by Herman Manson (@marklives) Claire Cobbledick has moved out of the adland bubble and on to client side. Formerly the MD at storied Cape Town agency The Jupiter Drawing Room, she now reports to eBay as head of marketing for its Gumtree SA classifieds brand.
This has resulted in a shift in her understanding of client/agency relationships, especially as she has embarked on finding agency partners for Gumtree.
Looking for educated opinions
Mostly, says Cobbledick, she is simply looking for educated opinions.
“I want an agency that tells me what they think, and who cares,” she says. “In the agency environment, we all want brave clients. Many agencies forget that, if something goes wrong, the client doesn’t have anything to fall back on, while the agency retains a broad client base that helps protect it. I don’t think agencies always realise what they are asking from clients.”
Cobbledick had been planning her exit from the agency world for a while and intended to take some time off to spend with her family — she recently had her second child. She left Jupiter at the end of November 2013 after eight years (and working out her three-month notice).
Most-admired agency boss
Cobbledick first joined Jupiter as an account executive over 16 years ago and rejoined the agency in 2005 as head of strategic planning, before being promoted to deputy MD in 2007, and finally MD in 2010. In 2012, Cobbledick was voted as one of the most-admired agency bosses in Cape Town by peers for her efforts in steering the agency through the turmoil of the Woolworths account loss in December 2011, when it lost 30% of its revenue in one swoop.
She had decided to leave Jupiter Cape Town, partly because of tough times at the agency (it lost Sanlam in early 2013) and partly because of the need to spend time with her second baby, without any firm plans for what would come next — but through a media contact was made aware that eBay was looking for somebody on the ground in South Africa. She sent in her CV, met with the US team and was in the job by December 2013.
Gumtree had been managed remotely via eBay’s headquarters in San Jose since 2005. Cobbledick was the first member of the new local office that is taking shape as Africa emerges as a growth point, alongside Asia, in a otherwise muted global marketplace.
Big site, not a big brand
Gumtree SA is a very big website but not as big a brand as it could or should be, says Cobbledick. On average, 823 130.83 ads are loaded onto the site every month — or 18.84 every minute. The most popular, frequently listed services have been DJ & Entertainment, followed by Building & Trade. Last year, the site carried 2 296 500 car ads on the site, of which a Jaguar XRS and a Ferrari Spider were among the most expensive. The site even hosted an ad for an original Tretchikoff oil painting.
Cobbledick works with Ogilvy PR and Net#work BBDO. For her, Gumtree, interestingly, is a retail brand. She also doesn’t believe a brand message can be completely uniform.
In the ’90s, she says, we pretended brands had human characteristics — that it was a person. Now, especially with the rise of social media, we understand that people drive brands, and that people are not uniform. We realise it’s not ‘Gumtree’ on the other side of the Twitter stream; it’s one of any number of individuals involved in managing its social presence.
Cobbledick’s challenges
Search is the primary marketing vehicle for Gumtree and the most reliable in terms of delivering results, says Cobbledick, even if it’s not always the most efficient. Competition comes from OLX and Junkmail, as well as verticals such as Auto Trader.
Cobbledick see part of her challenge as bringing new people into the online classifieds space for the first time, as well as to bring new product categories onto the site. Independent retailers will soon be offering new goods on Gumtree, too.
The focus, for now, will be on the SA market, and eBay is committed to investing in both people on the ground and infrastructure to ensure Gumtree continues its growth trajectory here, turning a big site into a big business.
— MarkLives’ round-up of top ad and media industry news and opinion in your mailbox every three work days. Sign up here!