A good ad has to achieve a simple, but almost illusive task: it has to communicate a brand’s message in a way that stays with the viewer. In doing so it more often must compete for the viewer’s attention with other messages and other media that are also vying for the audiences’ attention. Sometimes this is achieved by the massive repetition of advertising messages on a variety of channels. But the problem with that approach can be saturation – the feeling that if you see an ad just one more time it is going to drive you insane. I guess that’s throwing money at the problem – going for reach and penetration, instead of being smart.

But every now and again an advert will achieve memorability by creating clever little ads (or series of commercials) that give one that ‘warm, fuzzy feeling’. Those are the ads that make you feel good, make you smile or even have a little laugh. I’ve often talked about humour in this column because it is so often used in local advertising, and rightly so because South Africans love nothing more than having a good belly laugh. But achieving the humorous ‘sweet spot’ is a tricky balancing act. Brands can run the risk of getting things wrong and creating ads that are either cringe-worthy, sadly unfunny or horribly offensive.

Autopage, which is part of the Altech Group, is a cellular service provider that is not tied to any of the major networks. Rather, AltechAutopage Cellular acts as a ‘broker’ or agent of sorts for MTN, Vodacom and Cell-C, which—it claims—gives clients more choice. The campaign created by those smart folk at the King James group of companies, to promote Altech’s mobile offering consists of three ads to date, (perhaps in time they’ll produce more). Each ad contains the same basic message, but the context for each commercial puts a slightly different spin on what the promise means.

by Erna George I arrived home on a particularly normal day in Cape Town, grabbed the mail, and set myself up for a lazy evening in front of the box. Given the current state of the economy, my appetite for broadsheets and the bargains they herald has become avaricious, so I was thrilled to find one in the pile.

A cursory glance at the cover told me Woolworths (good news – quality and value on the same page) and I dived in only to feel a few seconds later that the contents were mismatched. Instead of shoes, clothing and delectable food items, it featured a ton of specials on fruit and veggies.

Rewind, back to the cover. Woolworths font and iconography mimicking the stamp emblem with the following copy ‘We don’t pull the WOOL over your eyes: Great Value…; Great quality…; Great Service…’ and Fruit & Veg’s logo.

Now in that very moment I felt like I imagine many other consumers felt – confused and amused by my error, and slightly in awe of Fruit & Veg’s guts. Quick recovery and marketing consultant hat back on, I gave comparative advertising the second thought that I have not truly given it since my varsity days, or when BMW and Audi took each other head on using the cliffs of Chapman’s Peak as their duelling ground.

Comparative advertising, while well used in other parts of the globe, has not typically been used extensively in our country. The Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa code contains two points: ‘6.1 Advertisements should not attack, discredit or disparage other products, services, advertisers or advertisements directly or indirectly.’ and ‘7.1 Advertisements in which factual comparisons are made between products and/or services are permitted provided …’ that a number of provisos have been met, including that claims have been substantiated and no disparagement has taken place etc’. (Source: www.asasa.org.za) Sounds onerous and perhaps why no one has truly taken on the code in many years.

The Creative Effectiveness, Direct, PR and Promo & Activation Lions category winners have been announced at the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

McCann Melbourne, Australia, took both the PR and Direct Grands Prix for their entry ‘Dumb Ways to Die’ for Metro Trains. The Promo & Activation Grand Prix was taken by Ogilvy Brasil, for their entry ‘Immortal Fans’, created for football club Sport Club Recife. Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam took the Grand Prix for ‘Heineken’s Legendary Journey: Justifying a Premium the World Over’ in the Creative Effectiveness category.

Design Annotator with Uno de Waal is a new column featuring the top design work from South Africa’s biggest online creative showcase, Between 10 and 5, curated by Publisher Uno de Waal.

At 10and5 we are still continuing with our Young South Africa series – our feature on young people in South Africa doing some really interesting and creative projects. We’ve featured the guys from I See A Different You a few times in the past, but we couldn’t pass them up for a feature this month. Alexander’s Band is a new illustration representation studio that aims to promote the best of the best – they would definitely be a useful resource for agencies looking for brilliant illustration work. The new moving billboards by King James for Allan Gray has evoked some controversial discussion on the site – have a look and weigh in your opinion.

TV and online seem to be such a happy fit so it has always perplexed me that eNews Channel Africa – or eNCA (previously eNews) – went for so long without a proper website. In fact, eNCA only launched its site – under GM Tim Spira – in April this year.

But even with eNCA still in the process of establishing its brand (the change was necessitated by the launch of a UK channel on the Sky pay-TV platform in August last year), the site’s numbers are exceeding its own expectations: at more than 270 000 domestic users in May, which was its first full month of in existence.

Grubstreet spoke to Spira last week to find out more about why it took so long for eNCA to establish an online presence and what mistakes they hope to avoid by coming to the party so late.

By Herman Manson (@marklives) The African continent isn’t quite the growth honeypot ad agencies had been hoping for. That said – it’s certainly a growth market. While it doesn’t match the growth rates in Asia or even Latin America, listed agency networks seem to have decided any growth is good growth given the state of especially their European operations. North Africa remains fragile – ZenithOptimedia forecast only 1% growth in ad revenue in the Middle East & North Africa as political turmoil post the Arab Spring continues to rock the region. The company expects 2%-3% annual growth from 2013 to 2015.

Growth in adspend globally is predicted by ZenithOptimedia to hit 4.1% in 2013 and 5.6% in 2015. South Africa will be one of the top ten contributors to that growth between 2012 and 2015.

South Africa in the South, Kenya in the East and either Nigeria or Ghana in the West of Africa generally gets the most buzz from agencies seeking investment in the region.

The 2013 APEX winners

MarkLives.com runs a regular slot featuring the best local and international magazine covers every week. We recognise well thought out, powerful and interesting (and hopefully all three in one) magazine covers and celebrate the mix of pragmatism, creativity and personal taste that created each of them.

A quality low-end tablet from ASUS and the imminent arrival of Sony’s flagship Tablet Z brings compelling new choices to the market, writes Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee).

The war for the South African tablet market took a new turn last week with the unveiling of two major new contendors.

On Wednesday night, Taipei-based ASUS made their biggest foray yet into this market, unveiling not only a compelling new tablet, but also announcing distribution and marketing partnerships that signal its intentions as loudly as do its devices.

To start with, it officially launched the ASUS Fonepad, a 7” tablet designed to be used as much for apps as for making voice and video calls. Yes, you do look silly holding a 7” tablet to your ear, but ASUS has spotted a trend that silly-watchers missed: younger users are increasingly using their tablets for communication, and that communication is increasingly visual.

It means not only that they are more open to video calls than the older generation, but also that they like to look at their device and continue playing with it while making voice calls. And because music is such an integral element of the way a younger user engages with a tablet, headphones are standard gear.

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Ogilvy Cape Town MD Gavin Levinsohn is resigning his position at the end of the year to emigrate to Australia, MarkLives has confirmed. The news was announced to Cape Town staff earlier this week.

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Godfrey Morley, Managing Director at Draftfcb Cape Town, is taking up the position of Chairman of the Cape Town agency starting July 1. It was recently announced that Eric D’oliveira, currently Managing Director at 140 BBDO, would step into the MD shoes at Draftfcb Cape Town starting July 1.

According to Morley, he had wanted to explore entrepreneurial opportunities for the agency for a while now, putting together innovative new ventures for the group. He will now be freed up to do so.

Louise Marsland’s (@Louise_Marsland) pick of new product, packaging and design launches.

A Tuff environmental campaign; start-up success story’s bold new stores; Z-Card worms its way into creating Turkish delights; and sampling in the loo.

he snot really hit the fan last week when The Washington Post and The Guardian reported that the US had secret spying programs that are “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies.”

It was inevitable that our industry’s obsession with Internet data collection would come smack up against questions of civil rights and individual liberties. But no one in the marketing or advertising industries seems to care about the consequences of our obsession with data, or the central role we are playing in this controversy.

It is an article of faith among the pundit digerati that the Internet has given us reg’lar folks more control over our lives. One of the mantras of marketing’s chattering class is that “the consumer is now in charge.” These people think that because we can tweet “the fries at Wendy’s really suck” we now have greater economic, social and political control. They are alarmingly insensitive to the trade-offs the web has presented us with.

On several occasions during the past few years I have taken the, ahem, contrarian position that not only are we not “in charge,” but the illusion that we are is masking the fact that the powerful are getting more powerful and that the individual citizen has less control than ever.

Don’t be surprised when you are greeted at the door of & Anonymous by a bearded man sporting a pink Barbie-topped balaclava. Or a leather-clad woman in a diamante-studded, gimp-like mask. Or anything in between, provided it hides the wearer’s face. The founders of & Anonymous are simply living the new company’s credo;

“A lot of agencies say it, but we wanted to live it: it’s time that the work came first. So we don’t need a name, and you don’t need to know our faces. It’s time to drop the ego, and focus on the ideas.”

Unfortunately, for the purposes of a media launch, names and faces are crucial. So the balaclavas are removed, revealing Joy Turnbull, ex Network BBDO Deputy MD; Brad Reilly ex Jupiter Drawing Room Chief Creative Officer; and Darren Cronje, ex Jupiter Creative Director.

Together, they have over 40 years of experience in the marketing, brand building and advertising arena, having worked their way up the ladder from junior account director and creatives to leaders and board members of two of South Africa’s top agencies. They have built brands from scratch, turned them around from certain death, collected a treasure trove of awards both locally and abroad, and monetised ideas for clients ranging from small localised businesses to global megabrands such as Coca-Cola.

But, as is often the case in any form of big business, the further the trio advanced in their careers, the more removed they became from the work.

Jonathan Deeb, currently Executive Creative Director at Havas Worldwide Johannesburg & Havas Worldwide Digital Johannesburg (the recently rebranded Euro RSCG Group), is to join Draftfcb Johannesburg as ECD from July 15 this year.

In a media statement, Draftfcb South Africa says its Chief Creative Officer, Brett Morris, “plays a major role in directing the group’s Johannesburg agency’s creative product, and he will continue to do so.”

MetropolitanRepublic (Cape Town) has won the Design Capital Cape Town 2014 ATL and branding account beating both FoxP2 and M&CSaatchi Abel. Quirk won the digital business beating Infestation and Gloo. The combined account is worth R9 million.

Priscilla Urquhart, PR and Media Manager for Cape Town Design NPC, confirmed that two request for proposals went out, one for digital and one for the rest of the business. “The ideal scenario would be to have everything under one roof however, the presentations showed up differently,” said Urquhart. “We’re very happy with the chosen agencies and believe they will deliver on the WDC outcomes.”

Cape Town Design NPC is the implementation company of World Design Capital Cape Town 2014 and an independent, not-for-profit organisation.

by Mimi Nicklin (@miminicklin) How actionable is shopper data really? A ‘blockbuster’ debate between Minority Report and Zero Dark Thirty.

I don’t know about you? But I find it very irritating every time I read a newspaper article or report that quotes the Tom Cruise film, Minority Report, as a reference to how ‘psychic’ we are becoming when it comes to shopper data analysis.

It paints a picture that, as per the film, we can track down and target any consumer’s needs in a matter of seconds using the Internet, electronic databases and augmented reality connections. Not only does it entirely undermine recent developments in research, predominantly in the neuro-marketing field, but it leaves every marketer reading the article dreaming of a day when it may actually come true with magic data and little analytical requirements.

The hard reality for us is that it is a lot easier to collect than it is to analyze, make sense of, and actually use data. The more recent, Zero Dark Thirty blockbuster film tells this story well – just because we have the data, doesn’t mean we can use it to effectively action the solution!

Many brands and retailers are collecting but how many are actually connecting and driving sales? With 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created globally daily, do we stand a chance of ever getting to the bottom of it?

Discontented with your sex life? Thinking that perhaps there’s room for improvement? 54% of the world’s population is in the same boat, according to the 2011 Durex Global Sexual Wellbeing Survey.

I have featured Durex in this column before, but that’s because it is a brand that innovates and knows its target market extremely well. It has turned a “tricky” subject (sex) into something that is both fun and open for discussion, mainly through consumer campaigns on campuses. The brand takes an interactive approach to promoting itself as an authority on sexuality, and has a progressive approach to obtaining and sharing information.

Durex has made a priority of “owning” sex, and this campaign is an extension of that philosophy. The 2011 Sex Survey was just the start – now the data is being used for a global “Sexperiment” that aims “to prove that great sex isn’t just about the physical, with experiments designed to explore emotion and intimacy as well as pleasure and passion.”

At the beginning of this month, Durex launched the First Ever Worldwide Sex Experiment. Couples from 26 countries are invited to sign up, and explore their sex lives, with the eventual aim of helping other couples around the world enjoy better sex. The invitation is open to all comers, and is showcased on a dedicated Facebook page.

By Herman Manson (@marklives) Media24 owned 24.com has decided to close down Nuus24 – the Afrikaans edition of news24.com – strating July 1. The group recently announced that it would be rolling out paywalls on the websites of its Afrikaans language newspaper sites for Die Burger, Beeld and Volksblad.

When the group announced its paywall strategy in April it said its papers would also adopt a ‘digital first’ strategy which will see them breaking news on their sites. At the time MarkLives questioned the viability of the paywall concept if a free Afrikaans language site competed in the market for Afrikaans news.

by Emma King (@EmmainSA) I came across an awesome word the other day – ‘Unitasker’. It’s attributed most commonly to Alton Brown, ‘celebrity’ chef and TV personality, who apparently disdainfully coined the term to describe single purpose kitchen utensils that clog up a kitchen and which are only good for one thing. Like a corn kernel remover, or a cake pop maker, or a banana slicer.

Apparently, it can also be used to describe a person – someone who can only do one task at a time (I’m resisting the temptation to insert joke about men and multitasking here). But I’d like to create another way it can be used, in the workplace, to describe someone who clogs up a business and who is only able or willing to do one thing.

I think it’s a pretty dangerous to be a unitasker in this fast moving age. Back in the day, when there were limited channels and disciplines, and ages to work through a brief from a client, we had the luxury of being able to lovingly and single-mindedly focus on our preferred skill of copywriting or design or strategic research.

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Mail & Guardian editor Nic Dawes is off to India in September, when he will take up one of the top positions at the Hindustan Times in New Delhi, it was announced recently. In this second part of an interview, Grubstreet talks to Dawes about change in the M&G newsroom, his legacy to the paper and the press’ recent battles with the ruling party.

Grubstreet: Do you think the converged newsroom – how you’ve integrated print and online – is the main mark that you’re leaving on the M&G?

Nic Dawes: I certainly think it’s probably the most obvious thing that I’ve tried to do here – to bring some of those (online and social-media) practices into our newsroom, to open us up so that the audience is not so much the audience anymore but participants in what we do.

You have to be really very sanguine and welcome the changes that are going on in our industry because I think they genuinely make us better journalists and make us produce better news products.

I think the other thing is the way we’ve tried to build capacity inside the paper, to keep on doing more thorough public-interest journalism without having new sources of commercial funding. So there’s AmaBhungane (non-profit investigative centre) and the Eugene Saldanha fellowship – these sorts of things, which do substantially broaden the base of what we do and also makes a contribution that goes beyond the M&G in terms of training journalists from other papers and from other countries in terms of advocacy.

And maybe the final thing is opening up a bit more to Africa – trying to bring more Africa coverage into the paper and into the website.

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Ramsay Media is being whipped into shape in preparation for the sale of shares currently held by the Ramsay family (mostly through a family trust). Ramsay Media, publishers of popular magazine titles such as CAR, Getaway, Leisure Wheels and Popular Mechanics, was established 1933, and has seen four generations of Ramsay family members employed in the business.

The last members of that generation has however now left the business to pursue other career and business interests, and the family, minus direct involvement in the business apart from Alan Ramsay, its chairman who took back the day to day running of the group at the end of last year, feels it’s time to sell.

Ramsay took a firmer hand in running the business after Ramsay Media MD Stuart Lowe left at the end of 2012. His replacement, yet to be appointed, will probably be a private equity manager with media experience who will be tasked to put the business on surer financial footing and make it more appetising for possible investors.

Ramsay says the business had a very tough 2012, but had stabilised significantly in the last few months, with budgets exceeding targets. Even in the digital age publishers need to keep their eye on fundamentals such as distribution, marketing, sales targets and of course the content of their titles, notes Ramsay.

The ten best read stories on MarkLives during the month of May. In case you missed it!

MarkLives.com runs a regular slot featuring the best local and international magazine covers every week. We recognise well thought out, powerful and interesting (and hopefully all three in one) magazine covers and celebrate the mix of pragmatism, creativity and personal taste that created each of them.

Louise Marsland’s (@Louise_Marsland) pick of new product, packaging and design launches.

Have it your way with Burger King; Checkers has it in the bag; a new liqueur from BlueSky; and the designer new Lancôme makeup range campaign preview

There is a small group of men who have ruined the advertising industry.

They have made it leaner and meaner. They have made it more efficient. They have made it more productive. They have squeezed all the fat out of it. They have also squeezed all the life out of it.

They have replaced ideas with data. They have replaced value with efficiency.

They are accountants and investors and financial wise guys. The one thing they are not is advertising people.

Advertising was once an industry of craftsmen and craftswomen. Industrious people would start their own agencies. There were dozens of independent, entrepreneurial agencies in every major city. The largest agency in the U.S. had a 1.5% share of market. Today four giant globalized monstrosities control over 70% of U.S. advertising.

The advertising business has been consolidated into submission. As Dave Trott says, we have become an industry of bank managers.

by Alistair Mokoena (@AlistairMokoena) As someone who vacillates between running an ad agency and relaxing through wildlife photography, I find the seasonal migration of various animal species fascinating.

Some animal species migrate from North to South and back. Others migrate vertically from high altitude forests to low altitude forests. These species migrate mostly in search of food and warmer temperatures as well as for breeding purposes.

The wildebeest migration in the Serengeti and the migration of European swallows come to mind. European swallows spend their breeding period in Europeso they can access food supplies and longer days. In winter, they migrate to the warmer southern hemisphere.

Before embarking on their journey to Southern Africa and the Indian sub-continent, they go on a feeding frenzy, which provides sustenance for their long sojourn. They travel in a large group on this long journey that takes them through North Africa, down the West Coast of Africa, all the way down to the South. Come spring, the swallows migrate back to Europe for their breeding season.

As MD of one of South Africa’s larger agencies I’m struck by the similarities between the migration of animal species and the movement of creative talent within our industry. The migration of talent used to be limited to advertising agencies. Now we are witnessing lots of movement of talent from traditional advertising agencies to small below the line shops, digital shops as well as to the client side, and vice versa.

Many employers in our industry are starting to use employee propositions to differentiate themselves. Employment contracts and remuneration packages are becoming a lot more creative. We are starting to see a combination of flexi time, relative job security, career paths as well as participation in share schemes.

Ironically all of this makes staff retention a nightmare for many agency MD’s. What compounds this retention problem is the fact that, unlike our parents’ generation, this generation of employees does not value tenure and loyalty. Not only is the world their oyster, it’s also a travelator, constantly on the go.

What I’m learning pretty quickly though, is that this musical chairs phenomenon is pretty normal in our industry. As European swallows are attracted to Europe’s abundant food supplies and long days in their breeding period, creative talent is attracted to agencies that are seen to be on the up and up.

Agencies that win pitches attract masses of creative talent. Agencies that boast a “sexy” client list and have an impressive collection of silverware are also quite alluring to talent.

Another observation I’ve made is that talented people tend to have a following, which means, when they move agencies, others migrate with them. It matters not how hard you try, using water tight contracts, to preclude them from poaching key staff or to stop key staff from following their heroes. At the end of the day birds with bright feathers cannot be caged. Is this perhaps what Bob Marley had in mind when he sang “exodus, it’s the movement of the people.” There’s got to be a better way, methinks.

Cellphone companies in SA are waging war with each other. What was a de facto monopoly has been challenged by upstart Cell-C, driven by former Vodacom boss Alan Knott-Craig Snr. Cell-C threw down the gauntlet in an apparent price war by offering cheaper data bundles and introducing the concept of discounting rates on same-network calls. Cell-C’s latest campaign is being flighted with numbing regularity on SABC and e-TV, promoting the concept of switching networks, while keeping your number.

Cell-C’s Knott-Craig has set himself up as the consumer champion, taking on ICASA to get the industry regulator to lower termination rates – in other words, the fees that mobile operators pay to carry each other’s calls on their networks.

The new battleground, as smart phones become more pervasive, is data. Every iPhone or iPad owner knows that all that browsing, chatting, downloading and photo-sharing chews up your data allocation like nothing else can, so data is becoming an even bigger component of the mobile phone bill than talk. In response to Knott-Craig’s salvo, MTN and Vodacom have hit back hard at Cell-C with a dizzying array of deals of their own.

Whatever way you look at it, this competition is good for the customer. There’s more choice and better value is offered in the fight for subscribers and cellular supremacy. For too long the big networks were suspected of colluding with one another and were regularly pulled before parliament for high prices and a lack of service. With Knott-Craig having dug in behind enemy lines, the industry, thankfully is now changing.

One of Vodacom’s unique claims is that it has better 3G coverage, and the Ad of the Week has not been flighted much despite the fact it was released 3 months ago, so I’m giving it a thumbs-up for humour and a clear message. It starts with a long-suffering character, Errol, who just wants to read his newspaper in peace. But his wife interrupts his idyll.

Draftfcb Cape Town has been shortlisted for the first Cannes Innovation Lions.

“The Innovation Lions have been designed to reward technologies and innovations. Lions arre awarded to such things as (but not limited to) the most innovative platforms, apps, tools, programs, hardware, products, and radical software which allow brands and creatives to communicate with their customers in a new way, or which stand alone as significant innovations in their own right,” according to Cannes Lions.

“The Innovation Lion honour more than a campaign or communications idea. It could be SaaS (software as a service), a new mobile platform, or a revolutionary piece of software that enables a new kind of customer engagement.”

Twenty five finalists from fifteen countries made the shortlist. Shortlisted countries are the USA, UK, Brazil, Japan, Canada, Sweden, Russia, Denmark, Finland, The Netherlands, Singapore, Australia, Poland and Ecuador. Shortlisted agencies includes Dentsu, ID\, Google Creative Lab and AKQA.

by Masingita Mazibuko Her ascension seems instantaneous. In fact, it is as if she was never gone. I recall all the girls seeking her out.

She dominated all conversations, and all wanted her in their homes. She was a part of all childhood games such as house, dress-up and the like.

Now she is back in my world, winning my four-year old daughter’s heart. Her name is Barbie and my daughter is steadily becoming an avid collector.

Whether it is heroes of the silver screen, toys or clothing, many a brand of yesteryear is making a resurgence and winning a place in our hearts all over again.

We seem to be inundated with yesteryear brands, those one may have considered old and gone but are today seemingly gaining increasing presence. A classic example movie goers and comic buffs will be familiar with is Marvel’s Iron Man. There’s also been the Avengers, Batman … and Star Trek.

This re-emergence of brands deserves consideration, for there are those instances when it has been botched, and those when it has succeeded stunningly.

For instance, when Mini came back to the fore in the United States, it flew in the face of a SUV trend. It managed to grow brand awareness through a clear articulation of its target audience beyond demographics to psychographic qualities that embodied the Mini mindset and coupled this with an innovative take of traditional media; for instance, the Mini riding atop SUVs as outdoor.

Alison Cenna highlights four key elements that inform brand revival. The first, allowing for rediscovery, talks to cross-generational appeal that provides nostalgic appeal for one generation while still engaging first timers.

Design Annotator with Uno de Waal is a new column featuring the top design work from South Africa’s biggest online creative showcase, Between 10 and 5, curated by Publisher Uno de Waal @Unodewaal.

June is always a special month for us at Between 10and5. This month we focus on projects that young people are doing, or projects that involve the youth in some way. I’m really excited to bring you the best of what the next generation of South African creatives are bringing to the table. We also have some great illustration work as always, and a personal favourite of mine is the street photography coming from Durban.

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) There is one consistently excellent stand-out newspaper when it comes to front-page design among South Africa’s dailies – and that is Die Burger in Cape Town. So my ears pricked up when I read that the title’s chief sub, Johnn-Grant Munro, picked up the Standard Bank Sikuvile journalism award recently for lay-out and design.

Munro won for his “Ongelooflik” front page of Chad le Clos’ Olympic gold in London and the judges said:

Johnn-Grant Munro seized the excitement of the Chad Le Clos Olympics win … by not choosing the picture that dominated other papers, the one of Le Clos shouting in triumph. Instead Munro chose the moment before, an image of Clos in open-mouthed astonishment, to which he added the headline ON-GE-LOOFLIK, a perfect coupling of words to image. Die Burger devoted the entire top of the page to this one image, which ran right over the masthead area, to make for a spectacular front page.

Grubstreet caught up with Munro this week to find out more about how he works, his design philosophy and why Die Burger is such a handsome newspaper.

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Editorial cartoons remain a staple in our newspapers. Which should be worrying to cartoonists as said media continues its circulation slide and publishers keep cutting back on content. A small pool of cartoonists work for an even smaller pool of newspaper owners. You can see the possible disadvantages in such a set-up – especially for cartoonists (few places of employment in a declining environment). Editorial cartooning seems like a risky career proposition, overall, unless you are Zapiro.

One day one cartoonist, John Curtis, decided to bring together a collection of cartoons celebrating Nelson Mandela, and publish it online for his 90th birthday. Africartoons was born, and helped establish an informal network between the professional editorial cartoonists in the country, which Curtis says numbers around 30.

Today the website holds a substantial trove of South African cartoons numbering anywhere between 10 – 12 000, with between 200 and 350 cartoons added every month. That is out of a total of approximately 430 strips and cartoons published in SA newspapers each month. Apart from maintaining an important editorial archive, the site has helped open up the digital market to local cartoonists, gives them access to an audience beyond often regional newspapers, and allows for greater networking and collaboration between cartoonists.

It’s improved the business environment for cartoonists, who have become more aware of who holds the rights to their work (them, preferably), and offers an informal platform for support (like when paper The New Age, owned by the controversial Gupta family, dropped cartoonist Jerm, allegedly because his cartoons were not “aligned with the paper’s vision and mission.”)

It also allowed quite a few editorial cartoonists to pop out of the woodwork. While Zapiro remains the most influential cartoonist in the country (and one of the most influential cartoonists in the world today) it has certainly helped raise the profile of other cartoonists as well.

The site has to date been funded by Curtis, who, alongside fellow cartoonist Dr Jack, was recently signed by City Press to produce editorial cartoons as DR JACK & CURTIS for the paper. Curtis had originally used the design studio founded by him and his wife Michelle, digitalJUNGLE, to build and maintain the site, but the agency had scaled back after Michelle’s second pregnancy, so for the moment Curtis is managing most aspects of the site.

MarkLives.com runs a regular slot featuring the best local and international magazine covers every week. We recognise well thought out, powerful and interesting (and hopefully all three in one) magazine covers and celebrate the mix of pragmatism, creativity and personal taste that created each of them. By media blogger MediaSlut.

Louise Marsland’s (@Louise_Marsland) pick of new product, packaging and design launches.

Design Partnership roars; a new creative hub in the Mother city; Nike gets technical with soccer; and an update on the latest tobacco legislation.
- There’s a new franchise ready to roar in the South African market. While having launched already in 1997 in Southern Africa, the Hungry Lion franchise has kept a low profile. Design Partnership is set to change that with a rebrand to “deliver stand-out pavement appeal” and lure new customers.

Hungry Lion, part of Shoprite Holdings, has a network of more than 150 stores in eight countries in Southern Africa and is currently rolling out new stores in Zambia, Angola, Namibia and South Africa. Its food focus is on fried chicken.

Along with the plans for the new stores and its positioning in the market cemented, Hungry Lion franchisor Adrian Basson, thought it was time for the brand to find its voice and shout about its 100% homegrown South African offerings.

This is exactly what Design Partnership hoped to achieve with its daringly bright red and yellow colouring that brings to life the eye-catching new Hungry Lion logo, created by M&C Saatchi.

All exterior detail was stripped to a very monochromatic and brightly lit red and yellow to attract attention and increase footfall. This was then blended with softer and warmer interior lighting and timber finishes to balance the strong yellow and red colours and create a harmonious scheme, explains Callie van der Merwe, CEO of Design Partnership.

Design Partnership created the new design identity against a backdrop of strict lead times due to a highly aggressive rollout strategy – Hungry Lion plans to revamp and open approximately 200 stores within the next two years in order to gain market share.