MarkLives.com
Independent industry news for marketing, advertising & media execs
Credible • Insightful • Essential
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Editor & Publisher: Herman Manson • @MarkLives • Eastern Cape, South Africa
Editor-at-Large & Newsletter Editor: Simone Puterman • @SimoneAtLarge • Joburg, South Africa
Contributing Writers: Carey Finn • Sabrina Forbes • Jessica Evans
Ramify.biz Support: Kylie van Zyl
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Editorial
Press releases, tip-offs, interview requests and pitches
Email us, together with low-res images (logos, portrait pics etc), at:
#CoronavirusSA — Special Section
This covers how the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and its resultant disease, covid-19, is affecting the advertising, marketing and related industries in South Africa and other parts of Africa, and how we are responding. We welcome various types of content. Opinion pieces/guest columns must be exclusive.
Your best campaign work
If you’re involved in making advertising that is smart, funny and/or engaging, please let the MarkLives team know at adchamps@marklives.com. All work featured in our new monthly column, #AdChamps, will be considered for MarkLives’ Ad of the Year 2020. Note: Ads must be currently running or no older than two months. If we like the ad, we’ll reach out and ask for more info.
Opinion/op-ed pieces
- We only publish commissioned, exclusive content.
- Our readers know the basics; we need something that is either new or tells the story in a new and interesting way.
- We prefer you submit a story pitch to us; if we like it, we will give the go-ahead. We are a small team and are unable to work through all the unsolicited stories we receive.
- We don’t allow copy to reference the agency brand or clients.
All ad-hoc writers are published in Marklives’ by-invitation-only section, Motive. There is a limited number of permanent columnist slots available on the site, which is filled as writers rotate out; these are based on subject matter and consistent quality insights presented by individual writers. We do not offer columns to agencies but to individuals. If an individual drops out, we do not replace them with another columnist from their agency by default. We are open to pitches from new faces throughout the year.
Email us for our full contributor guidelines/FAQ.
Content structure
- MarkLives: www.marklives.com
- Breaking/hard news/features
- Special section — #CoronavirusSA (see above)
- Radar — news in brief (2–3 paragraphs)
- Account wins
- Promotions/appointments
- #RetailRadar — product, packaging, design, food, décor etc
- #CampaignRadar — see below as well
- Interviews
- Features
- Q5 — five-question interviews with Carey Finn
- #BrandFocus — interviews with marketing directors and marketing managers
- Columnists:
- Regular columnists (permanent, selected by the editors of MarkLives)
- Ad hoc columns — Motive/By Invitation Only
- #BigQ — The Big Question panel
- Yearly trends series is #BigQ2020, #BigQ2019 etc
- Creative work — #AdChamps or #Campaigns
- See above
- Must be fresh
- Pitch your cool campaign as soon as it is ready, or even under embargo
- Extracts — excerpts from books and research
- Careers: careers.marklives.com
- Free job listings
- Ramify: ramify.biz — connecting marketers and agencies, as well as agency service suppliers
- Advertorial/company news offices as part of a Premium Profile
- Free listings available
- MarkLives Newsletter (three times a week, depending on public holidays)
- Banner ads
- Tender ads
- Subscribe
- Sponsorships
Delivery address
For our delivery or postbox contact details, please email us or use the form
Web: www.marklives.com
Twitter: @MarkLives
Facebook www.facebook.com/marklives
YouTube: www.youtube.com/marklivescom
Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/marklives
Newsletter subscriptions: Sign up here
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 the editor
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.
Published by MarkLives.com. Some rights reserved.
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