by Uno de Waal. It might be because of my Afrikaans background which makes me biased, but I’m loving the new Pendoring Awards short films that have been released.
Monthly archives: August 2013
Major TV shake-up great for consumers
by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) There’s a real shake-up of TV coming South Africa’s away – especially of television news – and none of it bodes well for our newspapers.
The SABC launched its 24-hour news operation on the DStv satellite network (on channel 404) last week while the Gupta family – owners of TNA Media, parent company of The New Age newspaper – is getting ready to take their 24/7 news operation live (on channel 405) very soon.
The Guptas’ Africa News Network 7 – or “ANN7” – already has a rather slick-looking beta website up and Atul Gupta has been tweeting recruitment ads
Dear Digital Grandad: get the best out of LinkedIn
Dear DigitalGrandad…
Righti-o Grandad! Here’s my question:
There’s a lot of buzz about LinkedIn but I can’t decide if its a good place to do social-media marketing. I have about 350 plus connections on LinkedIn and although I don’t get a lot of referrals from it, these people do spend more time on my site if they come from LinkedIn.
It does suggest this is a good place to be active (and all my posts go to my LinkedIn timeline) but LinkedIn itself is quite counter-intuitive in its design. I find LinkedIn hard to navigate and, therefore, time consuming. What are your tips on how to get the best out of LinkedIn as a marketing tool for a website? (The endorsing of skills is particularly irritating. Should I be endorsing connections back? That will be very time-consuming. Will it be worth it?)
Regards and thanks very much!
Gill Moodie, Grubstreet
Local agency focuses SA as digital outsourcing destination
by Herman Manson (@marklives) Bluegrass Digital is positioned as a digital production agency for ad agencies. Unlike many of their contemporaries, the agency isn’t trying to break into a through-the-line positioning. Instead, it focuses on what it believes it does best – implementation.
Born in the late 90’s as a hardware and networking company it evolved into a digital production agency and by 1999 had an office in London to take advantage of an outsourcing model that saw work done in South Africa, where labour was less expensive than in the UK, and a client facing team operating in London.
Nick Durrant, MD at Bluegrass Digital had joined his brother James, the founding partner of the business, to run the UK operation after four years in the world of banking. His focus was targeting agencies with skill, capacity or even budget constraints and convincing them that South Africa could produce and implement digital solutions in a cost effective and efficient way.
Media Future: DStv Explora
The new DStv Explora decoder is about to deliver on the unmet promise of previous versions, but leaves the have-nots even further behind, writes Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee).
The dithering of successive administrations at the Department of Communications has deferred the digital dreams of South Africa’s TV viewing public. The migration to digital terrestrial TV (DTTV), originally set for 2011, still has no due date. The Department has yet to issue tenders for set-top boxes needed by 5-million households to convert digital signals into an analogue feed for their old TV sets.
It was something of an irony, then, that a major announcement was made last week of a new set-top box. Sadly for the 5-million, the box had nothing to do with DTTV. For them, the dream remains deferred.
Shelf Life: General Mills launches Nature Valley Crunchy Granola Bars in SA
Louise Marsland’s (@Louise_Marsland) pick of new product, packaging and design launches.
Nature Valley granola bar launches in SA; Promoting wine tourism; adidas is a scream; Armani celebrates the modern woman; and there’s still time to enter Product-of-the-Year.
Media Future: How to fix SA’s fast tanking Internet connection speeds
South Africa has slumped to a dismal ranking in global connectivity speeds. But we know what is needed to fix our broken Internet, writes Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee).
The news this week that South Africa was ranked 80th in the world in average Internet connection speeds didn’t come as a surprise, but it did shock many. The same report, from global network services company Akamai, showed this country was ranked an even more dismal 126thin average peak connection speed.
While that does not measure the number of people or devices using the Internet, it is worth noting that, in 1996, South Africa ranked 14th in the world in number of computers connected to the Internet. From ranked to tanked, one could say.
The key question now being asked is, what can be done about it?
Quite coincidentally, this month also saw the appointment of a new Minister of Communications, Yunus Carrim, who has declared himself open to listening to the needs of telecommunications users.
In this context, as was noted in the Internet Matters report produced by World Wide Worx and Google in mid-2012, Government does indeed have a central role to play in ensuring universal access to Internet services. Moreover, it must create an enabling environment for infrastructure development and competition, and a policy framework that allows for the lowering of costs, the promotion of digital literacy and innovation.
Practically, what does this mean? The excuse often given is that the problems are obvious, but the solutions complex.
The Ad Contrarian: The ad world’s desperate attempt to remake itself as a tech industry will lead to failure
Bob Hoffman. Over 20 years ago I left the agency business for the first time. We had sold our agency to a “global” network and after two years of working for them I decided it was not the life for me. I took the money and ran.
Design Annotator: Creative Co-Working, Digital MTB Courses and Attention Seeking Illustration
Co-working seems to be booming all over South Africa. Our co-working space in Johannesburg is nearly full-up, and there have been some other interesting spaces popping up. We’ve brought you some of the best, most interesting spaces in Cape Town to work from to meet other inspiring creatives. The second series in the 21 Icons project has also been released with FW De Klerk and we show some interesting work from local illustration studios. Lastly, have a look at the wacky Stimorol campaign, while Toyota have seriously taken the interpretation of physical/digital to a new level with the outdoor website built by Hello Computer and DraftFCB.
Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – you keep your eyes on the road
Mercedes Benz has developed yet another pioneering, high-tech innovation, aimed at improving road safety. Studies show that around one quarter of all serious motorway accidents are attributable to sleepy drivers in need of a rest, meaning that drowsiness causes more road accidents than drinking and driving.
This latest piece of computing wizardry works on several levels to analyse a driver’s behaviour in order to detect if they are getting sleepy at the wheel, and then sound an alarm that brings their attention back to reality.
Of course, just showing this technology would probably induce sleep in today’s low attention-span TV audience, so ad agency Net#work BBDO came up with an amusing take on two ‘Walter Mitty’ type characters. The first features a good looking executive type, who catches his own reflection in the mirror while driving. He’s clearly in love with himself, as each time he looks in the mirror, his gaze lingers a little longer.
The music, a Sinatra/Perry Como-style song (created for the ad by Pulse Music New York) that harks back to the sultry lounge-lizard era, is a ballad about “You’ve either got it or not,” – something that this driver seems to think is the case.
As his hand reaches up to run his fingers through his hair, and you’re about to snarl “Keep your eye on the road,” a loud beeping snaps him back to reality. It’s a reality that is a bit of a shock, because now we see that he is, in fact, balding, and maybe slightly older than the ‘mind’s eye’ picture that we previously had of him. The beeping sound was, of course, the Mercedes Benz Attention Assist technology, that picked up the fact that the driver wasn’t paying enough attention to the road, and quickly brought him back to reality.
The byline is: “‘When your mind wanders, ATTENTION ASSIST brings it back.”