Culture

We rarely ask the world’s biggest cultural exports like Bluey or Peppa Pig to remove the cultural things that make them distinctive. Their specificity is often exactly what makes us curious. Children sing songs in languages they don’t speak. Audiences fall in love with places they’ve never visited. We learn unfamiliar foods, names, customs and worlds because the story gives us a reason to care.

So I don’t think the job is to remove culture and make things more ‘universal’, whatever that means. The job is to make the storytelling good enough that people want to come closer, learn and love.

That distinction matters commercially too. If your strategy for reaching a global audience is to remove everything distinctive about the idea, you may end up with something accessible but completely forgettable.

Of course, cultural authenticity alone doesn’t make something good. We still need brilliant writing, design, music, production, distribution and an understanding of the audience. Representation is not a substitute for excellence, and excellence, or should I say, ‘global success ’, does not require cultural dilution.

My advice to creators: know where your idea comes from. Understand what makes it different. Then give it the creative and commercial execution required to compete with anything in the world.

The goal isn’t to make culturally specific ideas less specific so they can travel. It’s to make them so good that people want to come closer.