the impact the love has for me when I say it in Portuguese is very different to Chinese, and very different to German, because there’s a different intensity, a different experience, a different memory around that.” (04:20)
Claude then turned it back on itself (05:15). If it works by mapping relationships between words, what is it unable to feel that a brand still needs in the room?
Hannes didn’t dismiss it. He pointed out that our brains are neural networks too, quietly picking words statistically. He also conceded the point most humans in our industry still resist:
“You will probably get the fluency and the grammatical accuracy right better than us in any moment. But that is not the point of human conversation.” (08:25)
His argument is that we are organic beings with 38 trillion cells, all taking in heat, smell and feeling at once, while AI takes in words (08:55).
The uncomfortable question
Then Claude asked the one that made me sit up:
“The honest worry for a brand isn’t that I’ll be clumsy. It’s that I’ll be persuasive without a conscience.” (09:55)
Hannes’s answer is worth hearing in full (10:30). In short, he thinks the best advertising isn’t aggressive persuasion. It’s about capturing attention, and the deepest forms of influence, like diplomacy and negotiation, are still human. In our debate after Claude signed off (15:45), I pushed on scale. Choosing a washing powder isn’t the same as governing AI. I don’t need the MD of Persil to look me in the eye, but the UN needs to look each other in the face. Maybe AI is good enough for the low-stakes decisions, and that’s most of advertising.
What Claude got wrong
This show keeps its mistakes in. Claude can’t tell two voices apart, so when I jumped in, it attributed my point about influence to Hannes, and I corrected it on air (10:05). It also lost count and skipped straight to “the ninth question” after only six (11:50). I’ll keep tightening the prompt.
Hannes had a critique of his own: Claude could have pushed harder on how humans perceive what AI does well or badly (12:40). And there was, as I put it, a bit of a Claude-mance (13:05). Hannes: “It was even thanking me. Incredible.”
Watch it, then tell me
Would you trust AI with your brand’s persuasion? Where do you draw the line? Leave a comment. I read them all.
I, Claude & Us is an independent podcast. It is not affiliated with, sponsored or endorsed by Anthropic. Claude is a trademark of Anthropic.
