For a fresh, independent and investigative view of Africa’s changing media, marketing and advertising landscape.
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Editor & Publisher: Herman Manson • @MarkLives • Eastern Cape
Editor-at-Large & Newsletter Editor: Simone Puterman • @SimoneAtLarge • Joburg
Contributing Writers: Carey Finn • Sabrina Forbes
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About MarkLives.com
“Mark” as a name has obvious links to marketing: making your mark, brand marks, etc. It also puts a human name as the focus for this advertising and marketing news site’s brand identity, a reminder of the kind of journalism that MarkLives wants to publish.
Business, and media, is all about people, but the business press has turned the human side into a side issue as it runs after stats and numbers. MarkLives publishes stories about the people who make up companies and their extended stakeholders — the site is named to reflect that.
Over the last decade, MarkLives has served more than 5.6m pages to 2.7m unique browsers. More than 4600 features and opinion pieces, and another 1200 news stories, have been published.
The rise and fall of a number of agencies have been tracked, the advertising disasters (remember Feed a Child and the interns under a bus saga?), management shakeups, campaign triumphs and account moves. The MarkLives Agency Leaders’s Most Admired poll has been established as an authoritative measure of industry standing. Entrepreneurs have been celebrated and how the industry is tackling diversity and transformation has been covered.
Today, MarkLives is the go-to news resource for the larger industry and its many wonderful, colourful and intriguing human beings.
About Ramify.biz
Ramify.biz, launched to help connect brands and marketers to ad agencies, currently lists more than 560 agencies and their service providers. Its objective remains to help marketers and entrepreneurs grow their businesses’ brands through easy access to info concerning relevant advertising and marketing communication partners.
Marketers may create shortlists, compare agencies or suppliers, and find people they want to work with!
The service also extends to service providers and suppliers for agencies, allowing ad agency execs to find project partners, based upon skill sets, to expand project capacity.
Ramify.biz has been built around the belief that agencies of all sizes should be able to list their information in a central resource, and that marketers should be able to access it free of charge. This empowers both parties and grows the industry.
About Brands.MarkLives
Brands.MarkLives, the digital partnership between Brands & Barnding and advertising and marketing news site MarkLives.com, aims to connect marketers to their peers.
Brand marketers are able to engage directly with industry stakeholders, fellow marketers and senior ad execs, and encourages brand-marketing departments to gain broader industry visibility and more-active participation in discussions through the online dissemination of brand case studies, marketing news and top-line thinking.
About the Ed
Herman Manson is an established business journalist and media commentator and the founding editor of MarkLives.com. He is the inaugural Vodacom Social Media Journalist of the Year (2011).
He has contributed to numerous magazines, websites and newspapers in South Africa, the US, the UK and Australia on topics ranging from new media to marketing and technology. These include Bizcommunity.com, AdVantage magazine, the Mail & Guardian, Men’s Health, Computer World and African Communications.
The founding editor of media.toolbox (the first news website dedicated to new media in South Africa) and Mobile.Works (a print magazine dedicated to covering the cellular industry), Manson served as assistant editor at Intelligence magazine and was launch online editor of Business 2.0 South Africa.
He was co-founder and former publisher of award winning business magazine Brand and has been a finalist for the Highway Africa Award for Innovative Use of New Media several times.
He has also been a partner in Media Africa, one of the first online research houses in South Africa, and consulted on web architecture for various financial institutions.
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